Co-founder @tortastudios Ex-Facebook, Ex-Microsoft. I build systems that make AI Growth workflows observable, repeatable, and scalable.
NC
Joined February 2012
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Alan retweeted
Immigration policy must be driven by the present, not the past, and business leaders are too terrified of the left AND the right to acknowledge this.
Recent H1B discourse revolves around a longstanding immigration sleight-of-hand. H1B proponents point to exceptional people who came here decades ago as if they represent the current state of the program in the same way that advocates for low-skill/illegal immigration point to very favorable immigrant crime/welfare/education/etc statistics that do, in truth, have them beating native-born Americans on many fronts.
It is all a sham. The world that created those statistics, people, and businesses no longer exists. Brilliant but desperate Vietnamese fathers who fled communism have nothing in common with young men from Honduras, and the crime rates/economic acccomplishments/integration of the former should not be used to justify mass migration of the latter.
Nor should the accomplishments of people who managed to get an H1B visa in the 90s (when the program was capped to just 65,000 visas) be used to justify staffing agencies and tech companies using the program to replace American jobs for less money. The obvious abuse going on is politically suicidal and something that even the most ardent supporters of the visa should want to crack down on, no immigration program can possibly survive the obvious and widely known reality of what is going on. I am a longtime outspoken advocate for stealing the best people from other countries to make our own better, runaway abuse of existing programs robs the government of the worker trust required to do so.
Lots of people in the tech space know this. Even the dumb people are smart enough to see it. Nobody actually believes these are all incredible people with unique talents performing jobs no American can. Everyone knows the guy in Cubicle Bay 7 doing mediocre but functional web design for half the salary of his American peers is no savant and doesn't meet the statutory requirements for his H-1B visa.
Unfortunately, most people with power or profile are terrified that any public statement or acknowledgement will get them attacked by the right (You guys have been screwing over American workers for years with visa abuse, you damn hypocrite!) or the left (You are racist, sexist, misogynist, and sucking up to this fascist administration!). Or, more likely, both. I know too many tech execs in particular who feel trapped, like the only winning move is to stay silent.
JD is blowing the whole thing wide open by putting facts and stats front and center that nobody wants to engage with. Critics will talk about anything and everything else but these damning facts and this obvious truth, that H1B visas serve neither their original purpose, legal purpose, invented purpose, or the American people.
Vice President JD Vance breaks down the data:
"If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position. If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position. So I’m sure that everybody here understands the game that is being played. You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers and, if you’re a corporation, you make a ton of money by under cutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who frankly shouldn’t be in the United States of America to begin with."
Alan retweeted
Who’s going to tell the old school coders that there’s going to be nothing but vibe coding in like 6 months. All companies will need are people who can describe what they want properly, and someone to look it over. These tweets that make vibe coding seem stupid, are naive.
Who's gonna tell vibe coders about...
1. SQL Injection
2. XSS
3. CSRF
4. CORS
5. SSRF
6. IDOR
7. Path Traversal
8. Mass Assignment
9. Clickjacking
10. Content Security Policy
11. Security Headers
12. Input Validation
13. Server-Side Authorization
14. Row-Level Security
15. Least Privilege
16. RBAC
17. Secrets Management
18. .env in .gitignore
19. API Key Rotation
20. Secret Scanning
21. Hashing vs Encryption
22. Password Salting
23. bcrypt & Argon2
24. JWT Expiry
25. Refresh Tokens
26. OAuth 2.0
27. OpenID Connect
28. Session Fixation
29. MFA
30. Brute Force Protection
31. Account Enumeration
32. Timing Attacks
33. File Upload Validation
34. Webhook Signature Verification
35. TLS Certificate Expiry
36. HSTS
37. Encryption at Rest
38. Dependency Vulnerabilities
39. Supply Chain Attacks
40. Threat Modeling
41. Indexes
42. EXPLAIN ANALYZE
43. N+1 Queries
44. Full Table Scans
45. Connection Pooling
46. Database Migrations
47. Down Migrations
48. Transactions
49. ACID
50. Isolation Levels
51. Deadlocks
52. Optimistic Locking
53. Pessimistic Locking
54. Normalization
55. Denormalization
56. Foreign Keys
57. Unique Constraints
58. Cascading Deletes
59. Soft Deletes
60. UUIDs vs Auto-Increment
61. Cursor-Based Pagination
62. Full-Text Search
63. Read Replicas
64. Replication Lag
65. Sharding
66. Partitioning
67. Hot Partitions
68. Postgres VACUUM
69. Materialized Views
70. Backups
71. Testing Your Restores
72. Point-in-Time Recovery
73. Change Data Capture
74. Outbox Pattern
75. ORM Lazy Loading
76. CAP Theorem
77. Eventual Consistency
78. Strong Consistency
79. Raft Consensus
80. Leader Election
81. Split Brain
82. Quorums
83. Clock Skew
84. Distributed Locks
85. Consistent Hashing
86. Bloom Filters
87. Two-Phase Commit
88. CQRS
89. Event Sourcing
90. Race Conditions
91. Backpressure
92. Load Shedding
93. Bulkheads
94. Jitter
95. Retry Storms
96. Cascading Failures
97. Thundering Herd
98. Cache Invalidation
99. Cache Hit Ratio
100. TTLs
101. Cache Warming
102. Write-Through vs Write-Back
103. Redis Eviction Policies
104. CDNs
105. Cache-Control Headers
106. ETags
107. Dead Letter Queues
108. Poison Messages
109. At-Least-Once Delivery
110. Exactly-Once Semantics
111. Message Ordering
112. Kafka Consumer Groups
113. Partition Keys
114. Background Jobs
115. Webhook Retries
116. DNS
117. DNS Propagation
118. HTTP Status Codes
119. HTTP Method Semantics
120. Keep-Alive
121. HTTP/2
122. WebSockets
123. Server-Sent Events
124. Long Polling
125. gRPC
126. Protocol Buffers
127. API Versioning
128. OpenAPI Specs
129. Backward Compatibility
130. Request Size Limits
131. Compression
132. Latency vs Throughput
133. Egress Fees
134. VPCs
135. Subnets
136. NAT Gateways
137. Firewalls
138. Security Groups
139. Service Mesh
140. Ingress Controllers
141. Health Checks
142. Liveness vs Readiness Probes
143. Graceful Shutdown
144. Connection Draining
145. Stateless Services
146. Failover
147. Multi-Region
148. Availability Zones
149. Single Points of Failure
150. Disaster Recovery
151. RTO & RPO
152. SLAs
153. SLOs
154. Error Budgets
155. Incident Response
156. On-Call
157. Runbooks
158. Postmortems
159. Chaos Engineering
160. Graceful Degradation
161. Autoscaling
162. Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
163. Cold Starts
164. Capacity Planning
165. Load Testing
166. Memory Leaks
167. OOM Killer
168. Structured Logging
169. Log Levels
170. Log Rotation
171. Distributed Tracing
172. OpenTelemetry
173. Correlation IDs
174. Metrics Cardinality
175. p99 Latency
176. Alert Fatigue
177. Error Tracking
178. Profiling
179. Flame Graphs
180. Infrastructure as Code
181. Terraform State
182. GitOps
183. Blue-Green Deployments
184. Canary Releases
185. Rollbacks
186. Feature Flags
187. Environment Parity
188. Staging Environments
189. 12-Factor Apps
190. Multi-Stage Builds
191. Non-Root Containers
192. Image Scanning
193. Resource Requests & Limits
194. Pod Disruption Budgets
195. Semantic Versioning
196. Lockfiles
197. Reproducible Builds
198. Branch Protection
Alan retweeted
Things population genetics have proven in recent years:
- Out of Africa theory was wrong
- "West Eurasians" (White people) were selected for intelligence (Akbari et al., 2026)
- Sub-Saharan Africans have a signficiant percentage of "ghost DNA" belonging to a now extinct hominid species (Durvasula & Sankararaman, 2020)
- The ancestors of modern Northern Europeans invaded India and established Vedic civilization (Narasimhan et al., 2019)
The supposedly debunked "race science" of the early 20th C. was far more correct than post-war anthropology. Normie discourse is decades behind.
Dr. Eleanor Scerri of Max Planck Institute says the idea that humans originated in Southern Africa based on the fact that the oldest haplogroups are located there is unlikely. gea.mpg.de/person/52339/2944
Alan retweeted
first time trying out jev for industry classification
client handed me 180k websites with no industries. paying per record in clay or open ai/etc to enrich all of that gets expensive fast, so i'm testing jev as the cheap classifier.
the flow:
- python loads the homepage, pulls title, description, nav, page text + tech stack signals
- if the homepage fails (cloudflare, dead site), fall back to serper google results
- jev returns industry + confidence, ecommerce y/n, dynamic site, parked or dead
- csv, then into clay
starting with 10k to check the failure rate before running the rest. the real goal is figuring out the shape of their account list and which verticals to actually target.
Alan retweeted
Aunque no tengo mucho tiempo en mi agenda del día, voy a dedicar un par de minutos a educar zurditos ignorantes (pleonasmo).
El rock no es ni de izquierda ni de derecha. El rock es contracultural, rebelde y antiestablecimiento. Nació en Estados Unidos como resultado de la mezcla del blues, el gospel, el rhythm and blues y el country, y no de la Revolución Bolchevique ni de la Revolución Cubana. No tiene ninguna filiación ideológica exclusiva con la izquierda política y, como industria, siempre ha estado estrechamente ligado a eso que la zurdería llama “capitalismo salvaje”. El rock no ha construido sociedades igualitarias, pero sí ha vuelto millonarios a artistas y empresarios de la música. Capitalismo puro y duro. Me encanta.
Asumir que por su espíritu contestatario el rock pertenece a la izquierda es asumir que la rebelión y la contracultura son exclusivas de la izquierda y que la resistencia anticomunista polaca, el movimiento de la Rosa Blanca en Alemania o la resistencia conservadora contra Hitler nunca existieron. Es asumir que Ramones, Sex Pistols, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Kiss, Alex Cooper, Kid Rock, Eric Clapton, System of a Down, Joy Division, Pantera, Megadeth o Metallica tampoco existieron.
Que un festival gratuito termine convertido en mitin petrista no significa que el rock sea de izquierda. Demuestra sencillamente lo que siempre hemos sabido: que a los zurdos les encanta todo lo que sea gratis. Rock al Parque es un festival financiado por los que no vamos a Rock al Parque porque sí estamos en condiciones de pagar por entretenimiento de calidad.
Edúquense para no ponerse en ridículo con sus argumentaciones falaces sacadas del orto.
Alan retweeted
#tech
Yo agregaría "sé tú mismo". Preferible que te conozcan como un hijo de puta en redes pero que es chingón en lo que hace, chingue su madre el diablo.
Si vives del "qué dirán" con cualquier cosa, ni les cumples a quienes te lo proponen y terminas frustrándote porque dejas de ser tú por complacer a dudes que ni te toparían o darían un peso por ti.
Estoy de acuerdo en networking + eventos presenciales.
Pero en este mundo interconectado, evitar redes sociales porque unos son (somos lol) "tóxicos" es peligroso. Especialmente en X donde aquí hay muchisimos builders y gente que es 10/100/1000x veces mejor de lo que se encuentra disponible dependiendo de tu ubicación geográfica.
La cantidad de gente con la que he podido hacer networking a través de X es impresionante, desde gente muy inteligente, muy capaz en LatAm como @xnt , @silvercorp @GringoJobs @suppahacka @sagmmd un sin fin mas de personas que no estoy seguro si quieren que las etiquete... hasta partners en los VCs mas grandes del mundo, devs con super trayectorias, etc...
Al contrario, mi consejo es estar super activos en X. Es la única red social que puede hacer una diferencia enorme en tu carrera.
Alan retweeted
Para allá va toda la industria. Mi último equipo de Pinterest siempre fue un ingeniero de cada disciplina (Mobile, Backend/Web), y a veces ni eso, me tocó mucho empujar proyectos solo. Hoy en día, como SWE, hay que entender mucho de producto y ser autónomo end-to-end.
Today we’re laying off a large part of the Airtable team.
This is not a reflection of their work but a reflection of our deep belief that small teams ship more and better.
For Airtable, better is about to look like:
- A new Core team shipping your top requests monthly (already 30+ shipped in 3 weeks)
- Upgraded Omni, Airtable Canvas, a stronger MCP, and BYO agents, coming soon
- New Performance and Infra teams focusing on speeding up bases and increasing limits on records, fields, and syncs
To everyone leaving: thank you. If you’re hiring, these are excellent people and worth a call.
Alan retweeted
Tu algoritmo es el reflejo de lo que eres.
Si tu algoritmo es negativo y fatalista, quizás debas ser menos negativo y fatalista.
(Mi algoritmo es sumamente clasista y aceleracionista).
Alan retweeted
y como siempre hay gente con problemas de comprension lectora: si, las empresas energeticas hacen plata, AWS hace mucho dinero ofreciendo computo, pero a) establecen modelos escalables, lo cual una profesion ofrecida de manera individual no lo es. y B) costes siempre tienden a reducirse y eso se transfiere al usuario final. Hoy tenes una GPU H100 por centavos de dolar por hora, hace 10 años esa capacidad de computo no existia en precios razonables.
Alan retweeted
Ademas piensan en tiempos demasiado cortos. mi conjetura es:
Sea el ratio de adopcion de IA para desarrollo > 0, existe un tiempo t donde la adopcion alcanzara una masa critica de usuarios.
Que significa masa critica?
El desarrollo de software como profesion individual no es escalable, y por tanto un servicio tiene que tener una ganancia que justifique el proveerlo. Si se vuelve un commodity de la misma manera que lo es la generacion de energia o el computo, esa ganancia tiende a casi 0.
Eso ocurre cuando suficientes usuarios dejan de requerir el servicio, y el numero es menor a que cada uno de los 8 billones seres humanos de este planeta sea desarrollador, y siento que me ahogo en obviedades.
Alan retweeted
I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade.
My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters with the trade they have made every single time, that they might have appropiate confidence or revulsion in the institution.
This is not new thinking. George Washington thought the same. The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms. It makes needless executions more likely, not less so. People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point. It doesn't somehow become torture or inhumane (as the UN is suddenly claiming) just because we decline to hide the act behind a curtain.
And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself.
And that is without even getting into the fact that men were not hung for stealing horse, but that horses may not be stolen.
"I would to God that one of the most attrocious in each State was hung in Gibbets, up on a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin."
- George Washington, 1778
Alan retweeted
The only group more insufferable than tech people is anti-tech bluesky users, who have been coming back to X in droves the last few weeks.
And they’re just discovering that the entire world got rich over the last two years while they were busy arguing with each other about politics and AI.
And they’re very, very angry.
Alan retweeted
Head of Content is the most valuable hire for VC-backed tech companies right now.
I’m getting 10+ DMs a day from startups asking me to lead their growth.
Having one employee generate millions of organic views > spending millions on paid ads.
Distribution is everything.
Alan retweeted
Uno de estos días les voy a contar cómo una compañía bastante grande nos pedía con frecuencia participar en “PERM interviews”.
Básicamente preguntas a modo para poder traer gente de otros lugares y cobrarles menos.
Literalmente hay una industria de abogados, consultores, etc.
BREAKING: The Labor Department has suspended 8 major tech and outsourcing firms from the PERM program, the first step toward sponsoring foreign workers for green cards.
The government will no longer accept new or process pending PERM applications from:
Cognizant
Infosys
Capgemini
Tata
Wipro
HCL
Microsoft
Adobe
Microsoft and Adobe were suspended over "multiple active federal investigations."
Alan retweeted
van a trabajar en más áreas y por el mismo sueldo
ya no existe ser dev frontend, backend, devops
a lo sumo los de más rango van a trabajar creando specs y los demás los implementan y deployan
Alan retweeted
Yo antes eran fanboy de la luz blanca y odiaba la luz amarilla. Eso ha ido cambiando y ahora estoy prefiriendo la luz amarilla.
Alan retweeted
Here's our first video, where we unpack the gap between personal productivity and product reliability when launching AI products, and the hidden human work behind a working demo, the last stretch of polish, and what changes when real users arrive.
youtu.be/eH56l_TKoGY?si=7Eja…