building internet

Joined April 2007
today i am feeling grateful towards my cofounders
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"Human systems designers are taught to optimize for the common case, but this can make systems fragile to changing workload assumptions." Anderson et al '25 We are in a new world of self-building software. Challenge all assumptions you had about ergonomics.
new take: now that we're getting past the cope of "design it for humans and it'll be fine for agents" we should revisit all apis made for human comprehension and cut them brutally down to efficient primitives and let the agents figure out what's best for them instead via @jdan, and QTing one of my more popular takes that *might* not hold water anymore
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you're done with the code when it is deleted
Asking Claude to review your code is a slot machine. Every review finds brand new bugs. Review again: more. Review a tenth time: it still finds something. It never runs out of bugs to find... so how do you decide your code is actually done?
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architecture and fundamentals of performance still matter, if you're under a GC runtime you can still do very well on throughput.
I've had agents implement and optimize the Campfire web app in Elixir, Go, and Rust. Yes, Ruby is the slowest. I didn't care about that when the pay-off was huge in terms of productivity and developer joy. But if you're no longer reading the code? github.com/basecamp/once-cam…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The shown benchmarks use non-equivalent implementations: Elixir routes all DB queries through a single GenServer with Redis for jobs (retained from Rails), while Rust uses in-process queues, omits CSRF tags/fields, and applies other caching changes. github.com/basecamp/once-… raw.githubusercontent.com/basecamp/once-… github.com/basecamp/once-… github.com/basecamp/once-… x.com/zachsdaniel1/s…
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I'm listening to recordings of Jeff Buckley this weekend. and, yes
Maybe it's the jetlag talking but when I hear Jeff Buckley after some time away from his music, my chest feels like it's going to cave in.
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tell me when the people discover state machines
Are we still talking loops or did we shift to graphs yet?
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Chris Broadfoot retweeted
Individual objections are easy to ignore, and employee leverage shrinks as models improve. That's why the @UTAW_uk / @CWUnews recognition effort at Google DeepMind matters: independent ethics oversight, whistleblower protection, and a right to refuse projects on moral grounds.
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this could have been an email and it could have stayed in drafts
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✓ Local Podplane cluster "default" is ready
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Chris Broadfoot retweeted
Long post incoming, but I'm desperate at this point and need the internet's help. (For the TLDR, check the replies for links and action items) So my little sister Chizo has been fighting leukemia for the past 2.5 years. She's been in remission twice, once after a bone marrow transplant from our brother and then again after a CAR-T treatment after another relapse last year. She is now in her third bout of the fight, as the leukemia has returned yet again in December of last year. She's spent the majority of this year in the hospital and they tried an alternative CAR-T treatment, which did not work this time. Afterwards, the doctors gave her two options: manage her pain and spend time with her family and loved ones until it's time to pass on, or to take a In order to address this third bout, they tried an alternative CAR-T treatment that did not work this time. The doctors gave her two options: 1) Manage her pain and spend the rest of her time here with her family and loved ones 2) Take a life-threatening chemotherapy treatment that can lead to heart/liver failure based on the intensity of it to bridge her to her next treatment, whether it's another CAR-T treatment or a bone marrow transplant if they find a donor. She's a fighter, so she chose the chemotherapy treatment and is still fighting to this day. So I'm here to ask for y'alls help as she continues this fight.
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How you kill a developer ecosystem When you care more about OKRs and launchcals than solving real problems I have no idea what exactly happened here (but I can guess) but you will never ever retain your DevRel talent if they have zero autonomy to solve real developer issues.
Two months ago I was fired by Google for creating the Google Workspace CLI. It went viral, hit #1 on Hacker News, gained thousands of GitHub stars and many thousands of actual users in just a couple days. It was an incredible, confusing journey, from directors and leaders asking what they could learn from the tool to getting grilled by legal about why the Google logo and brand colors are on the Google Workspace GitHub code repositories. I think the cause was that Workspace and certain leaders (and projects) were afraid of being disrupted. But the fear wasn't specific to my CLI, it was a broader fear in what agents meant for Workspace. Either way, the irony of my termination was the announcement at Google Cloud Next two days before I was fired that an official Workspace CLI was coming. I want this out there because it is easier for me to explain my story and it is an experience I want to fully own. It's also part of my healing. Nearly 7 years at Google was an incredible opportunity for me and I was fortunate to have wonderful teammates and a manager that fully supported me through these last few months. Thank you.
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I'm a strong believer in comments that explain the intent next to the code that should align with that intent
On commenting code, which camp are you? A. No comments, just ask AI to explain now B. Lowering the friction to grokking the code is worthwhile and comments are easier than ever to keep up-to-date.
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ca-caw! experimenting with a lightweight IDE that doesn't have an editor. @pierrecomputer absolutely cooking @tilt_dev underrated imo
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I did 150+ interviews and ended up working with a lot of the people I interviewed. My preferred interview length would be an hour. That's enough to go deep on a problem with someone. In literal 5 seconds all you're getting are vibes. Vibes are important but foolish to hire on.
Replying to @Steve_Yegge
It's very obvious when you should hire someone or not. If they're good or not. You know within 5 seconds. I never thought that gathering signal was a problem. If eliciting signal from the candidate is difficult, maybe the candidate just doesn't have enough signal to begin with
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beautiful new BOC red vinyl edition
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If you have an open-source Go project, I am happy to try to improve its resilience! DM me! #golang Happy to contribute to the Netsy project.
Super excited to be able to share that Netsy.dev has accepted it's first contribution, thank you @broady for coming onboard as a contributor!!! 🚀
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the "Member of Technical Staff" title originated at Bell Labs. almost 100 years ago.
Whoever invented “Member of Technical Staff” was a genius. It filters out Staff/Principal title-maxxers, protects engineering and research from corporate ladder brain, and leaves recruiters staring at LinkedIn like: “Is this person L4 or L7?” MTS is the best title. Happy to be MTS.
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Another thing I just remembered: this title existed at Google until ~the early 2010s.
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when I squint, everything starts to look like git, who can I contact for help
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Do you have an open-source Go system running in production? Please DM me if you're interested in a repo-wide (or scoped) audit of data races/integrity/correctness.
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