Jamie Lottering

I was a 10x engineer. Now I'm useless.

These times I feel like a madman saying the obvious: taste is often what you refuse to add and quality improves fastest when you stop adding things that make it worse. No matter how easy something is to add, every addition makes products either better or worse.

@WalkaboutMG Love the course. Great colors, cozy, and cute little coconut people. The difficulty of the Lost Balls was also perfect. Probably the only course I found them all in one go first try.

Befriend the native coconuts and explore the exotic isle as you discover the surprising origins of the best game ever created: mini golf. Tiki à Coco is out NOW on VR and iOS platforms!

@Betterment was your push notification system hacked? I just got this notification from the Android app, which cannot be real. For one thing, you can't deposit crypto into Betterment...

@EdTheOSINTer @Jason_Tran_NC @Betterment I'm a long time Betterment customer and how they handle this is going to determine whether or not I remain one. Need an official response

@Jason_Tran_NC @Betterment Beyond that, how'd they send a push notification from the Betterment app? They didn't just spoof the support address, their systems must have been compromised, and for a financial firm, that's reaaaaaaal bad.

@Betterment you guys get hacked? Suspicious crypto message and email from y'all.

@BettermentHelp I just got this notification on android. Looks like a scam

@Betterment why does this smell like a scam. Did you guys get hacked??

if the agents are so good why are you mfs in the office til 9 still

it’s honestly incredible to see software decline in real time these last couple of years i think there are different factors contributing to this nobody cares about the actual craft anymore, which is the consequence from: 1. leetcode interviews and faang interview style adoption - dsa is good but it doesn’t capture real knowledge on building systems 2. constant layoffs and ship jumping with no consequences - ie promo driven culture, ship and dip, no one is held accountable because nobody stays in charge of the product/system long enough to even have the full domain knowledge 3. non technical PMs in charge of product, services and pushing engineering to just ship with little understanding of the space, with only regard for themselves, because they too want that promotion and who cares if prod is broken 4. software engineering is not taking seriously - call it development, programming, whatever but nobody wants to have ownership and people dont care, just try to make the devs ship and the devs try to shit out a bunch of awful stuff to stay employed 5. with the addition of ML/AI into the picture we have a lot of brilliant folk who just wanna work in the AI space, which ofc is interesting but so is software engineering as a whole, a lot of challenging problems everywhere and AI is part of swe id say, we have people trying to ship AGI unable to run a crud app 6. the death of excellence - this feels like a global problem everywhere you go and look at, the decaying state of things, lack of domain knowledge or willingness to learn - a global cultural phenomenon? maybe i need to touch some grass

Once upon a time I started at a certain tech company. In the first week, I was like wow the build takes 45 minutes? And everyone was like of course it does why would it take any less time than that ya dolt? The next day my build was projected to complete in 6 hours because it used a merge queue and was behind 7 other builds. Everyone were like yes obviously, that makes sense. Felt like I was taking crazy pills for being the only person who thought this was absurd. I thought they were playing a prank on me. The story of how I made it my mission to fix it is less important than the takeaway - Resist the cultural normalization of dysfunction - when inefficiency or pain points become so routine that everyone stops questioning them. I was the outsider seeing clearly that the existing process was absurd, but the team had been conditioned to accept it as “just how things are.” Don’t let familiarity make you complacent. If something feels broken, it probably is.

New post 🎉 Going back to my roots on writing about the inner workings of things, a breakdown of key-value databases and how you might make one from scratch: nan.fyi/database

Lock your package.json dependencies to specific versions. Don’t upgrade until (ideally) you’ve reviewed all changes to deps or hire someone to do it for you. Don’t have dependencies where possible. Upgrade later rather than sooner.

@StillTevin I just got Barrowned

Big ups to the real ones, the namesakes themselves. Go snag something good!

@rauchg This reads like he passed away???

He changed frontend engineering forever. The Satoshi of UI. No one knows his whereabouts or his real name. He didn't ship a component system, he shipped a system to ship component systems.

@StillTevin @enori_zz D(EI)

@enori_zz Doesn't (evolutionarily improved)

how does he breathe

the reason why people abandon so many “almost done” things is because the last 20% of anything is friction, detail, & accountability. that last 20% of the work doesn’t feel like 20% at all, it feels like the whole damn thing & then some. this is especially true in an ai era where you can go from zero to something so quickly.

>join standup >”yesterday i worked on thing and today i will also work on thing” >repeat every day

Be wary of people who spew AI hype and screenshot their army of agents but don't seem to be shipping anything but demos. I'm a big fan of AI assistance and use agents and chat everyday, but there's a ton of engagement farming happening out there.

@wojakcodes If single and early in career: yes. But married with kids and experienced: no.

guys who work from home, do you ever feel like you're missing out on something?

TanStack DB is now in BETA! We’ve been working on TanStack DB, an embedded, reactive client database for TanStack Query, and are proud to announce today that with the 0.1 release that it's now in BETA!