
JD Lien
13.5K posts

JD Lien
@jdlien
Tweets about PHP/JS/Laravel/Tailwind. I help web developers be awesome at their craft. Bluesky: @jdlien.com Mastodon: @[email protected]






My coworker got promoted over me. He was worse at coding. Better at politics. I wrote better code. Fixed more bugs. Shipped faster. He talked in meetings. Took credit. Played the game. He got the promotion. I got "keep up the good work". That's when I realized: corporate rewards politics, not performance. Six months later I quit. Started freelancing. Now I make 3x his salary. No politics. No credit-stealing. Just solving problems and getting paid directly. The best developers rarely get promoted. They get used. Companies optimize for compliance and communication. Not competence. If you're technically great but politically terrible, you'll never win at corporations. Leave. Build your own thing. Get paid for your actual value.



PlanetScale Postgres is now GA! I sat down with CEO @samlambert to talk about it all: scaling MySQL with Vitess, PlanetScale Metal, and now PlanetScale Postgres. We covered a lot of good ground in this one, and there's a bit of a surprise at the end!


This is the best mouse of all time and it's not even close.




I think the appetite for software is nearly infinite. I've been using AI extensively to write code and yet the number of things I still need to code has increased, not decreased. It's like we added three lanes to the highway and still have traffic.













