Jesse Phelps

@jamonholmgren Same.

By the way, I'm like 10 years past the point where I care that much about particular syntax and coding patterns. I like to share ideas I have, and I don't get too married to convention. I've seen "best practices" that would *never* change, up and change, in my 32 years coding.

@jessitron We should have a geek out on this.

LLMs give us a new point of contrast for "what makes us human?" LLMs can do reasoning. That isn't what makes us human. LLMs aren't conscious, though. They don't have experiences, and they don't connect with each other.

@housecor Assembly

Imagine a future where we mostly stop reading AI generated code and primarily focus on behavior. What programming language should the AI generate? How do you decide?

@housecor It’s not just politics, it’s story telling. You have to be able to convince people. Show them the path, express the risks and how we address them, and why this is better. It’s leadership.

The most frustrating part: Individuals often recognize these problems, but lack the political power to change the organization. Knowing a better way exists isn't enough. You also need the political power to make a change.

In 2026, many dev teams still fail to get the basics right. Click ops No CI server No feature flags No automated tests Long-lived branches Big, ambiguous tickets Change approval boards Infrequent, manual deploys Many long-lived environments I still often see all this.

@schneidenbach @webprofusion I will say… if you have everything provided by MS, you have a lot fewer supply chain attacks to worry about. I am growing weary of the NPM ecosystem…

@webprofusion Bc dotnet devs think everything must be provided by ms

I can’t understand why every developer in .NET must have everything be in .NET like python is objectively a stupid language but my god how hard is it to just… not write c#

@jeffblankenburg @amazon @stirtrek Use Amazon business and the gift card manager.

I want to give @amazon $14000, and they won't help me do it. I run an event called @stirtrek. As part of it, we buy a large number of @amazon gift cards to use for tips and thank you gifts. Today, as I try to order them, my order is automatically cancelled each time.

@jessitron They’re are far more dangerous statistically for sure!

Opinion: Hippos are scarier than sharks.

@schneidenbach Same.

I saw a fellow speaker wrote a book. I’m convinced writing books is an exercise in futility, and AI is making the problem worse, not better I know lots of my friends have written books so absolutely no shade but I rarely hear of people who wrote books talk highly of the experience

@schneidenbach @gmltony

@gmltony this is what I got, apparently I'm a girl now

Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result. 😂

@housecor I’m still worried we’re creating a new generation of developers who will never mature in the technical competency. And the vulnerabilities… 😳

I can’t help but feel sad reading this. I remember my excitement when the site first launched. The end of an era.

@schneidenbach @jmrphy Oh it’s daily in my mind too. Every time I reach that moment of “I want to be done with this” because the day has been long, I reframe it immediately as “yeah, but this moment is fleeting and there will always be tomorrow for other things” and I’ve never regretted playing longer

@jessephelps @jmrphy Since you said this to me, it has lived rent free in my brain. I’m not even kidding. I probably think about it multiple times when I’m with all of my kids.

Am I just a monster? It's been 4 years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably about 70-140 minutes a week—roughly ten minutes each day, maybe 2x/day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong, but if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9 AM this morning, Saturday, January 3. It's a sunny, warm day here in Austin, and my four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn’t really feel like it, but at this age his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded, and with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father, the problem is only that I do not enjoy it. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure; it just seems wrong that I experience so little delight when my dad friends all claim to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque, tree-lined block. I am even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience. Yet for every single minute, on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful, and ashamed, when we're done. I know that when he is a teenager, I'll long to have these days back. I have all of this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person? Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are off? Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care, I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this.

@schneidenbach @jmrphy The days are long but the years are short.

Not trying to make you feel bad friend, youre getting dragged enough. Your post tho reminded me of this blog post I read 10 years ago. And specifically this passage I read there. Still haunts me. hanselman.com/blog/software-… — His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, "You spend time with your son?" "Much as I can," he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. "It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day'll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you'd give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn't see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won't last, so you revel in it while it's here." Ethan thinks often of that conversation, mostly when he's lying awake in bed at night and everyone else is asleep, and his life screaming past at the speed of light—the weight of bills and the future and his prior failings and all these moments he's missing—all the lost joy—perched like a boulder on his chest. - Pines (The Wayward Pines Trilogy, Book 1)

@jamonholmgren @staysaasy No one changes dramatically overnight. It’s a slow evolution.

Reminds me though … In high school there was a 6’-7” center, one grade ahead of me, who was the guy I had to guard in practice since I’m also tall. He would throw elbows, played dirty, and was kind of a bully in the locker room. So I really didn’t like this guy. 15 years later I connected with him on Facebook somehow and he messaged me about some website issues he was having for his small business. I was on guard but he was incredibly nice and polite and also complimentary of the business I had built. And it wasn’t an act, because over the next ten years he’s been nothing but cool to me. I suppose it was immaturity and possibly home issues. He also publicly credited his wife with helping him overcome a lot of personal stuff, which I assume has to do with it. (Not intending to focus on the anti-examples, your point is still a good one. Just remained me of that.)

In the last 20 years, I’ve never seen a single person overcome a serious personality/communication/attitude issue at work. I’m not exaggerating. 0.0% recovery rate. I’ve seen a small handful of people convince themselves they’ve changed because they changed their role to interacting with a totally different set of people with different expectations (surrounding themselves by yes men or docile peers).

@housecor We should have a Beer sometime soon.

People defend systems that are supposed to work in theory. But the purpose of a system *is what it does.* What does a Sprint do in practice? It creates an arbitrary deadline that leads to rushing.

@schneidenbach Shots fired!

it's hard to take the dev community seriously sometimes when they pre-select morons as speakers

If you are a restaurant/bar and you charge a service fee without very clearly indicating that you will only do that to me once and I will trash you to everyone I know. Just raise your prices and stop lying to us. And be great! We’ll pay it.

Anyone else sick of people copy/pasting chatgpt messages to you? So many business people are just running blindly running their business from ai slop it seems.

@housecor Money is a signal of that which is valuable and desired by people. You can work for meaning and contribution and $ is the feedback loop that tells you when you’re on track.

@jessephelps Knowing what’s enough avoids overwork and excessive fixation on $. At some point one is effectively working for free because the extra money provides no utility. In that case, pivoting to doing work merely for meaning and contribution over $ may make sense.

If you don’t know the answer to “how much is enough?”, the default is always “more”.

@housecor I don’t think that “more” is always the answer for those. More is the default answer when enough is unqualified. And often “when is it enough” is asked about the ultra rich. Enough, unqualified, means success, inventing, building, etc. And that is never enough. We need more!

@jessephelps True. Two potential frames: 1. Enough annual income to cover my annual spending. 2. Enough invested to retire.