Noteds

In short, we are in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of developer tools, and a dizzying array of approaches are currently being tested for their evolutionary fitness. Consider even an abbreviated, absolutely non-exhaustive list of related tools: Aboard, Bolt, Cline, Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT / Codex, Claude / Code, Gemini / CLI, Factory, Lovable, Poolside, Replit, Same.dev, vibes.diy, v0, watsonX and Windsurf. Not all of these will succeed, and indeed some argue that all of these are doomed because the economic footing they’re built on is fatally unsound. That argument is built on two core assumptions, however: that vendor costs will never come down and that user costs can not be raised – neither of which seems entirely safe.

That objective I described - meaningful Experimentation - is the first phase of our journey. We’ll then transition to a second phase centered around a goal of Adoption of AI as standard part of the day-to-day toolkit for engineers. At that point the focus shifts again to measuring Impact - where is this new tool helping, and where is it causing issues.

Deep dive in driving adoption of really anything. Change management 101.

America’s youth strive for personal and professional success, but many struggle along broken pathways from high school into the job market because the people and institutions meant to support them are fundamentally out of sync.

_{Quote Citation: Website, “The Broken Marketplace Study”, Present, https://www.brokenmarketplace.org/}

Originally pioneered by Sergej Sonic at Alphabet, DoorDash, and Rippling, this shift isn’t just a simple change in numbers; for companies, it’s a philosophical pivot toward a more dynamic, performance-driven compensation strategy. Top performing employees stand to benefit while others will have more uncertainty of compensation in subsequent years.

I mean, it wasn’t like spreading it over 4 years was keeping people anchored.

_{Quote Citation: Zaheer,Zuhayeer, “Front-Loaded Vesting: Why Your Tech Offer Looks Different Now”, September 9, 2025, https://www.levels.fyi/blog/front-loaded-vesting.html}

I’m talking about personal goals. Not the corporate version where everyone wants to “develop leadership skills” but real, ambitious, life-changing goals that make people light up when they talk about them.

Rejecting the “up or out” rat race is phenomenal

_{Quote Citation: Stephane Moreau, “The insane privilege of being a manager”, SEP 09, 2025, https://www.blog4ems.com/p/the-insane-privilege-of-being-a-manager}

React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default. That default is now slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem.

Ember? knockout? vue? I dont know what “let’s use React” is the innovation killer. There is power in choosing a standard coding language everyone understands.

_{Quote Citation: Loren Stewart, “React Won by Default – And It’s Killing Frontend Innovation | Loren Stewart”, 2025-09-16, https://www.lorenstew.art/blog/react-won-by-default/}

AI is being hyped across every industry, but can it really manage money without guidance?

This project is an attempt to find out — with transparency, data, and a real budget.

Spoiler. No it cannot.

_{Quote Citation: Nathan Smith, “LuckyOne7777/ChatGPT-Micro-Cap-Experiment: This repo powers my blog experiment where ChatGPT manages a real-money micro-cap stock portfolio.”, Ongoing, https://github.com/LuckyOne7777/ChatGPT-Micro-Cap-Experiment}

Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed

I mean. It’s why this project exists. I wanted to learn about AWS lambda, s3 and GitHub actions. Plus Hugo. So I get it. And there’s utility in understanding how things work, always.

If you can slow it down 42,000x just think about how happy your users will be when you speed it back up.

_{Quote Citation: Jacob Jackson, “Making Postgres 42,000x slower because I am unemployed”, 2025-07-27, https://byteofdev.com/posts/making-postgres-slow/}

A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have. So here’s how and why we upgrade a data center.

My first job also included management of the server room. Fun memories.

I’ve seen so many bugs in real systems due to mixing up integers, strings, or UUIDs that represent different things. Meanwhile, it’s simple to set up types that entirely eliminate this class of bug, even in a language like Go that isn’t known for having a particularly powerful type system. It’s absolutely astounding to me that this technique is not broadly used.

I mean I get it. compiler catch everything. Bob Martin would be proud.