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So what's going on? This is a reflection on this post (of the same title) that I thoroughly enjoyed, by Flavio Copes. "I am the genuine article, therefore I don't have to try. I just have to be. You, on the other hand, have to try any passing bandwagon, because what else have you got?" Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee It seems that a great many people are feeling the pinch of a tech job market squeeze that seems to have lasted for over 2 years now. A lot of folks seem to be quick to dump the blame for this squarely on "AI". And what can you expect when the tech CEOs are all doing their stupid dance, touting the latest fadtech as the breakthrough that justifies them laying off swathes of employees in short-sighted attempts to prop up shareholder value? A more self-destructive spiral I have not seen. But the truth is masked by this conclusion. I don't believe for one second—and I don't think a lot of other popcorn-crunching devs believe it either—that "AI" is remotely close to the claims being made by these flaccid excuses for billionaires. Something else is afoot. "First, there’s a lot of people, and I mean a LOT, that went into programming and didn’t have a genuine passion for the job. For them, it’s just a way to make money." Hard agree! I've seen some of these people. I don't believe it's a bad reason to get into any line of work, but in my experience, they have made for some of the worst developers. Not because of a lack of technical capability (I truly believe almost anyone can learn to program well), but the money motivator only takes you so far. Like any job worth doing, it is hard. The rewards come to those who continue to put in the effort. If you've based your decision to become a programmer on seeing someone else claiming success on social media, I can only tell you that you've been duped. The vast majority do not have this story. And even some of the ones that appear to, don't. "Very few jobs out there give those kind of perks: high pay and comfortable life." It's all relative. My personal experience with programming hasn't been "high pay... comfortable life". I've worked damn hard for a very long time. I still don't feel sufficiently compensated and I've just had my best year ever. And that as a freelancer! I've never seen programming (or really any possible career path) as "easy". Currently "AI" makes my life a bit easier, but nothing about using it in and out every day to build things convinces me that it's going to do away with my job. "To them, those people that care about the craft, AI is not a problem at all." I totally agree. ¶So what's going on? "post-COVID companies hired like crazy" "the end of the zero-interest rate period" "increased competition" from the potential of a globally shifted workforce "investor pressure" "AI" Look, there's not just one answer. That's clear. And these are just part of the picture. I have another theory: a huge factor at play here is that, for most of these businesses, their revenue is based on ads. Therefore, consumers (for the most part) are the driving force of a lot of the top tech companies' bottom lines. But the consumers are getting sick and tired of: Privacy violations. Crypto scams. Income disparity between the workers and the C-suite. Ads! Ads! Ads! everywhere, all of the time. The lies and manipulation of it all. Many of these tech companies haven't innovated anything meaningful in a long time. They're jumping on AI right now because they're all hoping they'll discover the next big breakthrough and unlock megabucks. And in the meantime they prop themselves up by touting eye-watering sales figures (and net losses) of their next "always-on, internet connected, touchscreen, AI-powered, super agent whosawidget." Or their "giant, face-hugging, reality-distortion spectacles that no person in their right mind would be caught dead wearing in public" But are any of these "advances" really moving the needle on solving the bigger problems we're facing as a species? No. So the ads and PR BS isn't working as well as it used. If your business model is to be a big promotional platform that relies on real human beings to view the content that your advertisers want to promote, then you have to bring real value. And if you're the advertiser whose whole business model depends on crazy ad spend to penetrate into and reach your target market of what you hope are real people, then you need a lot of cheap money to get there. It's a poisoned lake. These big fish have done it to themselves. Sure, they're big, so they'll survive for a while, but it's still terminal. The good news is that, in their wake will come true innovators. I expect the next few years to be something of the beginnings of a rebirth period in this constant boom-bust circus. And I genuinely believe that "AI" will enable a lot of that. It is already enabling small teams to move faster whilst staying lean. In time, these little fish will grow and once again find opportunity in hiring fresh talent. Get in with those companies now while they're still small by seeking them out and starting a conversation. It might not be a job right away, but it's building the relationship. "You have to have a network... Local meetups, and local conferences... Go a few days before... hang out before the conference... Go to the after parties. That’s where you actually meet and get to know people." This is the way. You know, I've never once applied to FAANG. I've never felt worthy. In most cases, I don't meet the requirements as I don't have a degree. And honestly, the companies and their leaders do not align with my values at all, so I'm extremely disinclined to apply. But imagine if someone like me, a "self-taught" nobody dev, with no recognisable education, only having a connection or two, skips the queue ahead of you and lands a job at the next great innovative tech company. All for the sake of saying hello and getting to know people. This is why, especially in the age of "AI", cultivating genuine relationships with real people is so important. Work on silly side projects (if you have the capacity). Read! Share what you're working on. Share what you enjoy. Retweet. Reply. Write about it—in the abstract if you have to. Make videos. Do a podcast. Go meet new people, in and out of your field. Don't do it for the algorithm, or the likes and subscribes. Do it for the genuine relationships. Because in a world of fakes and forgeries, the genuine article sticks out like a sore thumb!
2024 has overall been a great year for me personally. I believe it represents a turning point. 2023 was tough, but 2024 went some way to redressing the balance and I am even more positive about 2025 because of it. Here are a few highlights: We went to Japan! My first time in Asia. The best trip I've been on so far. I managed to get NativePHP support for Windows released, amongst many other improvements. It's almost ready for production usage. With over 1,000 devs in the Discord, $1,000/month in sponsorships and tons of contributors helping, it really feels like it's flying. I started building ReelFlow with an old acquaintance and his business partner, and it's got some very promising signs of growth. I went to Laracon US in Dallas and it was epic! Laradir became Laradevs, blew past 4,000 registered developer profiles and has some awesome features on the way. I was interviewed by Eric from Laravel News. I started four (yes, four(!)) podcasts. I finally fixed my website so I could start publishing to it again. And to top it all off, I got invited to speak at Laracon EU 2025, which is coming up in February. But it wasn't without its challenges! Up to about March/April, I had almost zero income. I was in a rut with NativePHP because I was so stressed about finding paid work. It was really frustrating to have all these goals and intentions for NativePHP (and of course a backlog of PRs and issues to get through!) but not really having the time to focus on it. I managed to pick some up when we returned from Japan, but it wasn't quite enough, and then all of a sudden I had too much. Committing to open source in your spare time is hard at the best of times, but especially so when you've got more than a full plate of full-time client work and you're trying grow a SaaS (Laradevs) on the side... I can tell you now, I have (and still continue) to make poor decisions about the best use of my time, for which I can only say that I'm very grateful to and for my long-suffering wife. Bu, I'm sorry that I've not spent enough time with you. Honestly, I feel like I've been teetering on the edge of burnout. So I decided that I needed to drop one client and that freed up my time. Thankfully, we managed to get away for a week later in the year. It was just to Tenerife, our neighbouring island, and we went up into the hills, so despite being the tail end of summer (when you'd expect great weather and warm temperatures), we were cold and damp in amongst the clouds. But it was just what I needed. We chilled out, cooked food, sampled the local shops, bars and restaurants, spent good time with great friends and just really relaxed. What's more, I felt like I truly disconnected for once (even though my wife might disagree!) So I'm determined to do more of that in 2025. Saying that, January is going to be tough! I've got a talk to finish so that I can go on stage in front of the biggest audience I've ever spoken in front of, to talk about something that I feel like I have almost zero knowledge about. A lot of the past couple of years - of basically being forced to go back into freelancing during the height of a hiring crisis - has felt like when I tried to start a business back in 2008/9, at the peak of the recession: hard work and I'm way out of my depth. Although many things have changed over those years, the one factor that's really stood out as being different is me. I can see clearly how I've grown in so many ways. I feel like I'm doing some of the best work of my career and I'm enjoying it a lot. The other thing I've learned is that I want to go all-in on NativePHP. In my opinion, the potential for this tech is huge. I'm not under any illusion that this is going to happen quickly. So one of my goals for 2025 is to build up one of those side projects enough to give me more time to spend on NativePHP, a stepping stone on my way to making it my full-time focus. It might be Laradevs, it might be something else. I don't know for sure yet, but I'm putting my chips on a few numbers. Besides that, I'm looking forward to visiting Amsterdam for the first time. I'm cautiously optimistic about my talk (though I'm starting to get very nervous) and I'm hoping to be able to attend Laracon US again. I've also got a couple more personal challenge goals. I'm 40 in 2025, so: I want to get my body into shape - I have a little excess weight to lose and while I'm probably the fittest I've been since the pandemic, I am still not fit enough. I want to build 40 apps with NativePHP! I want to meet (virtually or IRL) 1,000 Laravel developers I've not met before. 2024 has been a year of finding clarity and focus. 2025 will be the year of doubling down and building bigger. I hope you've had an opportunity to reflect and find some positives about 2024. I know it has been especially hard for many of you. I also hope that you can find a way to look into 2025 with enthusiasm and energy. I'd love to hear more about your ups and downs and what you're excited about for 2025, so please feel free to reach out to me
Avoid the shiny Avoid comparison Some examples Laravel Build tools Typescript and JS frameworks The Web Platform What I keep up with This morning, I watched a video advertising a course aimed at developers. One of the first sentiments proclaimed is that of feeling left behind, that tech is moving too fast to keep up. I think we're probably one of only a few industries globally that have this problem. I don't see baristas learning how to use every kind of coffee machine, or carpenters buying and using all the different types of wood saw. I don't see how they could. I'm sure those industries don't move anywhere near as fast as tech, so it may be a bit of an unfair comparison, but that has led me to a really interesting axiom: After 20 years in tech, I've learned that slow tech is good tech. I'm happier when I'm not trying to be on the bleeding edge. ¶Avoid the shiny I realised over time that I have been quite a lot more dismissive of "the new shiny" than a lot of other devs. In the back of my mind I was always kinda worried that I was being left behind because I wasn't learning X or getting experience with Y. But I've learned over the years that it truly doesn't matter. Why? Most importantly: users won't notice. Second: many companies don't have the capacity or desire to be on the bleeding edge. Finally: my brain still works, I can learn new things any time, when I really need to. And I learn faster now anyway. ¶Avoid comparison It's led me to believe that "falling behind" is a made-up concept designed to sell you stuff you probably don't need. 🌶️ Or maybe it's just human nature, similar to "keeping up with the Jones's". We're competitive, we compare ourselves to others very quickly. It's a bad habit though. I'm here to tell you that it's not just ok to fall (a little bit) behind, it can even be A Good Thing™. I've been falling behind for my entire career. 😂 I'm probably more behind now than I've ever been. But I'm also doing better now - in many ways - than I ever have. ¶Some examples ¶Laravel I didn't use Laravel until a couple years after its first release. When I picked up v4.2 it was using Composer and had started the transition to Symfony components. It had DI and all sorts of other goodies that earlier versions lacked. ¶Build tools I never used Bower/Gulp/Grunt/Yarn; I settled on NPM after the war was over. I haven't switched to Bun (and probably won't). I barely touched Webpack thanks to Laravel Mix. I use Vite, but also hardly use it directly, thanks to Laravel's first-party Vite plugin. I waited so long on all of this stuff that when I actually needed it, the choices were easy. Sure, I wasn't there at the front lines; I didn't invent React. I didn't build Vite. I didn't write the Laravel plugin. But then, I didn't need to, I wasn't building the frontend to the biggest online social network ever or a toolchain for other developers. ¶Typescript and JS frameworks I looked at Typescript once. You can just write plain JavaScript and get the same results. I slept on Coffeescript, Backbone, Angular, React, Vue, Svelte etc. Though I've used some of them briefly during my time, I never went deep on any of them. I stuck with jQuery for a long time because it worked and I knew how to build things rapidly with it. Importantly, I know the value of these other tools and when to use them. That hasn't stopped me being able to work on teams that use them heavily. But I've learned that it probably won't need to be me that's the person who's working day-in, day-out with them. And I'm ok with that. I use Alpine and Livewire now, as they were built to work with the tools I know and love using, each with a small footprint and easy to learn. They're more than enough for my needs—and many of my clients! And you know what? Some of my clients still use jQuery. 🤷♂️ ¶The Web Platform I love seeing the latest features in HTML, CSS & JS. I'll play with them, but very rarely deploy them. It usually takes some time before new features are available on ALL browsers and devices. And even then, billions of potential users are still running older versions. Yes, it still tickles my curiosity learning new things. It's intellectually satisfying. And, yes, proficiency in multiple tools can make you a more valuable asset. 💰 I'm not saying "you should not...", I'm just saying "you don't need to". ¶What I keep up with The only things that have been really important for me to stay up to date on are the core technologies I use: PHP & Laravel. I make it a point to keep my apps up to date with close to the latest releases - mainly for security and performance reasons, but also so I can use the latest and greatest features. 😛 But I rarely upgrade apps in production to the very latest versions as soon as they're available... I always leave it a few weeks. In that way, my work is not dictated by someone else's release schedule! That's not to say I don't keep abreast of what's coming in future releases of those tools; they're core to the service I provide and the tools I build, so I would be remiss not to. Being aware of what's coming is the priority there. But I don't have to have hands-on experience with everything. Testing early ("beta") releases against existing code is a useful exercise from time to time, but not always required. So basically I only need to regularly monitor two technologies. Easily done with a reasonably well-curated Twitter or a couple of RSS feeds. Sure, I keep my finger on the pulse of all the other tech I use, glancing occasionally out the corner of my eye and paying attention when the sources I am more focused on mention them But by keeping it simple, I can focus on delivering the most value rather than spinning my wheels on all of the superfluous things adjacent to the. Everything else can wait. Don't try to learn and keep up to date with everything; pick your battles!
I've started a little podcast! If you give it a listen, I'd love to know what you think.
Some history, some context When does an SPA make sense? So, why are SPAs bad again? Your front-end and back-end get decoupled! It may hurt customisability Performance will suffer So what's the alternative? I came across this interesting article by @gregnavis the other day. I guess it's from a few years ago now, judging by some of the other posts on his blog. But it still holds up. It's maybe even more relevant now. The article is entitled The Architecture No One Needs and it makes a simple and clear case, arguing that SPA's are more expensive than a standard multi-page app (which may or may not be a monolith). I'm going to use SPA throughout this post to mean the whole umbrella of ways you might be building a front-end application that is not server-side rendered. I think this is in line with Greg's intent too. I don't want to split hairs over whether a particular framework can be used to build front-end apps that aren't strictly SPAs. Since I read it, I haven't stopped thinking about this article. I found myself agreeing with all of Greg's stated points and it made me realise I actually have a strong opinion about this topic. I believe Greg is right, and as time rolls on I think I'm becoming more bullish in my stance on SPAs too. ¶Some history, some context My foray into the dirty, hubbub streets of front-end frameworks came about because of Laravel Nova and Statamic. They both use Vue, so I learned Vue. Of course, I looked around. But React made me retch. Angular almost made me want to buy a katana just to perform seppuku. (Of course I'm being hyperbolic.) I hear things about all of these and more thanks to Twitter. I can say some of it is good, but most of it continues to push me away. I stuck with Vue. I actually like Vue a lot, even if v3 has caused a bit of headache—it's actually better for it in my opinion and yes I do like the composition API. Overall though, I'm definitely heading more towards preferring not to have to build my front-end using node/deno/bun or whatever tool becomes popular today. That said, you just try and pry Tailwind from my frigid, rigid fingers! I'm quite firmly in the Livewire camp now. In another life, I may even like HTMX? I've built a few SPAs, but I can probably count them on one hand. But not only will I probably not build another one, I think you shouldn't either. I'm strongly encouraging my clients not to. I do think SPAs have a place, but it is almost certainly not in your project. Yes, I know this argument has been made before and probably far more eloquently than I'm going to, but you know I just felt like I needed to get this out of my head in my own way. ¶When does an SPA make sense? Let's get this out of the way first before I dunk on SPAs some more. They do have a place: I believe that the main advantage of an SPA is/was/has always been the decoupling of the front-end from the back-end. As time goes on and engineers specialise in areas that interest them the most, roles become more well-defined. This is why we have 'front-end' and 'back-end' and 'full stack' engineers. Although there is principally a lot of overlap (this is all programming at the end of the day and many concepts are similar), the domain—the environment that the engineer is most familiar with—is what determines their preference. Some engineers will prefer back-end because they don't want to think about or deal with a certain class of bugs or issues that arise from the rapidly-evolving world of front-end development. They may be uncomfortable using 3 or 4 different languages at the same time to get their work done, or they groan as soon as there's another major version of some framework which is going to require a load of refactoring that doesn't add immediate value to your product. Consider: every user of your app could be using a different version of a particular browser, which uses one kind of rendering engine, and a specific level of conformity to various web standards e.g. ECMAScript (the official standard that underpins what most of us think of as JavaScript) or CSS. Keeping on top of these variations and differences across desktop and mobile is enough to make anyone's head spin. And other engineers will prefer the front-end for its stateful nature, or because they're more comfortable with JavaScript/TypeScript, they grok CSS, and they love the intersection of code and design. Or maybe they just dislike dealing with databases, concurrency, queues, messaging and APIs a lot more than they dislike wild browser evolution. In any case, whatever size your team is, there will be these preferences. For example, I consider myself a full-stack developer, but honestly I like to avoid front-end work as much as possible, so will generally take the easy route there. Developing an SPA could allow you/your business to split the work of front-end and back-end into separate teams, which may help each team focus so they can do what they do best and be the happiest they can be. Which is the most important metric that will make an appreciable difference to your bottom-line long term. Being intentional about this will see you hit Conway's Law head-on and potentially tackle that beast in the best way, as long as you build up the necessary lines of communication. It also allows you to scale the two parts of the system separately—both in terms of team scaling and resource scaling—which, if you ever need that flexibility, could end up saving you from a certain group of headaches. And I'm gonna be honest, building distributed systems like this is a cool problem to solve and will be a point of growth for many of your engineers. ¶So, why are SPAs bad again? Yeh, so far this all sounds great, right? Well, just letting ol' Conway right into your living room isn't exactly the best idea. Aside of all the points that Greg makes in his article (if you haven't read it yet, go read it), I want to present three extra reasons why I think an SPA is a bad idea. ¶Your front-end and back-end get decoupled! Your back-end and front-end are always coupled. So trying to split them in anything but the most extreme circumstances is an exercise in futility. I think this is probably the worst part of this whole story. If your back-end team want to move in one direction, they've got to align with the front-end team. If timings and priorities don't work out, it's going to force someone to either put a hold on some work that really needs sorting out or do some grunt work just to patch over a hole that's about to appear. This is communication overhead. It adds risk. It adds complexity. It adds meetings into engineers' calendars. It adds friction, and stress, and distraction. It flies in the face of that number one principle: let your teams focus and be happy. This literally costs you money one way or another, cost that you could avoid. Deployments get unavoidably riskier in ways that are super difficult to test because testing distributed systems is really hard. Again, this might all be fine, in the most extreme cases, where you need the decoupling. Then this extra expense, and complexity, and churn-causing evil, is just a necessary evil that you have to learn to swallow and live with. But I've got x engineers, y1 are front-end, y2 are back-end. What do I do? I would strongly recommend that one of your engineering groups need to roll up their sleeves and get on learning the other group's code, tooling and responsibilities. This will have multiple benefits: career progression and learning opportunities, increased bus factor, fewer meetings and more collaboration. Sure there will be challenges too, but they won't be as big or as painful as the other challenges you'd face with an SPA. ¶It may hurt customisability As I mentioned earlier, the reason I got into Vue at all was because other tech I was using required me to. In both Statamic and Laravel Nova, the choice of Vue—well, not specifically Vue, but rather a reactive front-end framework—made sense because at the time it really was the best way to build flexible, reactive front-ends. And both of those tools needed that power and have become fantastic tools because of it. But there is one pain point that it's created that's quite hard to escape: the customisation story for each of these is harder because of it. How so? Basically, because each tool needs to build the assets to ship their product. And once they're built it's hard for third-parties to build on what's already there. How is it harder? Let's say I'm creating a Statamic add-on that allows CMS owners to post to social media from their control panel. As Statamic uses Vue and already has a bunch of components I can leverage, I am going to use some of them. But I'm also going to add some of my own functionality that doesn't already exist within Statamic. Now what happens? Well I build the Javascript... but wait. I can't change the bundled JS that's part of Statamic core. I have to build my own JS and load it at the right time, something I'm not in control of. Thankfully the Statamic team (building on tooling from the Vue & JS community) have worked hard to make this relatively easy, but my tool choice is now limited by what they support - if they're using Vue 2, I have to use Vue 2; if I don't like Vite or Webpack, tough luck. And on top of that, the builds have to happen at the client's end, which means we're now offloading some of the responsibility of making this whole thing work to people who don't need or want to know anything about this stuff. They just want to install your thing and get on with their jobs and lives. Why is this such a pain though? It used to be (in other platforms) that I could just load some extra JS file into the admin interface and do what I want. Honestly, we probably should never have been doing that either. Hands up, how many of you have seen a WordPress installation that tries to load 2 or more different versions of jQuery? 🙋🏼♂️ So these build tools go some way to alleviating some problems, but in the process have introduced so many layers of protection and abstraction that it presents a brain-melting, Japanese puzzle box to unlock. And all this JavaScript flying around is really unsafe, because JavaScript is completely malleable on the client side. That's meant library creators have had to go to some unusual lengths to protect the state of the application and encapsulate the code in attempts to make it safer and more portable. I won't pretend to understand all of the requirements, pre-requisites and implications for why built JavaScript assets are packaged up in a complex soup of function calls and obfuscated code, but suffice to say this makes building on top of pre-existing code that much harder. The web standards track is working to make this easier: we have Web Components and module starting to come through which should alleviate some of this. But if you're not building with those standard in play—I understand, it might not be possible because of browser support etc—and you want to expose your user's to third-party plugins/add-ons, then you've got to figure out how to make it easy for other developers. Some of that's going to require the specific implementation, the other part is going to be documentation. No matter how you cut it, it's going to be harder to get right than if you had server-side rendered views that you allow your third-party developers to load at runtime. ¶Performance will suffer This isn't really an extra reason as Greg did touch on this a little already, but I wanted to go harder on performance. You should never choose to build an SPA because of some supposed performance benefit. That is the wrong hill to try and defend for many reasons, but primarily because you've got the whole of the web stack—on horses, with bazookas—nipping at your heels. Sure, it may take a little while for web standards to get ratified and then rolled out, but the reality is that it's only a matter of time. We now have wide browser support for QUIC / HTTP/3 (which brings faster downloads and reduced server load) and things like 103 Early Hints response headers (which let us tell browsers what they should prioritise pre-loading), making the standard, non-SPA web even more performant. (And yes, some of this benefits SPAs too!) Sure, you can argue some of this advancement may have been driven by SPAs and their apparent benefits. But there's some inevitability to all of this (both the appearance of SPAs and the advancement of HTTP) which makes the whole argument moot in my opinion. As adoption and overall performance of the web platform increases, SPAs will even start to feel slow in comparison. Some feel slow already! That's because so much of the heavy lifting is left to the userland threads of the in-browser JavaScript engine instead of the lower-level compiled languages, the ones used to build the core browser engine itself (C++, Rust, Swift etc). That translates to a poorer experience in your app, and a penalty for your users. While it's not impossible for JavaScript to be as fast or faster than the actual browser it's running in, it's just such a long way for it to get there it's a no-brainer at this stage to let the browser do what the browser does best instead of trying to replicate all of that in JS. So don't! Use JavaScript the way it was intended: as a sugar-coating to enhance the pages, not to build entire pages. I mean, you wouldn't eat a donut made entirely out of sugar, would you? Again, in the extreme cases, maybe you would. Maybe for this donut-sized/-shaped sugar torus, you have an appropriately-sized dough-only counterpart, both of which you consume in close proximity... I donut-know where this analogy is going. ¶So what's the alternative? You, dear reader, are not in the most extreme case. Probably not even close! And you may never be. So, if you haven't started building an SPA, don't! Keep your code together in a single application where the front-end is rendered by the back-end, and then you can test and deploy it as a single unit. And yes, you can even do that without Docker 😱 Create it as a fully server-rendered, multi-page application with page reloads and everything. Go on! I double dare you. If you really want/need the reactivity, try something like Livewire, Hotwire or HTMX. You can do this all the way up to many millions of users per day and it will be fine, which you are a long way from. Trust me, your front-end will never meaningfully need to move faster than your back-end, and vice-versa. If you're already running an SPA and are contemplating bringing the two parts of the donut back together, do it! Bite your lip, close your eyes, and just do it. Relevant
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While Stripe is a widely admired company for things like its creation of the Sorbet typer project, I personally think that Stripe’s most interesting strategy work is also among its most subtle: its willingness to significantly prioritize API stability. This strategy is almost invisible externally. Internally, discussions around it were frequent and detailed, but mostly confined to dedicated API design conversations. API stability isn’t just a technical design quirk, it’s a foundational decision in an API-driven business, and I believe it is one of the unsung heroes of Stripe’s business success. This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts. Reading this document To apply this strategy, start at the top with Policy. To understand the thinking behind this strategy, read sections in reverse order, starting with Explore. More detail on this structure in Making a readable Engineering Strategy document. Policy & Operation Our policies for managing API changes are: Design for long API lifetime. APIs are not inherently durable. Instead we have to design thoughtfully to ensure they can support change. When designing a new API, build a test application that doesn’t use this API, then migrate to the new API. Consider how integrations might evolve as applications change. Perform these migrations yourself to understand potential friction with your API. Then think about the future changes that we might want to implement on our end. How would those changes impact the API, and how would they impact the application you’ve developed. At this point, take your API to API Review for initial approval as described below. Following that approval, identify a handful of early adopter companies who can place additional pressure on your API design, and test with them before releasing the final, stable API. All new and modified APIs must be approved by API Review. API changes may not be enabled for customers prior to API Review approval. Change requests should be sent to api-review email group. For examples of prior art, review the api-review archive for prior requests and the feedback they received. All requests must include a written proposal. Most requests will be approved asynchronously by a member of API Review. Complex or controversial proposals will require live discussions to ensure API Review members have sufficient context before making a decision. We never deprecate APIs without an unavoidable requirement to do so. Even if it’s technically expensive to maintain support, we incur that support cost. To be explicit, we define API deprecation as any change that would require customers to modify an existing integration. If such a change were to be approved as an exception to this policy, it must first be approved by the API Review, followed by our CEO. One example where we granted an exception was the deprecation of TLS 1.2 support due to PCI compliance obligations. When significant new functionality is required, we add a new API. For example, we created /v1/subscriptions to support those workflows rather than extending /v1/charges to add subscriptions support. With the benefit of hindsight, a good example of this policy in action was the introduction of the Payment Intents APIs to maintain compliance with Europe’s Strong Customer Authentication requirements. Even in that case the charge API continued to work as it did previously, albeit only for non-European Union payments. We manage this policy’s implied technical debt via an API translation layer. We release changed APIs into versions, tracked in our API version changelog. However, we only maintain one implementation internally, which is the implementation of the latest version of the API. On top of that implementation, a series of version transformations are maintained, which allow us to support prior versions without maintaining them directly. While this approach doesn’t eliminate the overhead of supporting multiple API versions, it significantly reduces complexity by enabling us to maintain just a single, modern implementation internally. All API modifications must also update the version transformation layers to allow the new version to coexist peacefully with prior versions. In the future, SDKs may allow us to soften this policy. While a significant number of our customers have direct integrations with our APIs, that number has dropped significantly over time. Instead, most new integrations are performed via one of our official API SDKs. We believe that in the future, it may be possible for us to make more backwards incompatible changes because we can absorb the complexity of migrations into the SDKs we provide. That is certainly not the case yet today. Diagnosis Our diagnosis of the impact on API changes and deprecation on our business is: If you are a small startup composed of mostly engineers, integrating a new payments API seems easy. However, for a small business without dedicated engineers—or a larger enterprise involving numerous stakeholders—handling external API changes can be particularly challenging. Even if this is only marginally true, we’ve modeled the impact of minimizing API changes on long-term revenue growth, and it has a significant impact, unlocking our ability to benefit from other churn reduction work. While we believe API instability directly creates churn, we also believe that API stability directly retains customers by increasing the migration overhead even if they wanted to change providers. Without an API change forcing them to change their integration, we believe that hypergrowth customers are particularly unlikely to change payments API providers absent a concrete motivation like an API change or a payment plan change. We are aware of relatively few companies that provide long-term API stability in general, and particularly few for complex, dynamic areas like payments APIs. We can’t assume that companies that make API changes are ill-informed. Rather it appears that they experience a meaningful technical debt tradeoff between the API provider and API consumers, and aren’t willing to consistently absorb that technical debt internally. Future compliance or security requirements—along the lines of our upgrade from TLS 1.2 to TLS 1.3 for PCI—may necessitate API changes. There may also be new tradeoffs exposed as we enter new markets with their own compliance regimes. However, we have limited ability to predict these changes at this point.
Recently I got a question on formal methods1: how does it help to mathematically model systems when the system requirements are constantly changing? It doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time proving a design works, and then deliver the product and find out it's not at all what the client needs. As the saying goes, the hard part is "building the right thing", not "building the thing right". One possible response: "why write tests"? You shouldn't write tests, especially lots of unit tests ahead of time, if you might just throw them all away when the requirements change. This is a bad response because we all know the difference between writing tests and formal methods: testing is easy and FM is hard. Testing requires low cost for moderate correctness, FM requires high(ish) cost for high correctness. And when requirements are constantly changing, "high(ish) cost" isn't affordable and "high correctness" isn't worthwhile, because a kinda-okay solution that solves a customer's problem is infinitely better than a solid solution that doesn't. But eventually you get something that solves the problem, and what then? Most of us don't work for Google, we can't axe features and products on a whim. If the client is happy with your solution, you are expected to support it. It should work when your customers run into new edge cases, or migrate all their computers to the next OS version, or expand into a market with shoddy internet. It should work when 10x as many customers are using 10x as many features. It should work when you add new features that come into conflict. And just as importantly, it should never stop solving their problem. Canonical example: your feature involves processing requested tasks synchronously. At scale, this doesn't work, so to improve latency you make it asynchronous. Now it's eventually consistent, but your customers were depending on it being always consistent. Now it no longer does what they need, and has stopped solving their problems. Every successful requirement met spawns a new requirement: "keep this working". That requirement is permanent, or close enough to decide our long-term strategy. It takes active investment to keep a feature behaving the same as the world around it changes. (Is this all a pretentious of way of saying "software maintenance is hard?" Maybe!) Phase changes In physics there's a concept of a phase transition. To raise the temperature of a gram of liquid water by 1° C, you have to add 4.184 joules of energy.2 This continues until you raise it to 100°C, then it stops. After you've added two thousand joules to that gram, it suddenly turns into steam. The energy of the system changes continuously but the form, or phase, changes discretely. Software isn't physics but the idea works as a metaphor. A certain architecture handles a certain level of load, and past that you need a new architecture. Or a bunch of similar features are independently hardcoded until the system becomes too messy to understand, you remodel the internals into something unified and extendable. etc etc etc. It's doesn't have to be totally discrete phase transition, but there's definitely a "before" and "after" in the system form. Phase changes tend to lead to more intricacy/complexity in the system, meaning it's likely that a phase change will introduce new bugs into existing behaviors. Take the synchronous vs asynchronous case. A very simple toy model of synchronous updates would be Set(key, val), which updates data[key] to val.3 A model of asynchronous updates would be AsyncSet(key, val, priority) adds a (key, val, priority, server_time()) tuple to a tasks set, and then another process asynchronously pulls a tuple (ordered by highest priority, then earliest time) and calls Set(key, val). Here are some properties the client may need preserved as a requirement: If AsyncSet(key, val, _, _) is called, then eventually db[key] = val (possibly violated if higher-priority tasks keep coming in) If someone calls AsyncSet(key1, val1, low) and then AsyncSet(key2, val2, low), they should see the first update and then the second (linearizability, possibly violated if the requests go to different servers with different clock times) If someone calls AsyncSet(key, val, _) and immediately reads db[key] they should get val (obviously violated, though the client may accept a slightly weaker property) If the new system doesn't satisfy an existing customer requirement, it's prudent to fix the bug before releasing the new system. The customer doesn't notice or care that your system underwent a phase change. They'll just see that one day your product solves their problems, and the next day it suddenly doesn't. This is one of the most common applications of formal methods. Both of those systems, and every one of those properties, is formally specifiable in a specification language. We can then automatically check that the new system satisfies the existing properties, and from there do things like automatically generate test suites. This does take a lot of work, so if your requirements are constantly changing, FM may not be worth the investment. But eventually requirements stop changing, and then you're stuck with them forever. That's where models shine. As always, I'm using formal methods to mean the subdiscipline of formal specification of designs, leaving out the formal verification of code. Mostly because "formal specification" is really awkward to say. ↩ Also called a "calorie". The US "dietary Calorie" is actually a kilocalorie. ↩ This is all directly translatable to a TLA+ specification, I'm just describing it in English to avoid paying the syntax tax ↩
We received over 2,200 applications for our just-closed junior programmer opening, and now we're going through all of them by hand and by human. No AI screening here. It's a lot of work, but we have a great team who take the work seriously, so in a few weeks, we'll be able to invite a group of finalists to the next phase. This highlights the folly of thinking that what it'll take to land a job like this is some specific list of criteria, though. Yes, you have to present a baseline of relevant markers to even get into consideration, like a great cover letter that doesn't smell like AI slop, promising projects or work experience or educational background, etc. But to actually get the job, you have to be the best of the ones who've applied! It sounds self-evident, maybe, but I see questions time and again about it, so it must not be. Almost every job opening is grading applicants on the curve of everyone who has applied. And the best candidate of the lot gets the job. You can't quantify what that looks like in advance. I'm excited to see who makes it to the final stage. I already hear early whispers that we got some exceptional applicants in this round. It would be great to help counter the narrative that this industry no longer needs juniors. That's simply retarded. However good AI gets, we're always going to need people who know the ins and outs of what the machine comes up with. Maybe not as many, maybe not in the same roles, but it's truly utopian thinking that mankind won't need people capable of vetting the work done by AI in five minutes.
I like the job title “Design Engineer”. When required to label myself, I feel partial to that term (I should, I’ve written about it enough). Lately I’ve felt like the term is becoming more mainstream which, don’t get me wrong, is a good thing. I appreciate the diversification of job titles, especially ones that look to stand in the middle between two binaries. But — and I admit this is a me issue — once a title starts becoming mainstream, I want to use it less and less. I was never totally sure why I felt this way. Shouldn’t I be happy a title I prefer is gaining acceptance and understanding? Do I just want to rebel against being labeled? Why do I feel this way? These were the thoughts simmering in the back of my head when I came across an interview with the comedian Brian Regan where he talks about his own penchant for not wanting to be easily defined: I’ve tried over the years to write away from how people are starting to define me. As soon as I start feeling like people are saying “this is what you do” then I would be like “Alright, I don't want to be just that. I want to be more interesting. I want to have more perspectives.” [For example] I used to crouch around on stage all the time and people would go “Oh, he’s the guy who crouches around back and forth.” And I’m like, “I’ll show them, I will stand erect! Now what are you going to say?” And then they would go “You’re the guy who always feels stupid.” So I started [doing other things]. He continues, wondering aloud whether this aversion to not being easily defined has actually hurt his career in terms of commercial growth: I never wanted to be something you could easily define. I think, in some ways, that it’s held me back. I have a nice following, but I’m not huge. There are people who are huge, who are great, and deserve to be huge. I’ve never had that and sometimes I wonder, ”Well maybe it’s because I purposely don’t want to be a particular thing you can advertise or push.” That struck a chord with me. It puts into words my current feelings towards the job title “Design Engineer” — or any job title for that matter. Seven or so years ago, I would’ve enthusiastically said, “I’m a Design Engineer!” To which many folks would’ve said, “What’s that?” But today I hesitate. If I say “I’m a Design Engineer” there are less follow up questions. Now-a-days that title elicits less questions and more (presumed) certainty. I think I enjoy a title that elicits a “What’s that?” response, which allows me to explain myself in more than two or three words, without being put in a box. But once a title becomes mainstream, once people begin to assume they know what it means, I don’t like it anymore (speaking for myself, personally). As Brian says, I like to be difficult to define. I want to have more perspectives. I like a title that befuddles, that doesn’t provide a presumed sense of certainty about who I am and what I do. And I get it, that runs counter to the very purpose of a job title which is why I don’t think it’s good for your career to have the attitude I do, lol. I think my own career evolution has gone something like what Brian describes: Them: “Oh you’re a Designer? So you make mock-ups in Photoshop and somebody else implements them.” Me: “I’ll show them, I’ll implement them myself! Now what are you gonna do?” Them: “Oh, so you’re a Design Engineer? You design and build user interfaces on the front-end.” Me: “I’ll show them, I’ll write a Node server and setup a database that powers my designs and interactions on the front-end. Now what are they gonna do?” Them: “Oh, well, we I’m not sure we have a term for that yet, maybe Full-stack Design Engineer?” Me: “Oh yeah? I’ll frame up a user problem, interface with stakeholders, explore the solution space with static designs and prototypes, implement a high-fidelity solution, and then be involved in testing, measuring, and refining said solution. What are you gonna call that?” [As you can see, I have some personal issues I need to work through…] As Brian says, I want to be more interesting. I want to have more perspectives. I want to be something that’s not so easily definable, something you can’t sum up in two or three words. I’ve felt this tension my whole career making stuff for the web. I think it has led me to work on smaller teams where boundaries are much more permeable and crossing them is encouraged rather than discouraged. All that said, I get it. I get why titles are useful in certain contexts (corporate hierarchies, recruiting, etc.) where you’re trying to take something as complicated and nuanced as an individual human beings and reduce them to labels that can be categorized in a database. I find myself avoiding those contexts where so much emphasis is placed in the usefulness of those labels. “I’ve never wanted to be something you could easily define” stands at odds with the corporate attitude of, “Here’s the job req. for the role (i.e. cog) we’re looking for.” Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I've been biking in Brooklyn for a few years now! It's hard for me to believe it, but I'm now one of the people other bicyclists ask questions to now. I decided to make a zine that answers the most common of those questions: Bike Brooklyn! is a zine that touches on everything I wish I knew when I started biking in Brooklyn. A lot of this information can be found in other resources, but I wanted to collect it in one place. I hope to update this zine when we get significantly more safe bike infrastructure in Brooklyn and laws change to make streets safer for bicyclists (and everyone) over time, but it's still important to note that each release will reflect a specific snapshot in time of bicycling in Brooklyn. All text and illustrations in the zine are my own. Thank you to Matt Denys, Geoffrey Thomas, Alex Morano, Saskia Haegens, Vishnu Reddy, Ben Turndorf, Thomas Nayem-Huzij, and Ryan Christman for suggestions for content and help with proofreading. This zine is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, so you can copy and distribute this zine for noncommercial purposes in unadapted form as long as you give credit to me. Check out the Bike Brooklyn! zine on the web or download pdfs to read digitally or print here!
