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What if we, the consumers, took control of our data completely… what if we all make a stand that forced big tech (and others eventually) to come to us for our data instead of just handing it to them on a plate? If we could do that, then we’d stand to benefit the most from it, stepping up with our biggest bargaining chip in hand, instead of sacrificing our place at the table for free. I would love to see companies paying me for my data directly, instead of paying Facebook or Google. I know there are many parts to this and it would take a while to work as it’s quite idealistic, but it starts by making a stand.
over a year ago

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More from Sometimes It Works :: simonhamp.me

On AI doomerism

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!

2 months ago 4 votes
2024: Just the Start

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

3 months ago 4 votes
Slow Tech is Good Tech

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!

10 months ago 3 votes
Simon Shares

I've started a little podcast! If you give it a listen, I'd love to know what you think.

11 months ago 3 votes
Why You (Probably) Shouldn't Start With an SPA

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

a year ago 2 votes

More in programming

The blissful zen of a good side project

One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.

18 hours ago 1 votes
How to resource Engineering-driven projects at Calm? (2020)

One of the recurring challenges in any organization is how to split your attention across long-term and short-term problems. Your software might be struggling to scale with ramping user load while also knowing that you have a series of meaningful security vulnerabilities that need to be closed sooner than later. How do you balance across them? These sorts of balance questions occur at every level of an organization. A particularly frequent format is the debate between Product and Engineering about how much time goes towards developing new functionality versus improving what’s already been implemented. In 2020, Calm was growing rapidly as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, and the team was struggling to make improvements, as they felt saturated by incoming new requests. This strategy for resourcing Engineering-driven projects was our attempt to solve that problem. 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 resourcing Engineering-driven projects are: We will protect one Eng-driven project per product engineering team, per quarter. These projects should represent a maximum of 20% of the team’s bandwidth. Each project must advance a measurable metric, and execution must be designed to show progress on that metric within 4 weeks. These projects must adhere to Calm’s existing Engineering strategies. We resource these projects first in the team’s planning, rather than last. However, only concrete projects are resourced. If there’s no concrete proposal, then the team won’t have time budgeted for Engineering-driven work. Team’s engineering manager is responsible for deciding on the project, ensuring the project is valuable, and pushing back on attempts to defund the project. Project selection does not require CTO approval, but you should escalate to the CTO if there’s friction or disagreement. CTO will review Engineering-driven projects each quarter to summarize their impact and provide feedback to teams’ engineering managers on project selection and execution. They will also review teams that did not perform a project to understand why not. As we’ve communicated this strategy, we’ve frequently gotten conceptual alignment that this sounds reasonable, coupled with uncertainty about what sort of projects should actually be selected. At some level, this ambiguity is an acknowledgment that we believe teams will identify the best opportunities bottoms-up, we also wanted to give two concrete examples of projects we’re greenlighting in the first batch: Code-free media release: historically, we’ve needed to make a number of pull requests to add, organize, and release new pieces of media. This is high urgency work, but Engineering doesn’t exercise much judgment while doing it, and manual steps often create errors. We aim to track and eliminate these pull requests, while also increasing the number of releases that can be facilitated without scaling the content release team. Machine-learning content placement: developing new pieces of media is often a multi-week or month process. After content is ready to release, there’s generally a debate on where to place the content. This matters for the company, as this drives engagement with our users, but it matters even more to the content creator, who is generally evaluated in terms of their content’s performance. This often leads to Product and Engineering getting caught up in debates about how to surface particular pieces of content. This project aims to improve user engagement by surfacing the best content for their interests, while also giving the Content team several explicit positions to highlight content without Product and Engineering involvement. Although these projects are similar, it’s not intended that all Engineering-driven projects are of this variety. Instead it’s happenstance based on what the teams view as their biggest opportunities today. Diagnosis Our assessment of the current situation at Calm is: We are spending a high percentage of our time on urgent but low engineering value tasks. Most significantly, about one-third of our time is going into launching, debugging, and changing content that we release into our product. Engineering is involved due to limitations in our implementation, not because there is any inherent value in Engineering’s involvement. (We mostly just make releases slowly and inadvertently introduce bugs of our own.) We have a bunch of fairly clear ideas around improving the platform to empower the Content team to speed up releases, and to eliminate the Engineering involvement. However, we’ve struggled to find time to implement them, or to validate that these ideas will work. If we don’t find a way to prioritize, and succeed at implementing, a project to reduce Engineering involvement in Content releases, we will struggle to support our goals to release more content and to develop more product functionality this year Our Infrastructure team has been able to plan and make these kinds of investments stick. However, when we attempt these projects within our Product Engineering teams, things don’t go that well. We are good at getting them onto the initial roadmap, but then they get deprioritized due to pressure to complete other projects. Engineering team is not very fungible due to its small size (20 engineers), and because we have many specializations within the team: iOS, Android, Backend, Frontend, Infrastructure, and QA. We would like to staff these kinds of projects onto the Infrastructure team, but in practice that team does not have the product development experience to implement theis kind of project. We’ve discussed spinning up a Platform team, or moving product engineers onto Infrastructure, but that would either (1) break our goal to maintain joint pairs between Product Managers and Engineering Managers, or (2) be indistinguishable from prioritizing within the existing team because it would still have the same Product Manager and Engineering Manager pair. Company planning is organic, occurring in many discussions and limited structured process. If we make a decision to invest in one project, it’s easy for that project to get deprioritized in a side discussion missing context on why the project is important. These reprioritization discussions happen both in executive forums and in team-specific forums. There’s imperfect awareness across these two sorts of forums. Explore Prioritization is a deep topic with a wide variety of popular solutions. For example, many software companies rely on “RICE” scoring, calculating priority as (Reach times Impact times Confidence) divided by Effort. At the other extreme are complex methodologies like [Scaled Agile Framework)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_agile_framework). In addition to generalized planning solutions, many companies carve out special mechanisms to solve for particular prioritization gaps. Google historically offered 20% time to allow individuals to work on experimental projects that didn’t align directly with top-down priorities. Stripe’s Foundation Engineering organization developed the concept of Foundational Initiatives to prioritize cross-pillar projects with long-term implications, which otherwise struggled to get prioritized within the team-led planning process. All these methods have clear examples of succeeding, and equally clear examples of struggling. Where these initiatives have succeeded, they had an engaged executive sponsoring the practice’s rollout, including triaging escalations when the rollout inconvenienced supporters of the prior method. Where they lacked a sponsor, or were misaligned with the company’s culture, these methods have consistently failed despite the fact that they’ve previously succeeded elsewhere.

yesterday 5 votes
Personal tools

I used to make little applications just for myself. Sixteen years ago (oof) I wrote a habit tracking application, and a keylogger that let me keep track of when I was using a computer, and generate some pretty charts. I’ve taken a long break from those kinds of things. I love my hobbies, but they’ve drifted toward the non-technical, and the idea of keeping a server online for a fun project is unappealing (which is something that I hope Val Town, where I work, fixes). Some folks maintain whole ‘homelab’ setups and run Kubernetes in their basement. Not me, at least for now. But I have been tiptoeing back into some little custom tools that only I use, with a focus on just my own computing experience. Here’s a quick tour. Hammerspoon Hammerspoon is an extremely powerful scripting tool for macOS that lets you write custom keyboard shortcuts, UIs, and more with the very friendly little language Lua. Right now my Hammerspoon configuration is very simple, but I think I’ll use it for a lot more as time progresses. Here it is: hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "shift"}, "return", function() local frontmost = hs.application.frontmostApplication() if frontmost:name() == "Ghostty" then frontmost:hide() else hs.application.launchOrFocus("Ghostty") end end) Not much! But I recently switched to Ghostty as my terminal, and I heavily relied on iTerm2’s global show/hide shortcut. Ghostty doesn’t have an equivalent, and Mikael Henriksson suggested a script like this in GitHub discussions, so I ran with it. Hammerspoon can do practically anything, so it’ll probably be useful for other stuff too. SwiftBar I review a lot of PRs these days. I wanted an easy way to see how many were in my review queue and go to them quickly. So, this script runs with SwiftBar, which is a flexible way to put any script’s output into your menu bar. It uses the GitHub CLI to list the issues, and jq to massage that output into a friendly list of issues, which I can click on to go directly to the issue on GitHub. #!/bin/bash # <xbar.title>GitHub PR Reviews</xbar.title> # <xbar.version>v0.0</xbar.version> # <xbar.author>Tom MacWright</xbar.author> # <xbar.author.github>tmcw</xbar.author.github> # <xbar.desc>Displays PRs that you need to review</xbar.desc> # <xbar.image></xbar.image> # <xbar.dependencies>Bash GNU AWK</xbar.dependencies> # <xbar.abouturl></xbar.abouturl> DATA=$(gh search prs --state=open -R val-town/val.town --review-requested=@me --json url,title,number,author) echo "$(echo "$DATA" | jq 'length') PR" echo '---' echo "$DATA" | jq -c '.[]' | while IFS= read -r pr; do TITLE=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.title') AUTHOR=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.author.login') URL=$(echo "$pr" | jq -r '.url') echo "$TITLE ($AUTHOR) | href=$URL" done Tampermonkey Tampermonkey is essentially a twist on Greasemonkey: both let you run your own JavaScript on anybody’s webpage. Sidenote: Greasemonkey was created by Aaron Boodman, who went on to write Replicache, which I used in Placemark, and is now working on Zero, the successor to Replicache. Anyway, I have a few fancy credit cards which have ‘offers’ which only work if you ‘activate’ them. This is an annoying dark pattern! And there’s a solution to it - CardPointers - but I neither spend enough nor care enough about points hacking to justify the cost. Plus, I’d like to know what code is running on my bank website. So, Tampermonkey to the rescue! I wrote userscripts for Chase, American Express, and Citi. You can check them out on this Gist but I strongly recommend to read through all the code because of the afore-mentioned risks around running untrusted code on your bank account’s website! Obsidian Freeform This is a plugin for Obsidian, the notetaking tool that I use every day. Freeform is pretty cool, if I can say so myself (I wrote it), but could be much better. The development experience is lackluster because you can’t preview output at the same time as writing code: you have to toggle between the two states. I’ll fix that eventually, or perhaps Obsidian will add new API that makes it all work. I use Freeform for a lot of private health & financial data, almost always with an Observable Plot visualization as an eventual output. For example, when I was switching banks and one of the considerations was mortgage discounts in case I ever buy a house (ha 😢), it was fun to chart out the % discounts versus the required AUM. It’s been really nice to have this kind of visualization as ‘just another document’ in my notetaking app. Doesn’t need another server, and Obsidian is pretty secure and private.

yesterday 4 votes
All conference talks should start with a small technical glitch that the speaker can easily solve

At a conference a while back, I noticed a couple of speakers get such a confidence boost after solving a small technical glitch. We should probably make that a part of every talk. Have the mic not connect automatically, or an almost-complete puzzle on the stage that the speaker can finish, or have someone forget their badge and the speaker return it to them. Maybe the next time I, or a consenting teammate, have to give a presentation I’ll try to engineer such a situation. All conference talks should start with a small technical glitch that the speaker can easily solve was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 03, 2025.

2 days ago 3 votes
Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine!

A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good.  And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well.  So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

2 days ago 6 votes