I see a lot of people complaining that ChatGPT ruined em dashes for them, but I have taken a different approach.

I got asked a simple question: “What advice would you give a high schooler who wants to work in tech?” I wasn’t planning to write anything this week. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. www.clientserver.dev/p/a-staff-en...

OK, this is a pretty solid take on LLMs.

A few people have asked, “how do you have time to write a newsletter?” This post has my full playbook. What is my audience? How do I pick stories? Why is writing an outline so important? What do I do after a post is published? What would I do if I had more time? www.clientserver.dev/p/you-have-t...

My latest newsletter is trending on Hacker News! It's a story from 2011 about how Larry Page tried enacting strict rules and conventions around meetings, in an attempt to get Google to stop slowing down. www.clientserver.dev/p/malicious-...

This week, I wrote about something that I found interesting in the Linux world: Ubuntu is actually replacing their implementation of sudo with a version written in Rust. www.clientserver.dev/p/ubuntu-is-...

How did Spotify ship a release 24 hours after a judge ordered Apple to loosen its restrictions on alternative payment methods within the app store? www.clientserver.dev/p/how-did-sp...

Me: “Sorry, I curse a lot.” Them: “I’m from New Jersey.” Me: “Thank fuck.”

When I had only been working in the software industry for a couple of years, I worked on an augmented reality training simulator for DARPA that required an incredible number of fixes. www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-...

Thanks! What I learned: 1. This group doesn't like writing that takes time to get to the point. Start with a tl;dr that summarizes upfront (this was not a surprise tbh: saw it eg inside Uber!)

Bazel recently had the 10-year anniversary of its announcement. I’ve used Bazel a lot, both personally and professionally. I also used Blaze when I was at Google, and it was magical. www.clientserver.dev/p/bazel-is-t...

Shopify recently announced that they expect their employees to use AI as part of their day-to-day work. They’re serious about it: they’re going to even include it in their peer feedback cycle, and it is now mandatory to use AI in the prototyping phase of projects.

Several CEOs have declared “you shouldn’t learn to code” in several different ways. These proclamations range in severity from “coding and all related activities will be done by AI systems” to “you should not learn to code now.” www.clientserver.dev/p/you-should...

I need to update my handle to @clientserver.dev. I keep forgetting to do the DNS record changes because I don't use Bluesky a ton.

In case you just want to bury yourself in engineering blogs today...here are Piotr's latest picks for writethat.blog - Choosing languages- @steveklabnik.com - Why Fastdoom is fast- @fabinou.bsky.social - War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged- @bitlog.com ...

I may be tired and a little hoarse, but as I said again and again on the Senate floor, this is a moment where we cannot afford to be silent, when we must speak up.

I just hit a milestone with my newsletter this week: 100 free subscribers to my newsletter. It's Client/Server, at www.clientserver.dev

I'll believe these people when they stop having open engineering positions on their careers page jobs.ashbyhq.com/replit

I built a Playstacean!

We have a big problem today: people cheat on their coding interviews using LLMs, and LLMs do a better job every year of answering bog standard interview questions. People really do this. This is happening today. www.clientserver.dev/p/allow-cand...

In this post, I look at the recent "kill switch" developer and rate his sabotage methods. How good were they? How likely was he to get caught? Were the methods themselves interesting? How well did he implement them?

Haskell is a language that has the elegance of typing with your elbows while listening to math rock

I wrote a post about the recent Citigroup extreme overpayments. In one situation, they credited their customer's account with trillions of dollars. In another, billions. I wrote a post about this from the lens of "human factors" research - www.clientserver.dev/p/citigroup-...

Oddly, the DST transition has been easier with a toddler than without. Our toddler tends to wake up early anyway. Her "early wakeup" was exactly at 7am today. Surprise, you thought you were ruining our day but now you're prepared for the daycare nap schedule tomorrow.

If I were the Democrats, I would simply make a public spectacle over holding town halls in the Republican districts that refuse to hold them.

www.clientserver.dev/p/is-c-backw... This week I got nerd sniped by C++ of all things! I noticed that a lot of people complain about C++'s backwards compatibility (even though they remove features with every release), and ended up doing a deep dive exploring how C++ has been responding to Rust

I know it's pointless to say this, but the Beneficial Ownership reporting is really simple to do. The only way it's an "absolute disaster" or "economic menace" is if you are fully aware that writing down your owners will produce criminal liability.

I wrote about all of Meta's recent layoffs and compensation changes - 5% of their workforce laid off - Max bonuses for executives raised from 75% to 200% of base salary - Trimming RSU refreshers by 10%

I think that LLM-powered coding is going to become increasingly important over time. But I could never reconcile the difference between all of the "I generated an entire app in a day" buzz with my own difficulty of using anything beyond tab completion. www.clientserver.dev/p/how-i-fixe...

Something I forgot that I missed from Trump’s first term are all of these courtroom exchanges. Otherwise-professional legal representation needing to defend incoherent nonsense and the judge having absolutely none of it.

This is just common sense? When I worked at a research lab, there were 2 or 3 people who would get auto-added as authors to every paper that built on their work, even though they hadn't done research in 5-10 years. They were too busy drumming up contracts. This wasn't even that egregious.

your outie likes engaging with create react app discourse despite not having touched it in several years

Your outie sometimes takes a longer route home, just to savor the trip.

I think my favorite part about UX interviews is how you can watch people struggle, like really painfully struggle to do something, and they'll come back like, "That was so easy! 😍" Sir, I just watched you fight for your life to accomplish the task. 😂 You cannot fool me.

‘You Can’t Let This Happen,’ Says Fundraising Email From Sitting U.S. Congressperson

In my high school, you had to wear your lanyard with your ID or you got an immediate 2-hour detention. This was the most severe detention they gave out. Only 2-3 teachers enforced it so a lot of people went without them. I got detention 5 times for that, zero times for any other reason.

The Cursor chat pane is definitely the final boss of AI coding tools for me. Copilot? Love it. Cursor tab completion? Great! Cursor inline prompting? Super useful. But despite prompt engineering and carefully picking the right context files, the chat pane loses time compared to doing it myself.

Can I use this to get them to stop harassing me for donations?

In this issue, I discuss contention in the Linux project over Rust for Linux. A long-time maintainer is trying to block a critical pull request from entering the kernel. www.clientserver.dev/p/rust-in-li...

www.clientserver.dev/p/deepseek-s... What can we learn about DeepSeek from how companies and the federal government reacted to it?

www.clientserver.dev/p/write-bett... I wrote about how removing the word "we" from your code comments will make them clearer and easier to read.

The right thing to do: "I have launched my A/B test and I will not peek at the results because I am a good engineer." What I do: "@datascientists the experiment has been up for 1 hour, can you please launch the experiment dashboard so I can peek?"

Jim Acosta announces on air that he's leaving CNN and says, "it is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant ... don't give in to the lies."

In today's newsletter, I go over a lawsuit that was just filed against LinkedIn. They are accused of violating their Premium contracts by sending private data to third parties for training, and then trying... www.clientserver.dev/p/linkedin-g...

For my few pet questions, DeepSeek is extremely impressive. If you give it an ambiguous coding challenge it gets EXTREMELY wordy, but the final code is actually pretty good. Tomorrow I'm going to experiment with its search mode.

Update on my create-react-app newsletter post: @acemarke.dev had this on their radar for a while, and the reminder encouraged them to start discussions with the relevant developers and file a bug to officially deprecate the zombie application. Thank you Mark, this is clearly a big issue!

Just saw an article pointing out the same "Create React App is broken" issues I've been highlighting, and also noting it's actually worse - the CRA docs make no mention that it's outdated: www.clientserver.dev/p/create-rea... This is pretty frustrating to watch :(

www.clientserver.dev/p/create-rea... Today I talk about create-react-app, and how it has become a zombie application. If you search for "create a react app" or similar queries, you will see tons of search results that guide you through using create-react-app...

Quote from my latest newsletter: "Imagine that you are looking for a software engineering job in 2025, and you want your job to bring you stability. You have children and a mortgage. You’d like to retire on a reasonable timeframe. So you’d like a job that will last a while."