“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier. Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor. What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked. A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with. So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else? People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons. So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm. [The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]

High intelligence Low agency = High misery

The industry has gone completely nuts. Use tokens to generate AI code and documentation slop. Then use even more tokens to understand and review that slop. Then judge engineers by token usage instead of how empathetic and clear their docs and code actually are, and completely neglect human comprehension. Utter nonsense.

Every man that tries to figure out the world entirely on his own ends up building a small, stupid god to replace the one he rejected. it never fails. he drops God, picks up science or stoicism or some guy on the internet who read enough books to pass for a prophet, and within six months he's talking about cold showers and circadian rhythms with the same exact tone a priest uses on sunday. the need to worship doesn't go anywhere just because you decided you're too smart for it. it just finds smaller things to attach to, and smaller gods make smaller people. nobody quits God. they trade down.

It’s refreshing to see a company of this size successfully call bs on the whole thing to this extent. One group of MTS on a mission, clean.

if after the bun rust rewrite and 1M code merge in a few days you still think that software engineering hasn’t changed massively idk what to tell you

end-to-end testing > unit tests, in the vibecoding era. A massive, almost entirely agent-coded refactor passed all unit and pre-merge tests but broke a critical feature. It was only caught due to my own excessive paranoia making me run end-to-end tests before the prod deploy.

Truly intelligent people can describe complex ideas in a way that a layman can understand. Being verbose is intentional obfuscation to maintain their little "elite" circle.

If someone is waiting on you for a code review, that has to be your P0 task. Look, waiting on a code review is one of the most frustrating things because the person is literally blocked on you. It gets even worse when there is a time zone difference to deal with. I get it. You do not have malicious intent and are genuinely busy with something important. But still, I would say it is a prioritization problem. Most people treat code review as something they get to when they have a quiet moment, and that quiet moment rarely comes. Coming from my personal pain point, I would say treat code review as a high-priority task, not a background one. If your teammate has raised a PR and you are the reviewer, that is important work in progress sitting idle. Every hour it waits is an hour of 'blocked momentum' (yeah, fancy term). Also, it is okay to preempt your non-urgent work for it. This matters even more across time zones because a delayed review does not cost an hour; it costs an entire working day for the other person (ohhh, this used to be such a pain). So the next time you see a PR sitting there, wrap up the review, because it is not "someone else's work"; it is yours. Hope this helps.

yet I continue to remain bullish on React.

i'm done with nextjs. rsc looks good on paper but in practice turns simple apps into distributed systems nobody asked for. you stop thinking in react and start thinking in server/client boundaries and caching rules. it adds abstraction instead of clarity

we don't have to live this way. senior engineers have the duty of building guardrails and teaching the next generation of programmers the practices that lead to high quality software. AIs may write most of the code, but you still decide what ships. we should never lose our taste for quality software. i made this analogy a while back: everyone can cook at home but yet restaurants still exist. the floor is rising, but so is the ceiling. the best software will always be made by those who care.

Deeply experienced software devs eventually realize the hard thing that takes tremendous talent, experience, and taste is writing the fewest LOC possible. Low LOC has significant benefits across every metric that matters. Entropy management is the whole game.

first time doing a greenfield Frontend project (simple) with Cursor and holy shit, any companies that has a decent Design System can improve FE dev efficiency easily by 50-60% holy shit.