Jerod again! š
Weāre making a quick trip to SF next week to partake in Sync Conf āa boutique conference on the future of real-time, collaborative, and agentic software dev organized by Johannes Schickling (Prisma), Adam Wiggins (Heroku), Emma Tracey (Cult.Repo), and more.
If youāre going, letās sync up! If not, stay tuned for the best convos from the hallway track. āļø
Ok, letās get into this weekās news.
Adam Jacob joins us to discuss how agentic systems for building and managing infrastructure have fundamentally altered how he thinks about everything, including the last six years of his life. He opines on the recent AWS outage, debates whether weāre in an AI-induced bubble, quells any concerns of AGI and a robot uprising, eats some humble pie, and more. š„ VIDEO HERE š
Ahmad Alfy found an old comment in his code that contained a powerful link:
I clicked the URL, and it was the PrismJS download page with every checkbox, dropdown, and option pre-selected to match my exact configuration. Themes chosen. Languages selected. Plugins enabled. Everything, perfectly reconstructed from that single URLā¦
Here was a URL doing far more than just pointing to a page. It was storing state, encoding intent, and making my entire setup shareable and recoverable. No database. No cookies. No localStorage. Just a URL.
URLs can do so much, but we donāt always use them to their full potential. In this article, Ahmad explains how URLs are even more than UI. Theyāre state containers. They have their limitations, yes, but Pareto tells me weāre not benefiting from the virtues of the URL nearly enough. Ahmad agrees:
Weāve built increasingly sophisticated state management libraries like Redux, MobX, Zustand, Recoil and others. They all have their place but sometimes the best solution is the one thatās been there all along.
The more I use Claude Code (CC), the more I want to use CC. Thatās a strong indicator of good product design. The challenge I have is the surface area of the product feels overwhelming. Not that Iām āholding it wrongā necessarily, but that I could be holding it better.
But if Iām being honest, (which I actually always try to be so I donāt know why I feel compelled to prefix the following (or any statement) with that phraseā¦ but here we are) I donāt know how much of CCās feature set is worth investing in. Are slash commands here to stay? Are subagents even worth it? Will I switch to Amp or Codex or Gemini CLI next week and make any CC specific learnings moot?
With those questions in mind, I love posts like this one from Shrivu Shankar. A brain dump of all the ways heās been using CC for me to cherry pick from. Letās do more like this!
Iām not sure the software industryās interview process was functional prior to October 2022, but as Yusuf Aytas laments in this post, itās certainly busted now:
Everyone now has access to perfect code, perfect explanations, perfect system design diagrams, and even perfect behavioural answers. You donāt need a network. You donāt need experience. You just need a second monitor. Lying. You donāt even need that. Check this out.
The āthisā that he referenced, for those who didnāt click, is an Interview Coder service thatās been recently āupgraded with audio support and 20+ cutting-edge undetectability features to keep you invisible across every interview check.ā
Tiger Data just launched Agentic Postgres, the first database built from the ground up for AI agents.
Weāve seen Postgres extended in every direction ā time series, vector, graph ā but this is the next evolution. Traditional databases wait for humans to query them. Agentic Postgres is designed for autonomous agents that read, write, and reason about data on their own.
Itās Postgres reimagined for the agent era ā with built-in memory, context management, and safety controls so agents can collaborate without stepping on each otherās data.
If youāve been wondering what the ādatabase for agentsā looks like, Tiger Data has just answered that question.
During his internship at TikTok, Wu Xiaoyun ported a core payment service from Go to Rust:
We faced a classic engineering dilemma: how do you squeeze more performance out of a critical system without compromising stability or breaking the bank? This is the story of how I tackled that challenge by selectively rewriting a performance bottleneck in Rust, resulting in a 2x performance gain1 and nearly $300,000 in projected annual savings in cloud costs.
One of our industryās principles is āpremature optimization is the root of all evil.ā But itās important to note how much heavy lifting the word āprematureā is doing in that axiom. Well-timed optimization can yield huge wins like the one Wu and his colleagues deployed. Oh, and if you think this experience soured Wu on Goā¦
Paradoxically, this project gave me an even deeper appreciation for Golang. Goās incredible developer productivity and well-rounded performance make it the ideal choice for 95% of our services.
TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) is a ācompact, human-readable serialization format designed for passing structured data to Large Language Models with significantly reduced token usage.ā
The idea here is to still use JSON programmatically, but convert to TOON for LLM input. Why? Because LLM tokens still cost money. And anything that costs developers money will be optimized as much as we can muster.
Itās a FRIGHTā¦when your record a podcast with dead projects all around. Tech debt, poor choices, timing, market shift, and optimizing for the wrong things are all lurking around waiting to pop out at you!
Just donāt forget to push record. š„ VIDEO HERE š
I love the concept behind this WordPress plugin produced by Internet Archive in collaboration with Automattic:
When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version. It also works proactively by archiving your own posts every time theyāre updated, creating a consistent backup of your contentās history.
Every publishing platform should have one of these. I just might have Claude Code build one for our show notesā¦
Cedric Chin:
The more good businesspeople I work with, the more I realise that the really effective folks are nearly always able to cut a business situation down into a single thing that matters.
Very rarely are there two things that matter. Usually itās just the one.
Since ātaste is kingā seems to be the motto heading into the next era of the digital ageā¦ itād be good idea to learn how to develop some.
Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you donāt like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.
And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyoneās taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
- A11y.css
- bash screensavĀers
- Side project advice
- Taking money off the table
- Free software scares normal people
- mock is an API creation / testing utility
- A heatmap diff viewer for code reviews
- Automerge is version control for your data
- Two years after our AWS-to-bare-metal migration
- More than DNS: the 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage
- Internet Archiveās legal fights are over. What was lost?
Thatās the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week! Andrew Nesbitt tells us all about Ecosyste.ms on Wednesday. And on Friday, past #define winners battle to determine the champion of championsā¦
Have yourself a great week,
in the multitude of counselors is safety,
and Iāll talk to you again real soon. š
āJerod