🤖 Joel Kirchartz

Someone** asked me about my advice to devs for "traditional software engineers" who resist change. Being a true tech professional means you keep your toolset sharp, and up-to-date. If you refuse to do so, you are probably not a true professional, but opted to be either a hobbyist or someone who voluntarily retired from the profession, or plans to retire real soon. Both are fine - but don't be surprised if those looking for true professionals pass over you. ** this "someone" was my Japanese Translator for The Software Engineer's Guidebook, to be published by O'Reilly, with some additional content in it, like this one. I really dig their approach!

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The best developers I’ve ever worked with frequently said: “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” They didn’t bluff. They didn’t hide behind jargon. They didn't bs. They were honest. They were curious. They focused on solving the problem They were not focussed on protecting their ego. Your job isn’t to know everything, it's to create business value and you can't do that by bluffing your way through everything. Saying “I don’t know” doesn’t make you look weak. I actually respect it. Pretending you do? That’s what does damage. There isn't much worse in an interview when someone is trying to make up the answer instead of saying: 'I don't know, but if in the job i guarantee id work it out by...'

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Quick tip for anyone building custom Typst templates for use with Quarto: If special characters like $ are causing mysterious compilation errors that standard escaping won't fix, try hexadecimal escape sequences instead. For example: \u{24} for the dollar sign. Wrote up a quick note covering this technique, including how to use Typst's ASCII table tool to find hex codes for any character. Could save you some debugging headaches! https://lnkd.in/eE62SBGb #Typst #Quarto

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** Vibe-coding 101 ** https://lnkd.in/g72w9wik Agentic coding assistants are here, and they're surprisingly capable (for certain tasks). I have some practical tips on how to maximize your vibe-coding productivity. - use Full Vibe Mode, but only for intern-level tasks - Point to Helpful Context - Maintain an Onboarding Doc for your AI - Prompt for Questions - Defensive Code Review - For tasks beyond intern-level, use Chain-of-Vibes

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It’s late, and you start getting alerts that requests to your web server are failing. You try to load a page and it hangs endlessly. The server isn’t responding to anything, and requests are continuing to queue up. What do you do?! My next Ruby concurrency post is "When good threads go bad". A deep dive into all things stuck threads, how to deal with them, and what to avoid. Link in the comments

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Missing form labels, empty buttons, links that go nowhere... Let's stop calling this "accessibility debt." This is just incomplete development. The real issue isn't that accessible code costs more to retrofit. It's that we're calling basic HTML requirements "extra work." A button without text? That's not accessibility debt - that's unfinished code. A form input without a label? That's not technical debt - that's skipping steps. A link that doesn't go anywhere? That's not an edge case - that's broken. These things should be in your Definition of Done already. Not because of WCAG, but because they're fundamental to how HTML works. When we frame basic semantic markup as "accessibility work," we make it sound optional. It's not. It's just good development. Start there. Get the fundamentals right. The rest gets easier once your team stops thinking of working buttons and labeled forms as "nice to have." #WebDevelopment #Accessibility #TechDebt

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Screw vibecoding. You know what LLM coding agents are *really* useful for? Reverse-engineering legacy code! "Hey can you research and explain how the flux capacitor settings are loaded, specifically where are the margadon-level overrides applied exactly?" It's a lifesaver.

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