Short thoughts that are cross-posted to X (Twitter), Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Threads.
Your regular reminder that shitting on OSS on social media is a selfish thing to do.
Good job sapping volunteer maintainers’ motivation in exchange for your “internet points”.
Next time: try rolling up your sleeves and contribute a fix to the problem you’ve identified.
I wonder how much of people loving or hating meetings is down to how well they can type or multitask.
“I’m excited to work with you, the company seems great. I’m a little unwhelmed with the salary, though, is there any chance you can do better?”
This sentence gets most who try a 0-10% new job pay increase with zero resentments.
Paraphrase it and use it (even on me).
This was a good read and reflects my experiences. It also made me think the answer to “what do we do with juniors/students and AI” is “actually teach them software engineering best practices, not just CS fundamentals”.
At work, you have two jobs: being good at your job, being pleasant to work with.
You can sometimes get by for a while not doing them both but it’s hard to survive doing neither.
Every time you open an issue or pull request with “No description provided”, an open source maintainer dies.
One of the strengths of Homebrew, despite it being unpopular, is being willing to break backwards compatibility when necessary.
NPM’s unwillingness to do so reflects GitHub’s: both show excessive caution that harm both security and usability.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/03/31/npms-defaults-are-bad.html
My talk “Ruby on Guard (Rails)” from Haggis Ruby 2024 is now on YouTube.
Weird watching in hindsight when I was very much pre-AI.
If anything, AI only makes the guardrails more important and valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgjFrEtMadQ
Job security for engineers is dead.
Career security is what matters.
You build it by learning, changing, taking risks, being reliable and stepping outside your lane.
Your employer won’t prioritise your long-term career.
You should.
This was a good read. Review is good but it does slow things down.
With async PR review, I prefer the “✅ with comments” review. Unblock the person from merging with trust they will read and resolve your comments first.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316