TOM

@subtlegradient

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@subtlegradient

building /frens this week I moved atoms are heavy 😰

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building /frens "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - some guy on Twitter claiming to be quoting Abe Lincoln I’ve been doing a lot of axe sharpening lately. That tree is freaking doomed bro

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@subtlegradient

crazy how much modern react code looks like the quick and dirty one file prototypes I used to make back in 2006 I miss `with` 🥺

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I guess the classic example is ui component separation back in the 2000’s. Having the HTML/CSS/JS for a single component living in separate files in separate folders and sometimes entirely separate repos. It was a nightmare. But we as an industry just didn’t know any better I did always colocate tightly coupled stuff in my quick and dirty prototypes back then, but always dutifully separated them before landing

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Personally, I code by gut instinct aka “intuition” aka “Feelings”. But if I were to train an ai to objectively measure it, I would look for files consistently mutated simultaneously. If you need to change two files to make one change, maybe they should be in the same file. But smart people have better objective evaluations. I’d probably consult the experts before building my own thing

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building /frens with ai fixed a tricky regex bug by finding the errant code, describing the problem precisely to o1-mini and asking it to precisely explain the underlying design flaw in the code that makes this bug possible It first helped me understand the precise problem, skipping stateful regex cleanup edge case. Then it proposed a solution and explained why it would solve the problem. Tests passed. Shipped the fix to production. Server rendered ui so no need for an app update 😎👍 Easily would have been 4 days of work back in 2014. Now it’s 20 minutes from laptop open to solution verified in production We are living in the sci-fi future

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@subtlegradient

threading the needle between control freaking and a chaos freaking

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Thabks. Feels good that people care 🫡

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“Separation of concerns” is bad and wrong. Better: “avoid unintended coupling” Often many separate concerns are highly coupled and we should expose that reality explicitly so that it’s easier to reason about

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I remember that being a hot topic 15 years ago. I haven’t really heard much about it lately 🤷‍♂️

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not building /frens today rebuilding mental health after a very serious near miss everybody is alive situation is improving but, being human, sometimes ya gotta mourn the loss that didn’t actually come brains are weird

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published @double-observer/react-client to npm It’s react-client from the react repo with minor tweaks to support React 18 & React 19 + exhaustive TS types

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building /frens server rendered subscription reactivity Now the server can push surgical sub-tree view mutations in response to realtime events the big difference is the inversion of control. Now the server shall be the boss, pushing arbitrary native ui changes to the client

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building /frens back in 2012, FB negotiated with Apple to let us ship app updates weekly. in 2015, React Native opened the door to push over-the-air updates daily. as of 20 minutes ago, the Frens team can push some native UI updates in a few minutes (with zero restarts!). still too slow

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building /frens can’t talk about it yet. past me from 7 months ago did some very careful engineering. This week I was able to ship more stuff with the same core Get the basics right and there’s an order of magnitude less work to do and less stuff that can go wrong

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building /frens getting some totally random layout bugs on The New Architecture 😰 Going to have to pause it and focus on real product development for a bit. I’ll try The New Architecture again after 77 lands 🥺

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building /frens the best diffs are red

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only my best /frens know

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building /frens Shipped too many thnings to count deleted all our old unused code upgrade to expo 52 landed, launches next week fixed something with invites some chart stuff too I think

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Actual “ENFJ Jumper” LARPing as an INTP

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