Posts tagged: catalytic

All posts with the tag "catalytic"

30 posts latest post 2026-01-08
Publishing rhythm
Jan 2026 | 1 posts

2026 Resolutions

It’s that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes.

Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM’s do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on.

Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I’ve met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don’t need their hot takes, don’t care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with.

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No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native… | Anton Martyniuk | 270 comments

No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native anyth…

Lean on your skills and your goals. If your goals are to have fun, use whatever you want. If you are looking for a job, Lean on tech that bridges the gap between your resume and the job you want. If you want to build a good product use the tech you are best at. No one in their right mind would throw away 20 years of tech progression because Zuck built facebook ftping php to a server.

The sentiment in this post is fine at best the picture feels triggering and oversimplies way too much. If you like kubernetes just fucking use kubernetes.

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I first met Adam in college, he seemed like quite a character on the outside, but was always quite smart and often leaned towards realistic solutions to problems rather than over complicating things. He was part of the SAE Formula car, well known for taking a simple problem and trying to turn it into a real formula one carbon fiber solution. I remember a period where he was a fan of old world blacksmithing as they would say at the time. He even got a few very simple and light parts on the car that were easy to make unlike the carbon fiber alternatives. By the time I was there he was more of a leader and did not do a lot of design on any whole system, but would take out class projects for a component or help with some hard problems. This company feels like it is a great extension of who he was a that time, with about 15 years of professional experience tacked on.

When you fill all of your time with a bunch of other things, it becomes really hard to become a friendly person. Prime talked about trying to learn how to drop the hurry in his life, and how to not always be in a frenzy of going from one thing to the next. It’s something that puts us in a state that its hard to remember to be friendly. Hard to remember that theres always time for coffee.

I do my best to always leave time for coffee, whether at home with my wife and kids, as well as at work. I am in a very unique place at work where I have a rare set of skills for the industry I am in. This comes with a lot of people insterested in how to do things like running data pipelines or managing server infrastructure. I always take time for these conversations, I find them interesting, and useful. Sometimes you end up with someone who asks the same questions every 6 months, other times, you have someone flourish from these conversations. I’m...

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"Business in the front, party in the back" isn't just some throwback style. It's the whole point.

In ou…

We need more mullets (as sam describes them). Not so serious, but serious when it counts. Ready to back you up, get some shit shipped, roll up their sleeves and do the work, stand up in front of people and pitch ideas. We have too many hustle bros pitching shit they cant do, ai doomers who have been here 10 minutes think they can replace everything they don’t understand with a word calculator, framework Andys afraid to ship till its perfect. Grow a Mullet.

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The message so many of us need to hear, stop scrolling and start creating. I’m not sure that I have a heavy issue with this, I barely scroll the socials anymore, I have my own rss reader curated with people that I enjoy consuming from. YT is often done as a family activity (with my wife) or listening while doing something like dishes. But I think I’ve been on the other side of this for awhile. There’s something that ticks my brain by twiddling with linux nonsensically or pip install thing-i-heard-about-today and try it. I’m not imune though, I often fill gaps in the day with nonsense short content, but try to avoid the short trap.

principal-engineer-at-meta

Jake Bolam principal engineer at Meta, has some of the best career advice for those looking to become principal or just be better at their craft. This video was such a banger I had to bring it in as a full post, and not just a thought. It was a random YouTube auto play, something that I probably wouldn’t have clicked on given title an thumbnail, but turned out to be very impactful. Jake is such a smart guy with a lot of great insights, and I can tell he thinks really quick on his feet, he just pulled all of these things out of his head on the fly.

Jake had a super long period of on boarding at meta, he came in as a seasoned leader yet took many months to get going. This was a phase during or near the end of the COVID-19...

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perfect

Perfect is a made up word that humans use to describe something that is above average, or works really well for them. The idea of perfection is fleeting, as you think more deeply about something, you can continue to chase the idea of perfection to unimaginable senses. Sometimes perfect simply means good enough. Could there be something better, Always, but at what cost. If I spent 10 more minutes on this post would it be better, maybe, but I might fuck it up. If I spent my lifetime studying how humans read and think, sole focused on how it pertains to this post, ya it would get better. When I use this word perfect it’s not meant in the most literal sense of the word, but perfect to me, maybe good enough given the constraints I have, its the best thing I’ve got.

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

I pulled this out into a full post just

just

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

When you say “just,” you’re skipping over all the invisible complexity. You’re assuming the problem is simple, and that the person asking for help hasn’t already considered the obvious.

You’re not seeing the constraints:

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Such a great message right now. I feel like everywhere I turn is negativity, especially social media. It feels like so many things are trying to divide and create hate. “This” is what we should be doing with social media. There are a lot of elements of “there are two ways to have the biggest building in town, tear down all the bigger buildings, or just build the biggest fucking building”, If you want to be successful in X then surround yourself with others successful in X. This is a catalytic skill that everyone needs to have in their belt.

Damn prime makes an interesting point near then end of this video. He’s seen a bunch of people able to just throw down charts and shit at their company and end up being “the coding guy” cause they proompted something once. In a way I can relate, I got into software in a similar way, but at a time that it took a lot more hard work, understanding , and copy past from the right stack overflow. Based on some of the people around me at the time I can only imagine how some people must feel like they got pushed into it without wanting it, and now are building something they don’t know anything about with no care about it or care to build any expertise. Is the future proompted charts from enterprise chatgpt or do we only continue growing more need for software from here.

Don’t stop learning! Stop trying because you have a doomer outlook on ai, llms, industry and think they are taking over. If you have no hope for the future, if you stop now you are cementing in that you will be no good and the ai will be better. Many, maybe most of us in this industry go here by hard work, long nights of learning, trying to solve problems that our job had. If llms take over then the world is going to be a whole lot different, it will be a world you cannot predict or plan for. For now put your head down and succeed in the world we have today.

TEEJ has some great thoughts on this whole sentiment, put this on for you morning walk or whatever you do.

What a great first guest for FAFO. Kelsey is always such a great listen. He talks about killedbygoogle and how engineers get no incentive to work on old projects, google had no incentive, and you got the thing for FREE in the first place. He talks about end of career and having love you money, having so much in the bank you can say no. If you are presented with a project that does not align with your values you can say no.M

Justin even mentions how Google has more killedbygoogle projects than Amazon has total projects.

If we knew how hard it would be, we would never build it.

Autumn’s Fav quote from ep1 of shipit

Theo weighing in on the 2025 job market. It’s no 2018 out there right now, the ratio of jobs to engineers in the market has flipped big time. Theo as usual really focuses on community, being in a community, and being a good citizen. At the end of the video Theo weighs in on his experience hiring, and generally it starts with we need someone to do x does anyone know someone, then goes to a more formal internal post, then more formally asking internally does anyone know someone, then maybe to his community, and if he really still needs the person it might become an external post. These days there are so many good engineers on the market that very few good jobs actually get a posting for in his opinion.

blogging in 2024

Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert on Shop Talk show, and it made sense. LLMs and AI is slowly killing the internet as we know it.

I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results nearly one year apart. Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago. I’m getting less impressions and even less clicks.

May 2023

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My Reader Project

In 2024 I built my own reader after years of being bitter about google killing reader more than a decade prior.

I built it on top of my own static site generator markata, feedparser (🐍 Parsing RSS feeds with Python), some jinja templating, and tailwind.

After putting all the work I have into markata, it makes projects like this fairly...