Hugh Guiney (Software)

🛠 Full-stack Engineer (React/Node) • 🎛 UI/UX Designer • Passionate about 📂 open source, ♿️ accessibility, 🦸 using tech for good. Personal→@LordPancreas

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

I was interviewed for this article! Got quoted a couple times. It’s a small achievement but very validating. Almost as if I’ve become an expert in my field after all these years… 🤯 https://t.co/6jtY7tkkxf

#software #design #ui #uidesign #ux #uxdesign #appdesign #appdevelopment

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Just learned that in #TypeScript, you can use the non-null assertion operator on `null` primitives. Which is hilarious.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Correction: `position: absolute` + inline styles are only present when using the `fill` attribute. But point still stands that adding a bunch of redundant, high-specificity rules to every single image on a website is a pretty gnarly approach to achieving responsive images in 2026

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

#NextJS’s insistence that you HAVE to use their inbuilt `Image` component over an `img` element is so patronizing. As if I couldn’t possibly optimize load times myself. Inelegant, too—who wants a bunch of inline styles and `position: absolute` added to every image by default??

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Copilot’s also less clever when you’re working on something novel, likely because there’s little to no lookalike code in its training set. This is an interesting phenomenon, as a lack of suggestions may imply patentability (or that you are working on something with no market lol)

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Github Copilot: At times useful, e.g. when completing rote tasks (long switch statements, etc.) with a lot of surrounding context for the bot to draw from, but often cumbersome.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

In a recent side-project I asked Copilot to convert a bunch of CommonJS files to ESM, and it succeeded, but it was way too many clicks to add all the files I needed into context, and even then this was orders of magnitude slower than just doing a RegEx-powered find-and-replace.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Don’t know why this isn’t obvious to today’s leaders.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Whoever took over Product at #Quora these past few years should be ashamed of themselves. Took one of the rare web apps still acting as a social good in the modern age. Turned it into Yahoo! Answers 2.0. No descriptions anymore. Ads galore. Responses are to DIFFERENT questions!!!

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Sure, you got a handful more ad impressions by cramming a unit where it doesn’t belong, but at what cost? Does that really sound like building a sustainable enterprise to you? Serve customers’ actual pain or interest points and they will keep coming back to you.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

But it doesn’t look like progress against a deadline, so managers read this as incompetence.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

The cruel irony of standup updates:

When a developer has a quaint update—“everything is going fine”—it either means they aren’t being challenged, or got nothing done the previous day and are covering for it. But because the update is neutral the manager reads this as competence.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

This actually implies productivity; the developer is learning about the inner workings of otherwise intractable systems or the folly of project assumptions made with incomplete knowledge. It is the very process by which senior/lead/staff engineers are forged.

[froem @karstenfroemm]

Replacing man hours is not the equivalent of replacing a sentient fully autonomous entity. You’re equating two totally different things. AI makes engineers more efficient. It improves the quality of output for the 70% engineers and bridges the skill gap. There are clearly diminishing returns and any serious engineer that uses AI every day knows this.

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

I understand why teams use Prettier, but as someone who meticulously formats by hand, I really can’t stand most of its styling decisions. If it were as configurable as ESLint that would be one thing; you could just set the rules to your liking. As-is it feels needlessly obstinate

[Hugh Guiney (Software) @HughxDev]

Software engineers never should have told support people about “clearing cookies and cache”. It’s not a relevant solution to 99% of web app issues, and is really only done as a last resort. Yet customers are now reflexively told to do this before they will be taken seriously.