Ben Johnson

Builder. Engineer. Founder Tero, Founder (acq. by Datadog), Ex @seatgeek

[Ben Johnson @binarylogic]

I built @vectordotdev . Spent a decade in observability. Finally wrote up what I think is broken and the question your vendor won't answer.

https://t.co/328eap227D

[Ben Johnson @binarylogic]

I think this is right. Fast repair is not the same thing as understanding. But the industry is not slowing down. Teams are shipping faster than ever, but the production side has not caught up.

I do think this gets solved. Just not with more dashboards, alerts, and tribal knowledge. Those were already a weak control loop. AI just makes the gap obvious.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Chamath on why organizational charts tend to reward the wrong types of employees

Rings very true from my experience as well. The more layers you have in a company, the more it accelerates the careers of individuals who are good at playing the corporate game

Over time you create a loop where actual technical talent leaves due to lack of career mobility, until you are left with people who sound smart but can accomplish nothing

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

“All the good ideas are taken.”
“If I was born 5 years earlier I’d be rich.”
“I missed the window.”

People said this about dot-com, Web 2.0, social, mobile, cloud… and now AI. There’s always another window. The people who aren't complaining are the ones who are seizing it.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

We need corporate PR speak like this to stop. Execs need to talk to people like people. The dev community is filling in the blanks anyways, whether they're right or wrong. Just own your direction and move forward, don't hide behind corporate cowardice. https://t.co/hFQtJD7ZHH

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The people who just blindly toss AI shit over a wall onto other humans without using their brain for even a nanosecond deserve shaming. We need to start a public wall of shame for the public identities (not doxing) of these people so we can have bots that just block them.

I don't care at all if you do this in your own projects, but when you cross a boundary where another human has to interact with you, its common courtesy to at the very least spend any amount of time at all thinking (the horror).

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I answer about a dozen or so emails every week from students and early stage founders. One of the most common red flags I see are people who want to be a founder for the sake of it and are chasing ideas or guessing. It's so common I have a canned response. Here it is:

(Starting the canned response here)

I’m sorry to say it sounds like you’re searching for an idea. Or, you have a solution in need of a problem. Or, you just like the idea of being a founder (for whatever reason).

This isn’t what you want to hear, but go get a job and work for awhile. If you have a solution that needs market validation, then work in the industry that you think that market exists. Immerse yourself in some industry, it really doesn’t matter what one, because they’re all so filled with problems that need to be solved that you can choose anything.

It only takes one or two years.

Then your problem isn’t going to be wondering “is this a good idea?” “What is a good idea?” Etc. The problem is going to be: which of these 10 obviously good ideas won’t be solved unless I do it, and which do I want to spend the next 10 years of my life working on? That’s the real hard question.

Remember, the key questions a VC is going to ask you and you should ask yourself is: “Why this? Why now? Why you?” You should have full confidence in all of them. The easy part is confidence in all of them. Then the hard part is executing fast enough and hoping the market moves with you with external factors that are mostly out of your control. :)

Don’t search for an idea. Let one come to you. Go get a job.

I’m sorry to tell you that, but it’s the advice I think you need to hear. Like I said, it won’t take long, one or two years or so. But that one or two years of working is going to save you more years of your life most likely wasting your time on the easy part (finding the idea). Plus, you’ll get paid for it.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The AI companies are on track to become GitHub faster than GitHub is becoming an AI company. I'm sure there's a lot of sycophants within GH/MS showing off PowerBI dashboards to argue against this for their own personal gain, but wake the fuck up.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The first step I'd make to "fix" GitHub is organizational: split Copilot and GitHub out into separate entities. Bring in an inspirational CEO from the dev community to lead GitHub. Don't let it report into the nebulous corporate machine. Let the Octocat free.

Copilot is a massive opportunity but deserves its own identity. I'm a big fan of AI and I think Copilot on its own is onto great things, but imo it detracts from a lot of what GH is trying to and able to achieve. And ironically, I think Copilot's deep ties to GitHub are hamstringing its own larger opportunity (despite GH being the largest dev community!).

I'm just an outsider. I have no idea how Microsoft's corporate machine is working today and I'm unfamiliar with the internal politicking. I'm sure there's games on top of games going on, but I also bet you that the social ladder climbers are angling for the "AI" angle and in the process damaging the non-AI angles.

Let the Octocat free.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I just want to log in without being redirected 42 times or logged out every single day. I want to remain logged in on my device for at least months. We have machines that can mimic sentience and yet we can’t do log in for more than 24 hours. We’ve been played for fools.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I think in a moment when GitHub’s reputation amongst developers is at an all time low, making the policy change to charge for self hosted runners in any scenario instead of making other technical changes to make GH runners more attractive will go down as a very bad move.

[merlin @merlinaudio_]

zig is really compelling if only because i'm seeing one super impressive production project after another written in it. and the language hasn't even reached 1.0

bun ghostty tigerbeetle pg_turso mach

[Naval @naval]

Great Engineers are Also Artists.

“I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake, and done well, and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion.

And a lot of engineers are introverts.

As an aside, I hate the term “incel.” It’s just a way of putting introverts down. It’s the new “nerd,” if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I’m more likely to want to interview them. So let’s move away from the slurs.

But introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They’re going to express themselves through their craft. They’re going to create art.

In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they’ve done on the side. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, water bottles. There’s one who’s done incredible music videos, really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products, much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying, “This is going to replace me.” Whereas someone who doesn’t have that identity of an artist and doesn’t feel threatened by it—it’s just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create.

Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They’re capable of anything. It’s just they’ve chosen to be engineers and focused on building things because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful.”

[Naval @naval]

UI is pre-AI.

[David Abram 🐊 @devabram]

By popular demand, I've implemented unwrap() in C, so every codebase can now segfault in production with typesafety.

[Sacha @NBMSacha]

being able to afford datadog is a very big flex

[Brian Cardarella @bcardarella]

I told Claude to one-shot an integration test against a detailed spec I provided. It went silet for about 30 minutes. I asked how it was going twice and it reassured me it was doing work. Then I asked why it was taking so long:

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

One of my favorite lessons I’ve learnt from working with smart people:

Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.

Sounds simple on the surface - the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.

[solst/ICE of Astarte @IceSolst]

BREAKTHROUGH: I have invented a novel object notation format that provides an additional 71% token savings over JSON and 59% over TOON.

I have named it VSC (Values Separated by Comma), patent pending.

[Vic 🌮 @VicVijayakumar]

We used to ask candidates to build a particular stateful API from zero. You show up with your laptop and you’re given an empty folder, and can use the internet however necessary to accomplish it. (this is all pre-AI)

Startup engineers owned it, FAANG devs struggled.

The theory is that big tech engineers rarely if ever have do greenfield development. All your work is sandboxed within a framework that someone has already setup for you. You get routing, build tooling, logs, observability, database connections, CICD, for free, and those muscles either never developed or have atrophied.

The conflicting signal was that the big tech engineers were then considerably better at large systems design than the startup folks, and we had to tweak the whole process to get better signals.