Ben Church

I help organizations get the most out of their data⚡

Current: @airbytehq

Prev: Eng @metalab CTO @gofetchca
Sold:

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

I don’t care if you can invert a binary tree.

I care if you have readable code and empathy.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@strikerglows @chrislevan24 https://t.co/V4Y2CS9AAc

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Happy to break it down

If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants

Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.

~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta

Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).

and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California

Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.

(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)

To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.

Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.

Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.

But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@lauren8love @chrislevan24 1. https://t.co/V4Y2CS9AAc

2. Speaking from experience 😉

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Happy to break it down

If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants

Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.

~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta

Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).

and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California

Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.

(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)

To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.

Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.

Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.

But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@kofialam @chrislevan24 Never said Toronto wasn’t garbage. Not sure why most of yall are living there.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@BoJackCapital @rptavakol @chrislevan24 The calculus isn’t too different for BC. And let’s not forget Banff is in Alberta if you want.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Happy to break it down

If you have an income of $200k USD and no dependants

Your take home pay in Alberta vs California is basically the same.

~US$131,972 in California
~US$130,976 in Alberta

Shockingly, sales tax in Alberta (5%) is 2.25% less than California (7.25%).

and the effective capital gain tax on say $1MM is 23.9% in Alberta vs 31.4% in California

Then you have our healthcare and schools being much cheaper in Canada.

(For example my wife needed double hip surgery in 2019, we were quoted near $500k in LA for each hip, when it was free back home)

To be fair California has much better tax treatment for dependants, and can become more attractive as your family grows.

Though I would again point back to cheaper healthcare and schools for that scenario.

Anyway. These are my own reasons for never accepting an onsite role in California.

But if I was offered one in Texas, then I may re-consider.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Canadians just need to learn to negotiate better.

If a remote us company is looking for engineering talent, then their geographic pay bands are negotiable and in most cases removable.

For example if they just spent $500k sourcing 1000 potential candidates from across the US/Canada, and youre the 1 to receive the offer. Then they have the budget and incentive to pay you a US salary.

Speaking from plenty of experience.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

BMO is absolutely terrible. My biggest business regret in the last 6 years.

I finally transferred everything to @venncanada and a local credit union (for cashing cheques).

Been exponentially happier since.

But @Wealthsimple just added business chequing (with cheque cashing) and credit cards. Looking at it now. Likely will move over since they offer corp investing on top.

[Daniel Lopes @danielvlopes]

Super excited to be speaking at Replay 2026, @temporalio conference.

I'll be talking about our experience extracting Output[.]ai — our open source framework that helps developers new to AI ship reliable, scalable agents.

#Replay2026 #TemporalIO #DurableExecution

[Daniel Lopes @danielvlopes]

the "agent harness" is the reason we built https://t.co/DLreTw8sP8 enabling teams to build workflows to production together with code agents. filesystem-first memory, reusable skills, swap any model, no saas fragmentation. everything easy to access to you and your agent.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@YaroST12 @FFmpeg @xiaonweb @AnthropicAI Someone in the room is for sure a moron...

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@wesbos @syntaxfm Here you go Wes.

https://t.co/v0zhnvK8ee

An OSS Javascript Framework for building durable LLM workflows and Agents.

Roast it.

[Daniel Lopes @danielvlopes]

After over a year of work we're open-sourcing our AI infra:

It's called Output [dot] ai.

- How do you work with proj. packed with prompts?
- How do you track cost?
- How do you test non-deterministic code?
- How do you create datasets from prod data?

👇

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@awilkinson We can use the excess heat to power our espresso machines and mash tuns

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@awilkinson Andrew. You need to build Victoria our own data center. It’s the only answer.

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@BusDownBonnor My own https://t.co/LNfeTA2bv4

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

@RoxCodes I collect them all right here
https://t.co/29WCDYGyLj

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Best I’ve found is dangerously skip.

I started by running it on a fresh laptop with little credentials.

Got comfortable. Started risking it on a personal laptop.

Sometimes if I’m forking an unfamiliar project I’ll isolate it in a docker container.

Currently moving my workflow to cloud vms so I can hopefully continue this behaviour unscathed.

[Daniil @mrpopov_com]

At 1703 we migrated a production SaaS from Python/React microservices to Elixir Phoenix monolith

3 apps → 1.
4 languages → 1.
5 frameworks → 1.

Thread with quick numbers breakdown:

[Ben Church @bnchrch]

Should I make them fight?