Tom

Software Developer 🧑‍💻

[Tom @devisscher]

Infinite loop

[Tom @devisscher]

Congratulations Bark Carney! @MarkJCarney #zootopia #cdnpoli @liberal_party 🎉

[Tom @devisscher]

Friendly reminder: even with 5 people, your “no” RSVP does not require lore. Just tap decline. We’re good. 🫶

[Alex | RWA.xyz @aeksco]

when cursor is down

[Wes Bos @wesbos]

@Random1911 2025 gonna be the year of customized <select>

[Tom @devisscher]

Hi

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

5.2M jobs
$28B of exports
$229B in GDP impact
$490B in economic activity

That was the 2022 global impact of @Shopify entrepreneurs. There’s never been a public, global database specifically for measuring entrepreneurship impact — until now.

Meet: The Shopify Entrepreneurship Index, launching today in beta.
https://t.co/bDp8UdlqNA

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow.

[Jason Swett @JasonSwett]

I know that flaky tests are a thorn in the side of quite a lot of developers.

Here's everything you need to know about what causes flaky tests, why they appear more often in CI than locally, and how to diagnose and fix them.

https://t.co/DDm8oeCUZ3

[Matt Rickard @mattrickard]

What was previously Google's biggest strength might prevent it from innovating in the future.

Google technology used to be years ahead of the industry. In 2004, Google released a paper on its proprietary MapReduce algorithm, the system that powered Google's massively parallel web crawling infrastructure. The previous year, Google had released a paper on its proprietary Google File System, which worked hand-in-hand with MapReduce. No other company was operating at Google scale.

But the industry always catches up, eventually. In 2006, two engineers would use those papers as a blueprint to create an open-source version of both technologies, Apache Hadoop and HDFS. They quickly became the industry standard - spawning huge companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Databricks. Google's internal implementation was similar but incompatible. Not only had Google failed to commercialize the technology, but it now maintained a completely different codebase. This made it difficult to hire talent, expensive to keep up with improvements, and created a divergent basis for future innovation.

Avoiding the MapReduce/Hadoop situation was the initial rationale for open-source projects like TensorFlow and Kubernetes. While open-sourcing internal Google technologies has been wildly successful in both cases, Google is still filled with bespoke proprietary technology. Everything works differently at Google: building software, communicating between services, version control, code search, running jobs and applications, testing, and everything in between. Ramp-up time for new engineers continues to increase. Engineers aren't able to use off-the-shelf software because it won't work with internal technologies. Technologies that were years ahead are now only months.

These are the patterns of strategic disruption: a company like Google acts rationally, building its bespoke technologies as a competitive advantage. This series of rational decisions unexpectedly creates an opportunity for startups to move more quickly, take advantage of the current ecosystem, and eventually disrupt. While Google still has some of the best internal technology, it is on a parallel, but different, path than the rest of the world. Cloud computing has accelerated this divergence. Engineers may choose to work at companies where they can build non-firm-specific skills to further their careers. I believe that Google understands these issues, but the inertia may prove to be too great to overcome, even with the best effort.

[Tom @devisscher]

First follow of the day

[Tom @devisscher]

@ryanflorence rendering without worrying that your data isn’t there.

[MrBeast @MrBeast]

Would you vote for me if I ran for president?

[Tim Cook @tim_cook]

Apple silicon unlocks a new level of performance for our users. And soon, many of these chips can be stamped “Made in America.” The opening of TSMC's plant in Arizona marks a new era of advanced manufacturing in the U.S. — and we are proud to become the site’s largest customer.

[Tom @devisscher]

@stourang Une causerie!

[Tom @devisscher]

How Wildlife Help Combat the Climate Crisis https://t.co/N0ilhmPsXA

[Tom @devisscher]

COP27 wrap up: funding the end of the world and other thoughts https://t.co/D5PGwvtAHr

[Tom @devisscher]

Yes 🙌

[I Am Devloper @iamdevloper]

STOP!!! NO!!! DON’T BUY ANOTHER DOMAIN NAME, YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE LAST SIDE PROJECT!!! STOP!!!

[David East @_davideast]

Imagine this. You are an OSS maintainer. Someone opens an issue on your library... and they are the lead singer of Weezer.

🎸 Brings a whole new meaning to "Rockstar Developer"

https://t.co/Sv4GvBMsdw