Edward Thomson

Product at @TrustVanta focusing on privacy and data security. Formerly @Vercel, @GitHub, @Microsoft. Maintainer of @libgit2.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@DavidGiard Thank you, sir!

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

It’s October 1 — the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act takes effect today!

Do you know where the personal data lives in your organization? What tools are you using to track this and maintain records?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

Throughout my career, I’ve focused on developer tools… mostly because I checked the wrong box on a form once…

[Christoph Nakazawa @cnakazawa]

I don't understand why squash merging is not the default on GitHub. The other options make no sense, and just slow things down.

Similarly, it's confusing that people *still* use `git merge`. It makes everything so complicated. Always rebase, never merge.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@kdaigle @github Congrats! 🐐

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@jldec Personally, I'm a big v0 fan; it nailed a weird React server component refactoring that I had been struggling with.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

I thought "vibe coding" was silly... until I watched my design counterpart — who has never written a line of code in his life — create a real outcome. Watching him succeed with these tools was the breakthrough for me to become a believer.

What made vibe coding real for _you_?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@jldec He's used a variety of different tools, he regularly shoots me a slack describing the pros/cons of whatever he's using today.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@webprofusion Wow, that's incredible. a) which rowing machine? b) is it public / open source?

[Natalie Marleny @NatalieMarleny]

Celebrating by watching @ethomson's really cool talk on hidden Git features and functionality at NDC London last week

https://t.co/N2o4Y1w0Fm

[Jakub T. Jankiewicz 🇵🇱 @jcubic]

Great talk by @ethomson about git

Worth watching 📺 link in the comment 👇

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

Perhaps my finest contribution to Vercel was printing the LFG stickers.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@matheusfrndes @vercel In other words, if @rauchg was the original tastemaker behind Vercel, how did he get the rest of the company to think that way. Careful hiring? Indoctrination? Something else?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

What’s an example of a developer tool with “great taste”? And why? What does that phrase mean to you?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@matheusfrndes @vercel I’d love to unpack that another layer - how and why does it have great taste? And how do you keep an entire company having “good taste”? How do you scale tastemaking?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@mtcderek 🤣

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@mtcderek I don’t know! Is it amazing?

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

Update: it didn’t arrive in March… new delivery date: September. A rare Amazon logistics failure, but what a complete failure it is.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

Update: it has not yet arrived, but it still has a month to get here!

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@rauchg @SwiftOnSecurity Finally; this is the year of macOS on the desktop.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@_sarahyo American in UK, the dream: I get US and UK holidays. In fact: there’s no such thing as a holiday.

[Edward Thomson @ethomson]

@rauchg @bryan_johnson Guaranteed *only* five, or is five the low bar?