Jake Varness

Sr.+ Software Engineer, Eastern Eagle, husband, father of three, nerd | Current: @lifestanceUS | Ex: @storableinc | Ex: @CernerEng

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

I made a blog! First one I’ve ever made!

There aren’t many blog posts out there right now, but I’ll write more soon:

https://t.co/LbpGfOIVJ4

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Current favorite open weight LLMs:

Qwen 3.8
Muse Glimmer
The 30B NVIDIA one that has a 1M context window who’s name I can’t remember

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Finally, the power of #LocalLLMs is at my fingertips: https://t.co/LOTEQVFTxf

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Say I tried to make ChatGPT edit a Pokemon save file using Agent Mode: how could I do it better?

https://t.co/htEUEDfhws

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@SumitM_X It’s fine, because…. NoBODY exists for that ID anymore 😀

Now that’s a knee slapper.

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Heroku used to be so cool: such a developer-friendly company, offering generous free tiers and easy ways to deploy and maintain projects.

SalesForce has really done a number on them. So sad to see 😞

[Heroku @heroku]

Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features. We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers.

There is no change for customers using Heroku today. Customers who pay via credit card in the Heroku dashboard—both existing and new—can continue to use Heroku with no changes to pricing, billing, service, or day-to-day usage. Core platform functionality, including applications, pipelines, teams, and add-ons, is unaffected, and customers can continue to rely on Heroku for their production, business-critical workloads.

Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers. Existing Enterprise subscriptions and support contracts will continue to be fully honored and may renew as usual.

Why this change

We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

This scared me a bit: no moves and the worst stats?

#ChatGPTEggLocke

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Interesting little experiment tonight:

I asked ChatGPT to edit a Pokemon save file so that I could do an egglocke in Pokemon Gold.

Using Agent Mode and a set of parameters (no legendaries, first-stage only, etc.), it filled two boxes with random pokemon eggs.

#ChatGPTEggLocke

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Some thoughts on agentic coding in 2026 and how it’s continued to shape my career: https://t.co/4gLWw7ew9K

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

I started posting recipes on my blog! If you’re entering your pellet grill/smoker era, try my pulled pork recipe!

https://t.co/9rct8GKFAy

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

Ever had the desire to make yourself a garbage collector? Learn how I did here: https://t.co/STD38Rm5kU

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@your_priscylla I didn’t understand until you explained it but yes, that is hella busted!

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@Masterfrogg @AlexisIstari @golgariguy That last effect kinda is

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@kentcdodds When your index fills up due to overflow and all your code starts to fail to insert anything, you get to remember all the neat stuff you built and how important it is 💖

If you use UUIDs you don’t ever get to resolve incidents on Saturday mornings ☹️

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@0xgaut So like… A hotel?

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@kentcdodds Then I guess it comes down to whether it will be cost effective and scalable enough for your use case to do so, and if you’ve got the know-how to be able to keep it secure.

Kinda sounds like a use case that Heroku or DigitalOcean could fill.

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@DThompsonDev Pull request is titled: “Init”, and it’s got like a couple commits.

First comment: “You need to add node_modules to .gitignore, remove all this stuff from the commit, and try again.”

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@florinpop17 Any IE really

[Jake Varness @jake_varness]

@dan_abramov Been following you for years for programming wisdom. Can’t wait to read your dad blog!

[Chris O'Donoghue @UppityNorrie]

At least we're learning about Elon's managerial inadequacies now, and not 3 weeks into a trip to Mars