JD Lien

Tweets about PHP/JS/Laravel/Tailwind. I help web developers be awesome at their craft. Bluesky: @jdlien.com Mastodon: @[email protected]

[JD Lien @jdlien]

I'm more active on Bluesky these days — it's a rapidly growing, fun platform, without a lot of the negative aspects of X, so it's well-worth checking out. Follow me there at https://t.co/o7hnLmnIDJ

[JD Lien @jdlien]

My MacBook Neo review:
https://t.co/1U0OASXIPX

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aarondfrancis Awesome work. Just watched your little video overview. I’ll definitely take it for a spin soon, I’ve been rocking cmux as my daily which seems to share some DNA and ideas.

[Angelo Libero @angeloldesigns]

Excited to share something I've been working on.

3 years of color tools. 2 months building this.

Supa Colors generates palettes where every shade looks balanced — visually, not just mathematically.

Really proud of it.

🔗 https://t.co/LT0GSmor7H

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aarondfrancis There was a huge missed opportunity to add the Beegees to the soundtrack for your cool new video.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aarondfrancis Awesome new project, Aaron. You're the king of pivots, haha.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

That's my story in a nutshell. I left a job I was good at and enjoyed to go freelance. It was scary (maybe more so for my wife), but I've got plenty of work now—and when I work hard these days, I actually earn what I'm worth.

[Andrei Verdes @theandreiverdes]

My coworker got promoted over me.

He was worse at coding. Better at politics.

I wrote better code. Fixed more bugs. Shipped faster.

He talked in meetings. Took credit. Played the game.

He got the promotion. I got "keep up the good work".

That's when I realized: corporate rewards politics, not performance.

Six months later I quit. Started freelancing.

Now I make 3x his salary. No politics. No credit-stealing. Just solving problems and getting paid directly.

The best developers rarely get promoted. They get used.

Companies optimize for compliance and communication. Not competence.

If you're technically great but politically terrible, you'll never win at corporations.

Leave. Build your own thing. Get paid for your actual value.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aarondfrancis Oh wow, that's wonderful to hear and so gracious of Sam/PlanetScale!

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@calebporzio You're giving us our money's worth, that's for sure.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@marcba I recently started using Windows again, and there are actually excellent precision trackpad drivers for that Magic Trackpad 2. So it even works very well in Windows. (Albeit with caveats that it must be used wired and some apps don't support smooth scrolling.)

[JD Lien @jdlien]

I’ve been programming professionally since 1999, and I’ve heavily used a few different agentic coding tools.

I’d have to say that, for me, the style of working has been incredibly addictive because I find fewer scenarios where I feel stuck. I can just create things without restriction and without having to do a lot of heavy research and learning before jumping into something I don’t know very well. I definitely feel like I can be in flow state and just keep creating and creating and iterating very quickly.

Sometimes when the agent is grinding away on some task in the background, I can continue to do something like polish some CSS manually. The hours very quickly slip away as I build things.

I think it’s a very cool way to work. I guess it’s a bit like pair programming, but way more efficient, in my opinion.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aschmelyun @aarondfrancis I wonder if being experienced devs before AI coding was a thing gives you a big head start because you understand lots from hard lessons learned.

Maybe it’ll turn out that doesn’t matter all that much. You use whatever tools you have; the results are proportional to your effort.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aarondfrancis Hard agree. I’ve been writing an insane amount of code lately with agentic coding. There is an endless list of stuff I want to do.

The difference is that now most of what I want to build is possible; before I’d write it off as implausible.

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@AshAllenDesign Yes, with a React frontend. Combination of Inertia and API. It’s early and not very playable yet, though, I have so many other projects I’m also working on!

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@AshAllenDesign Aw, thanks, Ash!

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aaditsh (I'm sure it and things like it will get better soon, though.)

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@aaditsh And holy crap that's awful. Full of spelling mistakes, inaccuracies, using mutated or completely wrong logos, and not really a lot of design sense. If that's a cherry-picked "good" example, this isn't a tool worth using!

[JD Lien @jdlien]

@AshAllenDesign I've been writing a lot of silly little utility scripts in Python lately, and it has been nice, especially because LLMs are tuned so well to work with it and there are so many great packages for it.

I still think it's a weird-looking language since it's not C-like!

[Ash Allen 🚀 @AshAllenDesign]

Wanna make your first contribution to open-source, but don't know where to start? 🤔

You don't have to PR a huge feature that's going to revolutionise the world.

It can be something as simple as updating documentation, or fixing a typo (like I did with the `laravel/cashier-stripe` upgrade guide)!

No matter how small a PR like this might be, they contribute to the bigger picture.

It's also a great way for you to get used to the flow of contributing to open-source and build your confidence 😄