Sini

building apps for fun after dark | scaling to $10k for a start | fan of scalable distributed systems | senior staff engineer

[Sini @sinibuilds]

I've worked in tech for 20+ years... and I have a confession...

I was never a good coder.

I did it all: infrastructure, consulting, devops, architecture, developer — at banks, startups, media - and built massive distributed sytems in an org moving £521 million a day.

And still, coding was still my weak point.

I was slow and never a friend of frameworks and patterns.

What I was good at: making systems work.

Connecting the pieces. Building reliable systems. Architecting for availability and scale. Keeping things running at scale at crazy high availability.

How could we otherwise move that £521 million a day...

Then AI coding tools came along and something clicked.

AI fills the exact gap I've had my entire career. It handles the coding for me that never really mastered.

I bring the systems thinking, the infra, the architecture.

Together? It's the most productive I've ever been.

So now, after 20+ years of building for corporations, I'm finally building for myself.

Small tools. Useful products. Things people actually want.

And maybe — if enough people show up — I'll finally get to solve the scaling problems I actually love.

Building in public starts now. Follow along.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@robj3d3 I love your choice of word: cooking. I almost used that too 😀

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Starting a new era... building something new.

Just pre-ordered The Attention Playbook by @robj3d3 - https://t.co/Mvw6OdEKae

to level up my X skills.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@marclou I love this, but how do you get your data from X?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@jackfriks Can you give an example idea and why taxes ruined it?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Would you mind sharing some of the challenges @jonathan_wilke ?

[Jonathan Wilke @jonathan_wilke]

The traffic and server load on https://t.co/3tMzhIlC1s are getting to the point where it's actually beneficial that I'm a real developer 😂

[Sini @sinibuilds]

- When should we announce Origin?
- Just wait for the next GitHub outage
- Easy

[@levelsio @levelsio]

The timing 😂

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@jackfriks I like that!

Did you just find unnecessary background jobs?

Or reorganised it to call the backend less?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Do you use dashboards like that?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Good metrics and dashboards can help a lot in noticing these in advance.

Like a graph showing request count per user.

You throw a few of these up on a dashboard and a quick 1 minute look at those can give such insights that's hard to get otherwise.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Good metrics and dashboards can help a lot in noticing these in advance.

Like a graph showing request count per user.

You throw a few of these up on a dashboard and a quick 1 minute look at those can give such insights that's hard to get otherwise.

[jack friks @jackfriks]

my agent just helped me find out 1 user costing me $30/day, running a sync call every ~5 seconds, 24/7 for the last 12 days

to sync facebook analytics on an account with 0 posts

funny cause the user was probably having his agent work for him and it cost him nothing but me a lot

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@jackfriks I’m interested: how did you find that out? Or what was the signal that triggered you to ask your agent?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@robj3d3 Never thought electrolytes can help that.

I’ll try it for my afternoon fog!

Thx for the tip @robj3d3

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@thepatwalls I use VoiceInk for the same. It's pretty fast. You can build it yourself and in that case its $0.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@tibo_maker this looks more like a full rebuild

Q: Hey Claude, fix the basement!
A: rm -rf level2, level1, level...

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Anyways, fixed.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Better to double check API docs before building...

Opus hallucinated that @RevenueCat uses HMAC-SHA256 instead of a simple secret token.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Now I'm burning more Opus tokens to fix it

Isn't it ironic?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

By day, I build software where a single bug costs real money. Twenty years of it.

By night, I'm a complete beginner. Never shipped an indie product. Don't know how to get my first user. Learning distribution from zero — the one thing 20 years in tech never taught me.

Both true at once. And the gap between them is uncomfortable.

Staying in the lane where I'm known and respected would be easier. But building a real product alone, in 1-2 hours a day, never added up — until AI coding made it possible.

So now I'm a beginner again.

No success stories yet. Just a starting line.

If you're senior somewhere and quietly itching to start over — follow along.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@jackfriks How do you make sure that existing features don’t break when adding something new? Could also ask what kind of test you use?

[Sini @sinibuilds]

@josefandre_ @lukenguyen_me @alexcooldev Yes they had.

[Sini @sinibuilds]

Weird AI hallucination?

Claire Code? @claudeai

This is now repeating...