Brandon Bloom

And data formats / protocols are literally the only things that matter. Everything in between will become disposable.

For years, I’ve been saying “all systems are distributed systems” because the user is part of the system. That’s even more true now with agents: it’s important everything be printable/readable.

I’m slightly worried my vim skills will atrophy since I don’t think I’m ever going to need to record a crazy macro ever again :)

But my spec writing skills are already dramatically improved & I’m developing a new “context management” skill.

1. I too was skeptical of LLMs for coding until < 1 year ago
2. Current tools/models are not a panacea for anything
3. They are wildly useful tools I now use every day
4. This will induce demand for real engineers
5. Like any tool, you must invest in learning it
6. Ignore it and you will fall behind

I've actually got two roles open! Here's the other one, which might be especially relevant to former Microsofties with Windows/C# experience:
jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

Apple Games Framework Engineer - Jobs - Careers at Apple Apply for a Apple Games Framework Engineer job at Apple. Read about the role and find out if it’s right for you.

Hello Microsoft/Xbox friends, if you got laid off: Sorry to hear about that! Please reach out via DM if you're interested in working on Game Services and the new Games app at Apple here in Seattle: jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

If you were wondering why it seems like smoke & carbon monoxide detectors always false alarm at 3am, that's because _they do_! Ambient temperature drops lead to obnoxious battery warnings at the worst possible time. Grumble grumble.

“Consistency” is the best you can aim for if you haven’t yet discovered an appropriate Abstraction.

Game Services Framework Engineer - Jobs - Careers at Apple Apply for a Game Services Framework Engineer job at Apple. Read about the role and find out if it’s right for you.

Hiring for my team at Apple in Seattle. Come work on some fun stuff :)
jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

Google Search can no longer find posts on their own BlogSpot service that I know exist and contain unique words coined by that post. Literally zero results. Exact query on every other search engine I tried produced exactly the page I expected...

Letting devs write programs that do ::waves:hands:wildly:: whatever they want, is a mistake. Basically no one can be trusted to write arbitrary code without destabilizing my experience.

One of my directs had to request access to view his own IT request, so that he could forward it to me, so I could request access to view it, so that I could open another request to escalate it... Am I about to enter an infinite loop?

Wikipedia is one of the crowning achievements of humanity... and we all just kinda take it for granted now.

I'm in SF at GDC for one more day. If you'd like to meet up, DM me. (I'm not sure bsky has the critical mass for me yet for this to work...)

Anyway, I'm _stoked_ for the tsc written in Go. It's a prayer answered.

Like of course the pragmatic language designers are going to ultimately choose the language designed by other pragmatists. They explicitly and reasonably rejected the complexity of C++ style languages for over 4 decades. Why in the world would they choose Rust now?

TypeScript team choosing Go over Rust is hilarious. Like here's some TypeScript people, who used to be C# people, who used to be Turbo Pascal / Delphi people, and they are like, "Yeah, this Go thing is pretty good." Meanwhile, the type-obsessed folks are like "BUT THE BILLION DOLLAR MISTAKE!"

"Hide Distracting Elements" is probably my favorite new browser feature in a decade.

Above ground power lines in any major metropolitan area are kinda inexcusable at this point.

The only allowable control plane API should be “set desired configuration to $spec”

Everything else is data plane for some other system you may or may not even have or want access to.

I’ve always found the “control plane” and “data plane” API split to be a helpful framing, but struggle with the duality in the same way as “code is data, data is code” infects my thinking.

However, I’m now convinced: Control Plane APIs should not exist…

I think it’s safe to say that “Semantic Import Versioning” and “Minimum Version Selection” have proven to have dramatically better ergonomics and ecosystem outcomes than any other approach out there…

Said it before, will say it again: I'll take an ID over an object any day of the week.

Noted. Deref is defunct, so let me move it to my personal Github and then maybe I can set up GoReleaser or something. Will get around to it sooner or later.

Snapshot tests – with proper tooling – are easy to write and maintain. Yes, they can be brittle, but they are also a good way to ferret out non-determinism and unintended side effects.

A while ago, I created the CLI snapshot tool I've always wanted & you should use it :) github.com/deref/transc...

CUE Configure Unify Execute Validate, define, and use dynamic and text‑based data Learn more Get started with CUE CUE makes it easy to validate data, write schemas, and ensure configurations align with po...

Found another excuse to use cuelang.org and it's really, really good and getting better.

Another example:

I've got a bunch of files in a wiki named "spec", but then you wind up with two browser tabs both labeled "spec". Which one is which? Browser should note the ambiguity, then use context from page to re-contextualize as "Foo Feature Spec" and "Blah Blah System Spec".

Big UX opportunity for LLMs: Re-contextualize user-provided strings.

Example: I should be able to write a lazy commit message like "fix index out of bounds" and then have log report that as is if given a path, but rewrite it to "fix index out of bounds in parser" at the top level.

The killer use case for `copilot: fix` is to catch bugs where my logic is absolutely correct, but I just used the wrong damn variable of the same type and no amount of staring at it overcomes my dyslexia.

Is it just me, or is it just plain silly that we all just live with the fact that our terminals interpret control sequences by default without any negotiation or default escaping policy? Like whoops, I accidentally cat out a binary file! I guess RANDOM STUFF IS GOING TO HAPPEN.