Josh Gachnang @DEFCON

YouTube video by MIT OpenCourseWare How to Speak

If you ever need to present at work or give a talk, this was a fabulous talk on giving a talk. I might submit a few presentations for 2026! It’s been nearly 10 years since my last talk, wow. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc...

I'm PhD in graphic design and Cracker Barrel's REAL problem is they didn't go *far enough*

My flight is delayed because the plane is too hot…it’s only 87 in Seattle.

Anyone have good ideas for individual engineer KPIs? Goal is easy to track and the engineer has as much agency as possible. So far my only ideas are numbers of PR review and/or lag between review request and review.

Headed to #defcon for the first time! I know no one, any other newbies in the same position? Planning to head to the BBQ tonight.

Literally every time I cook I'm annoyed by all the different recipe apps and sites. Put the measurements in the instructions (but dynamically, so I can scale) and always give me grams with dry ingredients. e.g. "Add 1 cup (120g) flour to the mixture". Time to spin AvoToast back up.

Always blows my mind when I try to work from a coffee shop like Starbucks and get like 2Mbps. Left and tried a Caribou in a grocery story in rural WI and I get 300Mbps.

Always a good sign when the pilot tries turning the plane on and off again.

Struggled most of yesterday with a bug. Finally threw the whole feature description and the 1800 lines I wrote into Gemini. 2 minutes later it pointed out I was a dumbass (“made a logical error”) and fixed it. Worked first try. Damn robots taking our jobs 😂

I'm surprised react-native-mmkv isn't as popular - honestly, there's no reason to use AsyncStorage anymore
results.stateofreactnative.com/en-US/state-...

Using Cursor to help write Cursor rules. Inception.

Legend List 1.0 beta is ready!

It started as a performance experiment, but it ended up solving a lot of the major issues with lists in React Native. 🎉

✨ Better perf than FlashList
✨ maintainContentVisiblePosition
✨ Bidirectional infinite lists
✨ Chat UI without inverting

Reminder that The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker came out during Trumps last term.

"Becoming a professional software developer is accumulating a back-catalogue of regrets and mistakes. You learn nothing from success. It is not that you know what good code looks like, but the scars of bad code are fresh in your mind." - @tef.bsky.social

Implemented a whole moderately complex feature, about 300 lines with tests. I wrote maybe 20 of those lines. Fed Windsurf the PRD and a brief implementation plan, nudged it a couple times, and it worked. Amazing how far these tools have come.

Does anyone have experience with Twilio campaign suspensions? Had one of our campaigns suspended (I suspect they flagged something as spam) and haven't had any luck getting any answers, even after paying for Twilio support.

Agreed! Lots of sports, tech, and journalists have come over, just a few small pockets like Peloton I’m missing here

Trying to be better about balance this year, so it’s sorta progress?

I was just thinking “well, I’m at a good stopping point, it’s 430 on a Friday, I’m taking off early!” Forgot I started at 7…

Love my 3D printer. 30 mins after I broke my treadmill clip, I had a new one.

Using Windsurf and it is _amazing_. I love Cursor, but having it actually able to run tests, read the results, and come up with solutions on its own is incredible. I might need to spend the first couple of weeks updating some of our infra to support it better (faster tests, UI tests, etc)

I guess there's a small moment in between buying one and reading the instructions. But AI can do so many amazing things...why is this your first example?

There's a terrible Meta Glasses ad I keep getting on podcasts that starts out with the person asking "how do I make a latte"? If you're capable of making a latte at home, you'd know it because you bought an espresso machine. If not, Meta AI ain't gonna help, other than "help" you order one.

Ascension of me to being The Senate?

I’ll be back to my appropriately cool bedroom tonight!

Two days, two coworking day passes that failed. Probably should have bit the bullet and went into Chicago proper rather than staying in the far burbs (where family is). On the high side, I’m getting tons of Starbucks stars ⭐️

Visiting family for the holidays. 73 is too high for the thermostat during the day IMO, but I’ll survive. 73 during the night? I’m dying.

It was about my 6th try and heavvvvy help from Claude, but finally added the ability to pin columns to our React Native Table component. It is literally the most requested feature by our staff. I wish ScrollView or FlatList would support it natively.

Screenshot of the statement from Costco

Screenshot of the statement from Costco

Screenshot of the statement from Costco

Just read the response from Costco to shareholders requesting it back down from DEI. It was glorious. It begins "Our Board has considered this proposal and believes … an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion is appropriate and necessary." and gets better. A happy investor #diversityandinclusion

Amazing! And I love your Bluesky username, it’s so true how boring the middle is.