Katie Sylor-Miller

Ahhhhhh the FOMO!

It was so amazing to work with you, Brian! Hopefully we both land somewhere great

Block was a really great place to work for the past four months. Unfortunately, I’m part of today’s 40% layoff.

If you need an old hand at web stuff, who has staff software engineering experience at multiple international corporations, hit me up. ❤️

Getting laid off sucks, but I just realized that I have never taken more than 2 weeks off between jobs before, and I’ve always juggled interviews with actually working. So, silver lining, I’ll get a nice long break for the first time ever, and I’ll be able to focus on studying for interviews

That’s the biggest bummer for me, I truly loved working at Square! I loved the amazing people, I was doing really good work, getting great perf reviews. Sadly I guess that isn’t enough these days. Time to join you in retirement maybe

I lucked out that I was able to scavenge amongst my son’s collection for the whole thing, so there are some wacky colors under the surface

Some of them are from before I added the clouds

Happy to share more pictures if that’s helpful!

Hi friends I just got laid off along with 40% of Block. No idea what comes next, but if you have need for a Principal Frontend Engineer hit me up!

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS. not just in communities, but companies too. I have never in my long career worked with anyone who deliberately *made the choice* to be a “low performer” without curiosity/discipline/agency, it’s always been beaten out of them

Props to @scott.hanselman.com for naming the elephant in the room in big tech.

AI coding tools boost senior engineers but create challenges for juniors who lack context to judge outputs. Cutting junior hiring for near-term gains weakens the future pipeline. We’ll need apprenticeship-style paths.

Oooh this is super exciting to see Container Timing come to life! This will be so helpful for measuring user-triggered page updates!

Accessibility: Yellow, Purple and the Myth of “Accessibility Limits Color Palettes”

I won't have time to debunk the old "yellow is not accessible" myth in my axe-con talk.
But, you are lucky: I already wrote a whole article on how accessibility does NOT limit color choices.
stephaniewalter.design/blog/yellow-...

#Accessibility #AccessibleColors #YellowColor

I say it with the American “k”, but when spell it, I hear Sir Patrick Stewart’s voice in my head so that I remember the ch sound

Kash Patel drinking beer on your dime, drunk and in the Olympic Hockey man's locker room, wearing USA shirt

The FBI hard at work investigating the Epstein Network; this picture cost $400,000 U.S. tax dollars to produce.

BOMBOGENESIS
BOMBOGENESIS
BOMBOGENESIS
BOMBOGENESIS

SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND SNOWTOTES MAP SUNDAYNITE MONNITE ISSUED 20260221 1808 MAP SHOWS MOST OF EASTERN MASSACHUSETTS & CONNECTICUT & ALL OF RHODE ISLAND IN A PINK 18-24" ZONE A RED STRIPE 2 THE WEST IS A 10-20" ZONE THEN IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS A ORANGE 6-12" ZONE REPENT REPENT 2 UR WEATHER LORDS SUMTHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES OH NO

/ FOLKS
/ THIS IS IT
/ THE BLIZZARD OF 2026
/ READY 2 BLOB U UP
/ READY 2 BLOB U DOWN
/ UR GONNA GET ALL BLOBBED UP
/ STARTING SUMTIME AFTER 6 PM SUNEVE
/ & LASTING IN2 MONNITE
/ THIS WILL BE THICC HEAVY WET SNOWBLOBS
/ CHARGE UR BATTERIES AS POWER OUTAGES R LIKELY

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm - Nature Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to X’s algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared...

Study proves what we’ve already know, Elon has turned Twitter into a right wing propaganda fire hose.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A sad day for rectangles

The Era of the Software Factory 🏭 A reflection based on the latest State of Software Delivery report

Really interesting - lately I've been wondering what it looks like to retrofit the software factory model onto an existing engineering team and this starts to answer that question - The Era of the Software Factory 🏭 refactoring.fm/p/the-era-of...

Arguing about unit tests vs. integration tests sucks. It's dogma and I feel like a heretic.

This post discusses a different way to think about a test’s scope. I love it.

Oooh this is a good article

Careers - Senior Product Manager, Websites Made up of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto, Block, Inc. builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

Hi friends, we’re looking for a senior PM for the project I am the eng lead for! block.xyz/careers/jobs...

It's been a while since my last blog post, so I made up for it with a wall of text 😅

This article looks at why JS-heavy web apps tend to miss their performance goals over time, what you can do to somewhat mitigate that, and ends with a plea for us to move back to the server, as an industry.

It’s so funny to think about the fact that there’s people out there deferring every life decision to this

They're Coming for Our Daughters The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures

The Heritage Foundation has released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.”

The document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls & young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.
jessica.substack.com/p/theyre-com...

As a similar person in tech with a liberal arts degree, I also resonated with his original tweet. I work with and have worked with lots of engineers who don’t want to talk to people or write docs or do anything except code. It’s not *everyone*, of course, but tech def needs more liberal arts

⭕️ NEW: An Al Jazeera investigation finds that Israel has used U.S.-supplied thermal and thermobaric weapons in Gaza that burn at up to 3,500°C, leaving no remains of victims. Gaza’s Civil Defence documented 2,842 Palestinians who effectively “evaporated” since October 2023, identified through forensic cross-checking at strike sites where only blood spray or small tissue fragments were found. Experts link the disappearances to munitions such as MK-84 bombs and GBU-39 glide bombs, whose heat and pressure vaporize bodies. Legal experts say the use of indiscriminate weapons constitutes war crimes and implicates Israel’s Western suppliers, as killings continued despite provisional measures from the International Court of Justice and an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ghassan Abu Sitta @GhassanAbuSitt1 Al Jazeera investigation reveals how US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions burning at 3,500C have left no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/10/israel-used-weapons-in-gaza-that-made-thousands-of-palestinians-evaporate

⭕️ NEW: An Al Jazeera investigation finds that Israel has used U.S.-supplied thermal & thermobaric weapons in Gaza that burn at up to 3,500°C, leaving no remains of victims. Gaza’s Civil Defence documented 2,842 Palestinians who effectively “evaporated” since Oct 2023, identified through forensic...

‘Shut up and focus on the mission’: Tech workers are frustrated by their companies’ silence about ICE Across the industry, workers describe a “fear-based culture” and pressure to “fall in line.”

‘Shut up and focus on the mission’: Tech workers are frustrated by their companies’ silence about ICE

This is the same tech that all the software engineering influencers on X are telling you to use to open PRs to your codebase without reviewing the diffs.