Aaron Alaniz

I am teaching my son how to play catcher and one new thing I notice catchers doing is showing the target briefly and then placing the glove on the ground. I presume this is so they only catch the ball coming up into the zone as opposed to trying to frame a low pitch. Fascinating!

Anvil Moves to Maintenance Mode · Issue #1149 · square/anvil Hey all! We wanted to share an update on the state and future of Anvil. We previously published a roadmap covering the major work we had planned, including K2 support and making Anvil a standalone ...

👀👀👀👀

github.com/square/anvil...

GitHub - block/trailblaze: AI-driven mobile testing framework. AI-driven mobile testing framework. Contribute to block/trailblaze development by creating an account on GitHub.

Trailblaze got some new updates today! There's an official yaml spec defined in the trailblaze-yaml module. The examples will be updated by the end of this week.

There's also new memory tools available so the agent can remember screen state for later assertions.
github.com/block/trailb...

As an Android developer I basically have zero visibility into what is happening in Java beyond JDK 8. I am not sure which came first, but it is nice to see convergence on similar concepts like data classes and records.

Omarchy Trial There is a lot of sameness in technology these days ­and while convergence is fine, it's nice to explore. The announcement of Omarchy­ – an opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup – reminded me of the...

I gave Omarchy a try and it has made a ten year old laptop fun again. 💻🖲️

aaron.alaniz.xyz/omarchy-trial/

I always looked forward to showing my kids the Ocarina of Time — the look of satisfaction after completing the first boss battle, priceless ✨

What a timeless game

Shift + Esc — the best OOO feature ever made in Slack

I discovered that my son has been using my debit card pin code as the password to the playground forts at recess. 🔓

From a dev at a large tech company:

“We were only allowed to use GitHub Copilot as an AI IDE. It was OK. But then more and more of us used Cursor on side projects and it was *so much better*

Luckily we have have a dev platform team and we

I just learned about the Savannah Bananas from the @acquiredfm.bsky.social IPL episode — this is so amazing. I love baseball tradition and nostalgia, but this looks so fun.

thesavannahbananas.com

A screenshot of Fastmail's bottom bar configured to show Mail and Calendar

The Fastmail bottom bar I always wanted 🙌🏼

My favorite thing about AI is the spike in motivation to write incredible documentation — previously, the incentives were not so tangible. Now, you have immediate feedback about whether your efforts to document something are useful.

Basically, yes. I use Notion to categorize things like grocery spend from Amex statements.

Yes 👍🏻

I vibed an Amex to Notion tool the past few weekends with Cursor — it's like, so good.

A Week with Cursor Technology waves swell, crest, break onto shore, and then, some time later, mobile developers show up, board in hand. I committed to using Cursor exclusively for a week as my daily driver editor. A we...

I am enjoying shorter lower stakes blogs — here are my findings using Cursor for Android dev for a week 🚀

aaron.alaniz.xyz/cursor-week/

Bruce Springsteen Will Release Seven ‘Lost Albums’ in June The singer and songwriter announced a boxed set featuring 83 songs, of which 74 have never been officially released in any form.

Bruce delivering a sunny day himself this morning ☀️

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/a...

Two blogs in a month 🙌🏼 — watch out for feature flag drift in your UI tests.

aaron.alaniz.xyz/rollout-to-u...

My kids only seem to want an apple seconds after I have taken the first bite of mine. And it has to be mine.

A hastily sketched graph of programmer salaries on the X axis, and # of programmers on the Y axis, with two lines: a "before" distribution and an "after" distribution. The "before" distribution has a higher average salary, but there are less of them. The "after" distribution includes the entire "before" but is much larger, although with a lower average.

I wrote up some thoughts about the effect of AI on programmer salaries: seldo.com/posts/ai-eff...

First Time Experience Authoring a Kotlin DSL I recently came across a file commented with // TODO convert to DSL. I use this file frequently and while I thought it could be improved, it had never occurred to me that a DSL would help. Feeling cur...

I have about ten rough drafts of random posts I would like to finish some day. I managed to complete one about my first time authoring a Kotlin DSL.

aaron.alaniz.xyz/kotlin-dsl/

I tried Cursor for the first time today and it is so smooth ✨ From nothing to solution with a short prompt and some chat assisted debugging. All in place, no app or context switching. 💯💯

GitHub Merge Strategies: A Visual Explanation Understanding Merge Commit, Squash Merge, and Rebase Merge

A discussion about the differences of @github.com merge options came up at work this week.

I couldn't find a quick explainer I liked so I wrote down what I shared. I hope it's helpful!

blog.mmckenna.me/github-merge...

This must be while RuleChain exists, but I tried to get fancy composing one TestRule with another and found that it is pretty easy to forget a base.evaluate() call and pass every test suite that uses the rule. 😅

And we'll need a replacement for "my two cents"

Nothing dates me more as an #AndroidDev than frantically switching off the design view for an xml file.

One of my favorite things to do at work is to edit somebody else's PR description to include a new line between the last line of text and an embedded media file so that the media renders correctly. 😂

I won my first silent auction today — guessed just right!

It took me a minute to spot that my six year old has been humming Tangled Up in Blue all evening. 🥺💙

In honor of the Eagles fabulous victory, I've added a new git alias to my workflow.

git shove

For when the code just needs to get over the line 🦅