Mike Coutermarsh @mscccc Twitter profile

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@sanyaj1

Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

Job interview: “algorithms” Reality: “Turn a 127 message deep slack thread between 5 engineers into a decision”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

THEY DID IT. @salesforce tower is Eye of Sauron for Halloween 🎃.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

MSFT stock grants New hire: can’t code. has 30k twitter followers. $800k over 4 years. Current eng: finds 500ms backdoor, saves world. $67k retention grant, vests over 5 years.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 years

Why won't this CSS change?! Restart server >Nope rm -rf everything >Nope rebuild dev env >Nope Oh wait, I was looking at production

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

11 months

Duplicated string in some code. New developer: "Approved." Mid-experienced developer: "This violates DRY and should be extracted to a constant." Experienced developer: "Approved."

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

Asked the front desk guy if people have a hard time quitting this gym once they join.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 years

San Francisco lol. Just saw these 2 cruise cars (self driving) stopped/confused at an intersection. Person behind is honking + screaming “learn to drive!!”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 months

I have 14 months of experience. 9 months at FAANG. When applying to startups, would I be a principal SWE or director of engineering?

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

8 years

Clicks "contact us" button Oh no. It's a mailto: Apple Mail is opening "Syncing 14,321 emails" No, no, no, no, nooooo

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 months

Borscht the T is silent

@InternetHippo

6 months

I believe we are approximately here in the society pant cycle

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

How high traffic sites rename a db column without downtime. 1. Add new column 2. Double write to old/new column 3. Backfill new column 4. Switch reads/writes 100% to new column 5. Delete the old column Each step is a code deploy

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

I’m convinced Siri is a single file with about 15k if statements

Owen Williams ⚡

@ow

1 year

Microsoft: our AI can summarize meetings, write code for you and organize your calendar Apple: this year Siri can set TWO timers AT THE SAME TIME!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Remember: Underscores in URLs are trashy. Hyphens are classy.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

11 months

@JasonSwett What exactly do you mean by "duplicated string"?

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

At a dinner with top engineers. Not a single one thinks they’ll return to an office — and all refuse to accept anything lower than SF level compensation.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

Pretty sure you can become top 10% engineer just by checking prod error tracker everyday and fixing things without anyone asking.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

This single box has more features/tech behind it than your entire app. Yet, looks so simple.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

Notices 500ms latency MSFT Engineer: solves problem, sends text only email. Saves world. You: Blames framework, declares Vercel is dead, 12 tweets a day. Still $0 MRR.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

Slack is closed. Headphones on. You're writing code. Sun is out. Tests pass first try.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Ha I’ve seen this strategy many times. Engineer joins, shits on existing code to seem smart. Ships nothing. Happened a few times at GitHub. Most commonly when people joined from a FAANG.

Gergely Orosz

@GergelyOrosz

1 year

So, based on what I gathered talking with several Twitter devs: Developer workflow works at Twitter Engineers ship a lot of code (else risk being fired) Engineers didn’t help Hotz b/c he didn’t ask for help They really don’t like how he talks down Twitter’s eng culture

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

You don't want to quit your job to write NodeJS for a 24 year old CEO with 50k twitter followers? It's a life changing opportunity!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

Just googled "undo last commit but keep changes" And I work for GitHub. This stuff is hard!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

What engineers think leading a big project will be like “I will architect some genius design for everyone to implement” Reality: “I will literally do everyones laundry if it gets this thing to ship”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 months

@JesusTheHun I’ll send you a job posting once I’m settled. I’ll need people in my team who are willing to tell me like it is!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 months

Software developer hobby ladder 1. Text editors from the 70s 2. Pour over coffee 3. Writing a book 4. Mechanical keyboards 5. Endurance sports

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

8 years

Fake news about the fake news on fake news. lol

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

Tweet only visible to $200k+ software engineers

Ben 🤖

@benfryc

2 months

The time is KNOB. Pre-orders for the Knob / k•no•b•1 by @work_louder are now open! Link in the replies. ⌨️🎛️🚀 Available for $439 USD in both ANSI and ISO layouts with a number of language options. 📦Shipping worldwide in Q3 2024. 🗺️

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

Things that are scary: 12. Public speaking 11. Jumping out of an airplane . . . . . . 1. Pressing play on Spotify in an open office and not knowing if your headphones are connected

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

Most elite keyboard for engineers

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

I'm a macbook air guy now. Rails app running, next.js running. Slack. Million browser tabs. 16gb ram.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

These people are everywhere: - Invests $1k in friends startup - Adds to twitter bio: “angel investor”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

All the code needed to protect against free plan abusers.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

High traffic app that can’t take downtime. The “trick” to data migration is: Think small changes 1. New table 2. Update writes to go to old and new 3. Background job to migrate old data to new 4. Move reads to new table 5. Stop writing to old table Each step is a deploy

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

$67k!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

Remember kids, Unsigned Big Int is the smart, default choice. UUIDs only if you know what you're doing.

PlanetScale

@PlanetScale

3 months

UUIDs as primary keys can be bad for database performance:

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

When I joined GitHub I remember thinking that I'd be learning fancy/unique Rails patterns needed for scale. Instead I learned "just use default rails". model/view/controller is good.

Taylor Otwell ☁️ 🦹

@taylorotwell

2 years

Suspect this is also very true for Laravel projects. 😅

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 months

Rails is an incredible option for high scale web apps. (my entire career is high traffic @rails apps. Worked at GitHub, now PlanetScale. We support databases for some of the largest web apps in the world.)

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Reasons to live on US east coast as an engineer: 1. can wake up at 11am and still beat lazy west coast co-workers to work. 2. Low ping to us-east (best data center). 3. Timezone overlap with Europe (cool people who ride bikes and trains)

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 years

I'm so good at React dot js.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

@dan_abramov that's what everyone does. It's just not cool to blog about it.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

@roshanpateI Wow we used the same numbers.

Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 months

I have 14 months of experience. 9 months at FAANG. When applying to startups, would I be a principal SWE or director of engineering?

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

@F1 @redbullracing @SChecoPerez Sergio, blink twice if you have been kidnapped and forced to say this. We'll send help!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

"They are still thinking about accepting the offer" *sends screenshot of our 1 min CI builds* "they signed!"

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

which is faster? we may never know

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

As a US east coast engineer. It's critical to hire an EU timezone best friend engineer. This way, you have someone to approve your code during the 6 hours before anyone else wakes up.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

9 months

You’re using strings in your code?This app isn’t i18n?! No one codes like this anymore. Sir, we have barely 6 users.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

The Rails monolith is BACK BABY 🚂🚂🚂🚂

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

2 years

@sampullara Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 months

Hang in there GitHub. Keep ignoring the haters. Server side rendering and working URLs are about to be cool again. You can finally laugh at everyone who teased you for not being a SPA for 10 years.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

Don't think I'd ever want to work for a non-remote company again. Remote first is just so good.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 years

You can now run GitHub Actions on your own hardware, for your entire org. **insert cool ASCII art**

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

hey friends, new thing I just shipped.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

Sr. Staff Engineer gazes at the sky, a glint of nostalgia in their eyes. "That's cool kid, I remember thinking tdd would save me 15 years ago too. Have fun"

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

View source to see how real software is made. @planetscaledata

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

“you should never use an ORM because sometimes you have to write sql anyway” Ok Charlie, I see that your bio says VP Eng, so it seems people should listen to you. But you've worked at 4 startups, each for less than 8 months & shipped nothing. So shut up.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

@Max33Verstappen @redbullracing @SChecoPerez Rewrote it for you “Congrats to Checo on a great race!”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 years

I work on a product called “Actions”. In a Rails app. If you don’t know, Rails prefixes many of its base framework classes with “Action” ActionController ActionView ActionMailer Do you see my problem? 😂

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 months

Upgrading a rails app. Rails upgrade: easy. CSS/JS: dear lord end my suffering. give me that NOBUILD immediately. Why the hell do I need python in my path for npm install to run successfully

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

When your friend says something wrong about Rails monoliths

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 years

“Our tech stack was great until all the Staff+ people started to ‘increase their impact’”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

My last day at @github was a couple days ago. I feel a little sad about it, but it was time for me to build something new. Last month I left SF after 6 years, closed on a house in PA, signed a new job offer and resigned from GitHub. It was a lot 😀

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

What mentoring jr developers is actually like: Jr: “here is some code I’m struggling with” Mentor: “yeah I have no idea either but I know how to figure it out”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

Manager: I noticed you entered an entire shower remodel into Expensify Developer: Ya it’s worth it because that’s where I do all my debugging

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

Really enjoying that github shared some stats and people refuse to believe it’s a rails monolith serving all those requests. Must be micro services! Must be go! Must be c#! Must be fancy caching! (nopeee)

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

10 months

I’d hate ORMs and only write SQL too if my language had me swapping to new-hot-ORM every 6 months. It’s not the ORM you hate sweeties

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 months

Prediction: Tomorrow DHH ditches on-prem. Deploys all of Basecamp to a single M3 Max sitting on his desk.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

If I were to create the most elite software team from scratch: 6 engineers who previously worked on the GitHub rails monolith and never whined about it.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

11 months

@rbranson ^ engineering manager Tweet complete

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 years

📣GitHub Actions engineering is hiring. In my extremely biased opinion, the best team. aka come work with me.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Better strategy. Be nice. Ship a few things. Then either you realize your first impressions were wrong, or you have enough credibility to start making changes.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

“I got a 2.25% raise. My manager told me it’s great and I’m a high performer because most people got a 2.20%”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

Update on cool stuff our team has been shipping. Two big ones. First, you can now run GitHub Actions on your own hardware. I've been running Actions on my Mac for past couple weeks, it's 🤯.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

Pick your database like you pick your frontend framework - trending on HN - less than year old - lots of stars - twitter celebrities hyping it Then - add to twitter bio - get followers - repeat process in one year. one month of work + a downtime deploy that loses customer data

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

(I worked on github actions). Basically everyone used the same cron times. And the shared action runners are... shared! Was wild how much would need to run at top of hour. My fav tip at the time was "schedule it at min 59 instead"

Guillermo Rauch

@rauchg

1 year

The top 5 schedules since the @vercel Cron Jobs launch 😁 ◆ every day at 00:00 ◆ every minute ◆ every day at 10am ◆ every 5 minutes ◆ every day at 5am Generating 1M+ invocations per week, growing at 84% w/o/w

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Learned this at GitHub. If you have even the tiniest doubt about a code change. Copy/paste the entire function, and feature flag it. No more fear.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

9 years

#1 . make it work #2 . make it fast #3 . spend an hour picking out a gif for the pull request

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

1️⃣ year at @github 😀

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

4 years

github markdown protip. Use a code block with the diff highlighting. Makes it really clear in an issue what needs to be done. ```diff { "some_param": true, + "another_param": true, "head_sha": "f83a356604ae3c5d0" } ```

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 months

Successfully replaced my use of “you all” with “chat” at work. Coworkers all acting like it’s normal

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

10 months

Adding live updates to my web app

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

Hyphens are pretty. Underscores are ugly and don’t belong in URLs

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

I'd like to talk to the frontend engineers at banks who disable pasting into the routing/account number form.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

In browser @github Actions editor now includes linting, AUTO COMPLETE and inline docs. Built by @gimenete ✨

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

In 2018, I made $115k as a faang new grad intern and I couldn’t even code. In 2019, $125k at a YC startup In 2020, $250k + $75k bonus. Acquired by a faang, I made Staff engineer because CEO liked my tweets. In 2021, $1.2m due to massive stock appreciation. And I still can’t

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

morning internet friends ✨ A while ago I moved teams at @github . I'm now full time working on building GitHub Actions We're sharing latest in 2 hours. It's. Real. Cool.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

2 months

High traffic websites often use database replicas to scale out their reads. Most web traffic is a GET request anyway and never modifies data. But how do you know when you should READ from the primary?

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

9 months

Rails upgrade 2.3 -> 3.2

sophie

@netcapgirl

9 months

Apparently, all men have a favorite historic battle. Spill it, gents.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

8 years

You all have done this at least once.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

At what net worth do people start calling their blog posts “essays”

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

9 months

@dhh We're building @PlanetScale with Rails as well. It's going great.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

We built the GitHub Actions UI with custom elements from @muanchiou + team. No framework. Entire log UI is ~7kb of JS.

muan.co @ Berlin

@muanchiou

5 years

My team at GitHub creates and maintains reusable JS behaviors (custom elements). On the surface it might seem like a framework of sorts still, but the biggest difference is that now many features are shipped with 0 new JS. Our “framework” encourages you to rely on HTML.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

1 year

Lol, absolutely false. At any big tech company, new hires are almost always getting paid significantly more than existing employees who were promoted to the same level.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

7 years

Ok I think I'm all packed for team retreat.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

cloudflare workers, so good. Was seeing 1.5 million API requests with empty auth headers (when you run an API, people mess up code and infinite loop requests often). Added a check to the worker, now it 401's from "the edge" and never hits app servers ✅.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

Venmo me and I’ll send you this PDF with my secret perfect tech stack for growing a 6 figure side business

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 years

beginners guide to delegating eng work "this sounds fun" -> give to someone else "fml" -> do it yourself

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

5 years

important life achievement. I now have written @golang in production for github dot com. Since I can only hold 2 languages in my brain at once. I am choosing to forget JavaScript. sorry JS.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

11 months

I see a lot of "how could that take so long?" on here from engineers who haven't yet experienced the joy of working on something "at scale". Here's a random example/fun memory.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

6 years

For GitHub interview I got to review a PR. Loved it. Reviewing code is part of the job. Quickly solving hacker rank problems is not.

Derek Prior

@derekprior

6 years

We’ve started doing this at thoughtbot recently and have thus far found it to be much more instructive than our previous in-person discussion of the candidate-provided code sample.

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Mike Coutermarsh

@mscccc

3 months

Remember when this was the ultimate status symbol in web design?

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