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Jacob Voytko

@bitlog.com

Staff backend engineer at Hinge. Ex-Etsy, ex-Google. https://www.clientserver.dev -- my newsletter on software engineering and the tech industry

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08.09.2023
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Latest posts by Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com

This happened to me with Blue Prince.

The game's premise: Find the room

The achievements: Find the room in one day

Me: OK, it seems like I just need to use enough buttons until I find the room. I will now try to find this room

Everyone: This is the wrongest way you could possibly do it

26.01.2026 15:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I thought that I changed and started hating movies. Then I rewatched a bunch of movies from ~1998-2008 (my prime movie-watching years) and realized that movies and I have just grown apart since then.

21.10.2025 04:30 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Sucks to suck, get raptured next time

23.09.2025 05:05 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

In Google, you have bodies of litigated law instead of principles.

Principles are like "Be Googly" (i.e. "don't be a dick") and are widely ignored.

Laws are the tomes they have written about code quality and making services production ready, every word resulting from endless wars and bikeshedding.

07.09.2025 19:01 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Office Space meme template with Amir and Michael Bolton. Top text says "WHY SHOULD I STOP USING EM DASHES?". Bottom text says "GPT'S THE ONE WHO SUCKS"

Office Space meme template with Amir and Michael Bolton. Top text says "WHY SHOULD I STOP USING EM DASHES?". Bottom text says "GPT'S THE ONE WHO SUCKS"

I see a lot of people complaining that ChatGPT ruined em dashes for them, but I have taken a different approach.

04.09.2025 02:43 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Maybe it's just NYC, but if my wife and I did dinner and a movie it'd be north of $100 unless we grabbed falafel or something cheap. That's pretty steep especially for someone in their 20s, unless you land in tech or something like that.

03.09.2025 17:20 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I liked it a lot more when I started learning as much as I could on every round, instead of overly focusing on getting to the antechamber

03.09.2025 16:09 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

They didn't used to have service fees. I just pulled up a random receipt from 2019 and I had $21.35 of items and it came out to $26.48 after tax and tip. Now you'd have a delivery fee and service fee, which varies by time of day, so it's just noticeably a lot more than it used to be

12.07.2025 15:15 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Everyone laughs at New Jersey but we have "Born to Run" at the ready

22.06.2025 04:35 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Tag yourself, I'm "Strange Stones"

16.06.2025 03:47 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

* And remember: there’s more to life than tech. Fill your life with stories, not just side projects.

13.06.2025 18:05 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

* Learn how computers really work: OS, architecture, protocols.
* Understand where the industry is going. Right now? LLMs, agents, AI.
* Increase your luck surface area. Talk. Share. Meet. Post.
* Be curious. Be humble

13.06.2025 18:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve been coding since I was 14. I’ve worked at places like Google, Etsy, and now Hinge. Here’s what I said, distilled from 25 years of experience:

* Learn to code early.
* Don’t just take classes. Build something. Even small projects count.
* Get internships (or the closest thing you can).

13.06.2025 18:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
A staff engineer's advice to high schoolers who want to work in tech Are you a high school student interested in working in tech? Here's my advice as someone who has worked at everything from FAANG to research labs, and has been in the industry since 2008.

I got asked a simple question:

β€œWhat advice would you give a high schooler who wants to work in tech?”
I wasn’t planning to write anything this week. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

www.clientserver.dev/p/a-staff-en...

13.06.2025 18:05 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

99% of my naps are about 10 minutes. Every now and then I'll accidentally sleep an hour. My accidental nap record was around 4 hours.

10.06.2025 20:10 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I paid $50 for some new NES games 30 years ago. They were trash compared to what you can play today. We're blessed that games didn't keep pace with inflation.

10.06.2025 02:04 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Only thing that it's missing is matching Shin guards

03.06.2025 18:40 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

OK, this is a pretty solid take on LLMs.

03.06.2025 03:22 πŸ‘ 12 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

But I think the important takeaway is that even if you don’t have a lot of time, it’s possible to publish to a newsletter if you have a strategy. I’m not trying to convince you to run one… but if you just need a little push, I hope this post provides it.

29.05.2025 13:19 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

6 months ago, I got my first newsletter subscriber. Now I’m up above 260. This is a big deal for me, because after my daughter was born 2 years ago, I didn’t have any time for hobbies. Writing this newsletter was the first hobby that I was able to do for myself.

29.05.2025 13:19 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
You have the time to run a technical newsletter A dad's playbook for running a newsletter when you have very little free time.

A few people have asked, β€œhow do you have time to write a newsletter?” This post has my full playbook. What is my audience? How do I pick stories? Why is writing an outline so important? What do I do after a post is published? What would I do if I had more time?

www.clientserver.dev/p/you-have-t...

29.05.2025 13:19 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

On one hand, tools like Cursor are actual skills that require time and effort to learn. I've seen people drop out before they got good at it. But on the other hand, there are parts of my current codebase where I don't bother using it because it has no hope of doing anything right.

28.05.2025 14:19 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm personally excited to watch a tablet try to potty train a toddler.

21.05.2025 02:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Hinge dating app: A live map of the world. Little hearts pop up when there's a match

19.05.2025 19:41 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

These were widely mocked and mostly went away, except for some vestiges that remain like "hour-long meetings are booked for 50 minutes."

One team took advantage of the 50-minute meeting rule in an unexpected way. Read more to find out how!

15.05.2025 14:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.

My latest newsletter is trending on Hacker News!

It's a story from 2011 about how Larry Page tried enacting strict rules and conventions around meetings, in an attempt to get Google to stop slowing down.

www.clientserver.dev/p/malicious-...

15.05.2025 14:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Well, not anymore: this is one of the features that sudo-rs is removing.

In my post, I go in depth about historical security issues that sudo has faced, and explain the project motivations in more depth

13.05.2025 01:02 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

In the course of this, I also went on a long tangent in my research when I found out that sudo can *send mail*. Like, not just send mail to the Linux mail spool with scary messages about your login attempts being sent to the system administrator, it actually farms out jobs to sendmail.

13.05.2025 01:02 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

There are obvious reasons for wanting to do this: sudo's job is to safely escalate the permissions of single commands. So if an attacker can bypass this using memory safety issues, then there is no limit to the potential attack surface.

13.05.2025 01:02 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Ubuntu Is Betting Big on sudo's Rust rewrite Canonical is rolling out sudo-rs by default in Ubuntu 25.10, embracing Rust’s safety while shedding some of sudo’s legacy baggage

This week, I wrote about something that I found interesting in the Linux world: Ubuntu is actually replacing their implementation of sudo with a version written in Rust.

www.clientserver.dev/p/ubuntu-is-...

13.05.2025 01:02 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0