Jon George

Love this ❤️ Enjoy!

I feel this with every new domain 😂

Try something, eat concrete, try again with a 3 degree adjustment. CSS just bruises your ego instead of your knees

I confess. I've collected 6 ThinkPads over the years. Every time I get a new laptop, I swear I'm going to sell the old one. I will, eventually.
#ThinkPad

Every architecture disagreement I've been in comes down to the same thing, people optimizing for different risks without realizing it. Enterprise is thinking about strategic risk. Solutions is thinking about delivery risk. Technical is thinking about engineering risk.

#SoftwareArchitecture

Leaving a JetBrains IDE feels like canceling a gym membership. Loving Zed right now tho. Now all my adjacent tools feel negotiable. Dangerous energy 😈

LLM conversation where the model apologizes for hallucinating a vulnerability in a nonexistent search bar, then immediately describes the same vulnerability in a nonexistent form

Asked an LLM to hack my website. It found a critical vulnerability in a search bar that doesn't exist. I said "there's no search bar." It said "You're absolutely right!" and then found the same vulnerability in a form that also doesn't exist. The confidence never wavered 😂

There's something satisfying about finishing a big refactor that you wrote by hand and rereading it a few times. Not to check it, just to look at it. Code can be beautiful and I'm not embarrassed about caring 😆

Stop worrying about AI replacing you. Instead focus on (you + AI) > (others + AI)

The five dimensions of cognitive work We track lines of code, tickets closed, PRs merged. Nobody tracks the four hours you spent holding a system in your head to find a one line of code fix.

The hardest work in software engineering is invisible. It's not tracked on any dashboard. Just someone holding a system in their head for hours to find a one line code fix. Wrote about why we need better language for cognitive work.

jg.dev/writing/the-five-dimensions-of-cognitive-work

Hello, Kettlebrook! A new town. A fresh start. The rest is up to you.

I'm making my first video game. It's called Hello, Kettlebrook, a cozy game about moving to a new town, doing odd jobs, and finding where you belong. I have zero experience. Let's go! #cozygames #indiedev #devlog #gamedev

Experienced developers are losing the habit of reading what they ship. This is a security risk. The old model assumed the author understood every line. That assumption is gone and nothing has replaced it yet.

The heart of orbital mechanics: Kepler's equation. *Real-time* positions!

121 lines of Go implementing 400-year-old math. Throwback when I compared my calculated planet positions with @NASA graphics.

Look carefully: it's a match! 🥳

#buildinpublic #astronomy #physics #gamedev

Love this! It blows my mind that most of our math foundations came from an era with no laptops, computers, or AI.

Sounds like you were well prepared! Hope it went smoothly!

If you’re stuck using legacy technologies at work, how do you grow?

Just realized that I'll never have to start writing code in a blank file again. Not sure if I'm happy or sad about that 🤔

Added RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds to jg.dev tonight. The feed package by @jpmonette.net made it incredibly easy. Good way to end the day.
jg.dev/feed.xml

My biggest challenge right now is stopping my brain from coming up with ideas and focusing on the priorities.

Thinking about implementing RSS on my personal website. Do people still use RSS feeds?

4AM thought: Keyboard shortcuts are just vim with better PR

Prompt engineering process loop that changed how I work:

1. describe what you want in plain language
2. have the model generate a structured prompt for it
3. use that prompt.

The results are consistently better than hand written prompts. The model is better at talking to itself than you are.

Am I the only one that thinks mixing JS/TS code with HTML (i.e. JSX/TSX) is ugly?

This is the best kind of learning. One of the reasons I love setting up a home lab is it encompasses so many facets of IT - software, networking, security, administration, storage, etc. There is no substitute for getting hands on.

That’s true. Half the comments on my PRs now are “why did you accept this approach” not “this has a bug.” The review has become a design discussion.

You didn’t write the code in your pull request, you reviewed it. The person that reviews pull requests is now reviewing your review. We’ve invented meta code review lol

There’s a specific kind of grief when a tool you built your whole workflow around announces it’s pivoting to AI

The sad state of software engineering research

There's a whole category of software that exists because someone looked at a spreadsheet and said "this should be an app" 😅

Kotlin is so much more developer friendly than Java. I'm never going back, neverrrrrr