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thomasmcinnis.com
curr: Sydney 🇦🇺, enterprise software, old junior, meetup enjoyer (come to SydJS!), too much to learn prev: non-technical bootstrapped founder… got on the tools and never looked back
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Ahh so the difference between feeling rotten and amazing is simply going to the gym for 25 minutes hmmm not sure if I will internalise this information

Might fuck around and declare I’ve achieved AGI

drinking from this like I’ve found water after wandering the desert for months my need for some structure makes everything in here sound great

be still my beating heart

I keep trying to express this to people. Granted, I had to learn it the hard way, but doing the work *is* the work The learning happens in retrieval, not encoding. Pulling it out of your brain and applying it is the hard part and it’s the part that sucks, but it’s also the only part you can’t skip!

it is impossible to generate code comments from source code because good comments are definitionally based on things not in the source code (intent, counterfactuals, experiments, etc.)

Just seen two (2!) framework laptops at the airport - never seen any in the wild before

Someone who is good at databases can you please recommended books on databases or just sql for someone mostly sheltered from databases ok thanks

what frontend stack for building a SaaS today gives folks the most confidence about maintainability, reasonable speed to market, and solid client experience?? (yes I am aware I just said I want fast-good-cheap)

anyone need some imposter syndrome lmk I've got a bunch lying around I should really get rid of

When I was a kid I remember my dad teaching me how to play chess and it was one of the most boring days of my life

finally caved and installed linux on the pc... and just 1. a browser and 2. a terminal, and 3. an app launcher and now I'm thinking what have I been doing with my life? its perfect. it does what I ask it to do and that's it

hmmm see what you needed was `call-with-output-process` when you went and used `with-output-to process` you absolute fool, you imbecile

that feeling when you one-shot some working code mmmmmm why would I give this up to LLMs all the time, I need some dopamine for myself

why didn't anyone tell me the soundtrack to hackers absolutely fucks

Of course Vue has its own gotchas... but we're onboarding a new dev coming from React this week and he keeps saying "oh ok wow that's so much simpler..." when we go over reactivity and state management Vue is really nice

Haha, what the fuck?

Unironically picture #3 in this is good office design and I would deck out a HQ like this. Endless bookshelves and little nook office spaces not open plan.

just saw a webdev reddit post of someone asking how to implement something like the McMaster-Carr website into their Wordpress shop godspeed to that poor soul

yes

a 'second-brain' in note taking apps is alluring but really I just need my first brain to work read old notes in my obsidian and had no recollection of writing them or the grasp of the related knowledge switched to flashcards and everything sticks now, even content not on the cards

this thing was a joy... such janky software but I loved it

If you've ever found yourself confused by JavaScript's `this` keyword, do I ever have a two-part article coming up for you on @piccalil.li. This first one is the essential groundwork: you can't understand the _what_ of `this` without first understanding the _when_. piccalil.li/blog/javascr...

time to bring back socratic method discourse as part of the graded curriculum I guess

This is how I see it too. At every company I’ve worked at, we had all these ideas for things we wanted to do, but only like 20% of it got done because we had an engineering bottleneck. If each dev is 2x as productive (let’s just say), I don’t think that means you’d want 50% fewer devs.

We're doing a blog. It's still draft/tentative. If anyone has time for feedback: samthor.au/2025/collabo...

nothing makes me question my intelligence more than when I have to really deeply explicitly think about `this` in JS rather than relying on some rule of thumb

imagine we are all writing lisp instead

if you interview for JS and do something like ask to implement built-in methods (eg. array map), what are you looking for: to open the ECMA spec and deliver code that meets the spec, or to write their version of what they _think_ that method does?