Jacob
@fat
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worst engineer at the company, third coolest. https://t.co/tD9KZibMq7
Joined September 2008
last weekend pierre [dot] co went down for a bit – this felt bad. But also a good time to add git blame??. And then i made a dumb video about it.
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Google docs needs to GIVE IT UP with these page breaks. I'm tired. Noone is printing this shit.
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This summer we went into a hole and rewrote the bulk of Pierre off of RSC and onto a local first sync-engine called Replicache. It's… really fast.
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WOW. okay. You can now just SIGNUP for Pierre [dot] co. No waitlist, just a button. To commemorate this, we built a new website, new brand, have new funding, and changed our legal name to Pierre Computer Company, Inc. More details below (here’s a video of the website).
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ALRIGHT SOMEHOWWWW im getting really hype on CI which is not something I thought would ever happen. So here's some of the stuff we're doing…. 1) Jobs are written in typescript (not yaml). And the api looks like it was written by js nerds instead of people that fucking hate js.
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my kink is i can only work on a couch in the most fucked up position imaginable, with a battery perpetually at 5% AND i have to be staring across the room at a perfectly good, ergo desk setup, with external monitor, ring light, etc. that i never use.
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Imo the source of truth for the visuals of your app isn’t design files anymore. It isn’t in figma. It’s code. Specifically design systems. The best product teams in the world aren’t sweating pixel perfect mocks or handoffs. They’re staffing up and wrangling design systems.
We launched Dev Mode last year to make @Figma work better for developers and I’m so excited for the new features shipping next week. They will speed up handoff and help keep design and dev in closer sync. More details before these features go live Jan 31!.
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Imagine a tool built from the ground up ✨JUST for product engineers ✨. What would that even look like? How would it be different from what’s already out there? . Excited to start showing off a bit more of our story and what we’ve been up to on A 🧵
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So w/ Pierre, we've been rethinking A TON around discussion & code reviews. FIRST, everything is character based instead of line based. Turns out things become super clear when you can actually just highlight what you want to talk about. Spelled this wrong? Refactor these lines?
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in hypergrowth, it's unlikely you get promo'd as an IC as quickly as inflation around leveling happens. this means older tenured employees are artificially down leveled over time or have to "work harder" for the same level. interesting how the opposite is often true for managers.
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OKAYY TODAY WE’RE HYPE TO FINALLY BE INTRODUCING **BLENDED DIFFS** ON PIERRE!!. WTF is a blended diff???. Engineers have been viewing code changes the same way since basically the 70’s, with unix operating systems and printed out code reviews. At Pierre, we’re changing that. 🧵
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nice how anytime I start entertaining the idea of starting a company again I have these old videos where last time around I was very clearly on the edge of a psychotic break
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discord has been SUCH a massive upgrade over slack for remote work for our small team. The ability to fluidly move in/out of video chat all day and shoot the shit is the closest proxy to in office work I've found.
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So… I recently had a kid and quickly realized I fucking hate cocomelon… so I did what any nerd would do and started building my own kids app (except mine trades stale 3d and wheels-on-a-bus, for weird cat drawings and 808 beats).
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The more I’ve been processing the more convinced I am that the first technical things AI will truly displace are low level things like design systems (and eventually other canonical libraries - react, svelte, etc).
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✨OKAY…… finally time to talk about what I’ve been working on for a minute… a few of us have been heads down building an ENTIRELY NEW dev platform (like github/gitlab) from the ground up… and it’s pretty great. FUCKING difficult lol. But pretty great.
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ALRIGHT. WHAT IS PIERRE [dot] CO??!??!. One of our users in discord asked me to make a video they could share with their colleagues……… turns out im still either the best or worst at video.
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okay this is SOOO SICK to me…. New user Ronny signs up for Pierre, and notices a typo in the new Pierre CLI… and let’s us know in discord (bless this man <3). And so i stop what i'm doing, push a new branch ***AND SHARE IT WITH HIM***. Ronny, who's not on our team, can now view
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Saying modern art today is crap, is just lazy. There's amazing new artists, just takes a lot of sifting through noise to find. Finding classic art that's incredible is *really easy* because a hundred+ years of filtering the best stuff to the top has already happened by museums.
The people who think modern art and architecture are crap are often right. But then they undermine their own case by picking terrible examples of "good" old stuff. They can't resist a Victorian pastiche.
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@iamharaldur @OnnuJonuSon if you weren't such a good person, it would be annoying how talented you are. good shit.
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I feel like @nateparrott is a whole step level above the rest of the industry at interaction design right now. And he's SHIPPING, it's not just demoware. Early Loren Brichter levels of fuck you up.
Maybe my favorite feature we’ve ever shipped:. Pinch on any website in the Arc Search app — like you’re pinching 🤏 to zoom out — and we’ll fold it down (origami-style) to summarize the page for you!. Feels SO GOOD & saves so much time when people text you links on the go!
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A few of you asked for this – so Ian did an ENORMOUS deep dive on the technical aspects of our data rewrite / migration… Worth a read if you're doing local-first or considering replicache…
This summer we went into a hole and rewrote the bulk of Pierre off of RSC and onto a local first sync-engine called Replicache. It's… really fast.
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A HUGE part of code reviews is actually describing/setting context for the code you're changing. And w/ we've been EXTREMELY rounding out this experience lately… to the point that I'm finally starting to prefer our editor for all of my technical writing.
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As an engineer @arcinternet continues to win me over by providing the absolute best in class js/css animation perf. Period. The web just *feels* better on arc – and as a dev, it makes me want to spend the extra hour crafting great UX. 👏. MEANWHILE safari… visceral pain 😭.
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absolute shittest feature of 2021 was google meets hand raise feature. built my entire career on bullying, interrupting, and talking over people.
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It took me basically an entire year of deving with next 13+ to finally figure out a data model that seems to work w/ realtime / dynamic apps. The biggest issue i was having was in most systems i've worked with I've always thought as the server as the source of truth re: data. In.
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OKAY @jorilallo it's not on the home page – BUT we do have a p fun lil dynamic island for approval flows (and another one for merge flows) in APP. We've been SOOO super stingy w/ animation in Pierre – but we're all obsessed with how natural this one feels.
@fat Good site but I was really hoping for some dynamic island action in the header!.
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SOMEHOW Pierre's new sidebar is one of my fav features ever??. Having your logged in experience be all about your company / team, the repos you use everyday, and the work you're actually developing… feels SO extremely nice. No more memorizing urls, hunting for your teams work…
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Everything we're doing with Pierre is built on git. IMO Git got a ton right, and the next iteration of version control will innovate on the UX Layer (on top of git). We're already seeing this today with Meta's sapling project and google's jj. Modern tools, w/ no migrations.
@fat What's the backend for pierre? Is it git or a custom vcs?. It would be great if this worked with existing repos on GitHub directly, wouldn't need to change remotes but could switch teams to use a new code review process more easily - much lower barrier of entry.
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there are 2 types of people in this world, make your co-founder the other one
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FUN one w/ Pierre today. We're now generating a "Time to Review" on EVERY code review and suggestions / prompts on how authors can ACTUALLY reduce code review times!
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OKAY… next.js has *the* most INSANE prod only bug i can't figure out. Anyone have any tips on how to debug something like this?? . Next/Link is for sure throwing a promise that is never getting resolved… but i have no idea why and no clue how to debug next/link in prod.
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Last month we shipped this thing I'm obsessed with that we've been calling "Magic Branches"… basically entirely generative, collaborative surfaces that we spin up for ALL changes at push time. (Think @arcinternet's mobile pinch summaries… but on `git push` for any change you
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THE WEBSITE -> It’s very good. You should go scroll it. Nick and Devin (@devinjacoviello @narrowd) did things i didn’t know were possible on the internet. We’re still processing them. We will be sharing more about them/this (next week-ish). OUR STORY ->.
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Some quick notes for the nerds:. 1. We still use RSC - but only for things it’s good at. Realtime, mutable data is NOT one of those things. 2. Is it possible to realtime with RSC? 100%. But it takes a lot of tuning to get right, is very difficult to maintain, and ultimately our.
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In my entire career, I've never fought with a single piece of tech as much as I have RSC. The amount of staff+ level eng we've thrown at it over the last 2 1/2 years to try to make sense of it… is honestly depressing.
So far my experience with RSC is that it's all very simple and awesome until I need optimistic UI. Then one component turns into 3, data loading moves out to parent components then passed down as props and new contexts are needed. No opinion yet, but dislike the big code shuffle.
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So we've been working on a THING. WHICH IS *INSANELY* COOL TO ME…. Basically in Pierre you can now continue your code review conversations across descriptions, diffs, AND NOW LIVE PREVIEWS
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what if code reviews didn't let you type words anymore. you just had to take a photo of your face and hoped it conveyed enough "you fucked up" energy… or "pls revisit this" energy
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OKAY… Last week on Pierre we started to roll out the beginnings of what we've been calling "✨Magic Branches"… basically automatic categorization and summarization of any code change at push time. Here's a quick thread showing some details and why we're EXTREMELY excited 🧵
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At twitter we used to wear this giant foam cowboy hat when fire fighting incidents / fail whales… idk if remote / in person is better for peoples health or output - but I DO KNOW this giant foam cowboy hat I’ve been wearing around my house alone doesn’t quite hit the same.
All these takes about remote being bad for your career are quite frankly, a skill issue. If you have to be in person to collaborate all the time, all that says to me is that you don't know how to communicate your ideas or work well with others. 🤷🏾♂️.
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I've been obsessing about onboarding lately (which i know can be the most boring shit ever)…. BUT i'm stuck on this idea… what if signing up for pierre just meant going to any existing git repo and running:. $ npx pierre
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Fun one @npekker cooked up for the holiday…. Rolling out today on @pierredotco, teams now have a sidebar that shows who's online, and what branches they're working on / reviewing. Game changer for easily finding what's in flight, who to ping for review, and more…
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Quick one we rolled out this morning…. **Inline suggestions** – powered by an ~ACTUAL~ code editor 😅. Something I've wanted for a LONG time. Highlight just the code you want changed, edit it, and submit the patch. Author can accept or dismiss in 1-click.
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Starting Pierre and getting a chance to work closely with some of my favorite people again has me thinking a TON about the best archetypes to build with. And I decided my ideal team is made up of neurotic, blurry / multi disciplinary ICs (prob in that order).
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We've been slipping so many little details like this into @pierredotco lately…. I think i've been looking at the same diff text for almost 15 years at this point and I still have no clue what ```@@ -173,7 + 196,6 @@``` even means…
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Working with people you've known / worked with for a long time is honestly the single biggest cheat code. You just naturally slot in so well together and can get sooo much done so fast.
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havent written code in 4 months. keep expecting something to happen that makes me want to use a computer again.
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This is the right take. Code review culture has gotten hilariously bad / extremist. Your best engineers are already rubber stamping their peers. IMO, like pairing, code reviews should be a tool, not a mandate.
This might be heresy but:.1. Code reviews are a massive productivity tax with tiny quality benefits.2. They should not be mandated.3. The author should feel free to request a review if they want it.4. If you don't trust your engineers, invest more in CI, or hire better ones.
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More bearish than ever on human intelligence. More bullish than ever on human taste.
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This is a good take… seems like commits (manual save points) are really only still happening in engineering (every other platform has moved to streaming auto save points)…. Dream workflow is still something closer to jj – start a branch, let me work (while something is.
Hot take but commit messages are almost entirely useless. Just turn on squashing, write great descriptions, and git commit -m "BONK".
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hate to see it
Click through to see what 10 years of open source in the React ecosystem does to you
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We've been working on this thing internally for a few weeks now we're calling "continuous branching"… imagine iteratively shipping from the same collaborative surface over time. All your comments, context, etc. are persisted. It's ~completely~*~ changed how i build software.
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me: no sequoia i don't need to hire someone to help with MARKETING. also me: *weeeyooooo weeeyooooo*
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SOO many CI tasks are easily generalized (especially for product engineers). Starting today when you signup for Pierre, our CLI automatically detects common tools you might already be relying on like Prettier, Typescript, Eslint, or even @vercel & then automatically sets CI up.
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css will always be my favorite. And while things are definitely nicer now because there's often "a right way" to do things…. There was something magical about bending the language w/ fucked up hacks to get it to do something new / novel. Curious if there's every been a.
How the hell did we layout in CSS before Flexbox?.
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I've been obsessed with this idea since reading @RickRubin's book. Building for yourself is art, building for others is commodity. Which is why watching Mitchell work on ghostty is the fucking best. Him nerding out on pr descriptions cracks me up. You can't not feel the joy.
I talk to a disappointingly large amount of people that cannot comprehend that I can work on something for the joy of it and not any long term financial play.
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wow figma got so good since i last used it. almost ready to be a designer again.
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ok this is a half baked thought but… has the javascript toolchain gotten so good that it's making engineers shittier? . kinda like how google maps made me not know how to get to the grocery store.
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pierre team headed to the office today.
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We wrote some words about our "brand" journey with Pierre [dot] co. We have some opinions. Yes, there's a giant disapproving Steve.
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The cool thing about all this is it isn’t just another GitHub clone. We’re *actually* rethinking all of these old primitives… BUT we’d love your help. If this space is interesting to you and you want to see what we’re building OR kick the tires… DM ME! 😇.
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prompt engineering being the next wave continues to be hilarious to me. all you left brained engineers, who built your career on rational, analytical and logical thinking… RIP 🪦. The future api is lazy, inconsistent, and literally responds best when you send it a :).
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This is something we've flirted with at Pierre as well from the CI side… should you really have to wait to run tests AGAIN in the cloud on git push to "Pass CI" – or could we just run jobs locally and cryptographically sign / verify their status🤔.
The fact that mainstream developer laptops now ship with 16-core, 3nm CPUs is one of those THE PREMISE CHANGED fundamentals when you contrast to the 2-4 core CPUs we were running a decade ago. Time to reconsider some fundamentals of where things run, how, and when.
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One collaborative surface, with many rich, multiplayer note fields for each iteration of your work (each w/ full comment, embed, etc. support). Absolute unfair to be able to go from 0-1 on multi-editor support in a single day. prosemirror, tiptap, etc. are literally cheating.
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OKAY… Starting to be able to do some really cool shit with our branch editor… like being able to embed live figma's, tweets, youtube videos, etc…. If you were rethinking code reviews from scratch what are some other features you wished you had?
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Absolutely HUGE ship from @mdo. From writing, to visuals, to code 😮💨.
Writing docs—and the code that powers them!—is always a fun project. After being heads down for a couple weeks, we've shipped all new docs for @pierredotco. MDX galore and some fun design elements. Read all about it and check 'em out at
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IMO Jared has exactly the right take. And most people knee deep in building with AI *should* have a similar one. The best UX for AI HAS to bake unreliability into it (we recently heard this same thing from @hursh at Browser co). LLMs, unlike traditional programs, are.
Even if we get 10x better reasoning in the next wave of models, I see 2 major problems that will likely delay agents being real: cost and reliability. In the current prompt-in-text/data-out, costs are already brutal on frontier models to the point where product margins are.
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On @pierredotco we just rolled out a new flavor of an old feature that we're calling "Drafts"…. Drafts are meant to be a home for your writing, as an engineer. Write a quick note for later, manage a personal todo list, or even evolve something more formal like a TDD with
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I can't decide if I've just given up inside, knowing ai is going to refactor all this trash I'm writing in 6 months. or if it's something else. but im definitely writing the shittiest code of my career.
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Instead would love to see figma start building *their* creative suite. Specifically, imagine a figma engineering tool? Built from the ground up? With the same figma principles? And built to be interoperable w their design tool….
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It's shit like this which is why I always tell people working with @mdo on Pierre is actually just cheating…. Not only do I not have to explain eng primitives like diffs, branches, etc. to our "designer", but this isn't even his first holistic design pass on diffs 😮💨.
✏️ I wrote a little post about how we designed and shipped blended diffs in @pierredotco. If you haven't seen them yet, def give it a read—we're working to reimagine how we build products and a better diff experience is just a small (and rad!) step.
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someone needs to write plugin called sage that just drives all the bad energy out of this codebase that clearly hates me.
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idk about performance but bun and deno logos are definitely way cuter than whatever hexagon shit is going on with node.
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4. Ok this one is just for fun in Figma land, but imagine being able to eventually add things like custom actions to annotations (self heal type failures, convert todo's to linear ticket, etc).
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listen to us talk about our react native transition at coinbase. if you're considering re-platforming away from native tech (particularly in a large eng org), could be an interesting listen
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so making Ian admin on our server might not have been the *best* choice i've made as ceo
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One of the BIGGEST bottlenecks we hear from people using GitHub/GitLab everyday is waiting on reviews 😪. And this makes sense because these notifications are representative of over 10+ years, several companies, open source projects and an entire opensource community with your @
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Main takeaway from the openAI event is in a world of AI agents (Custom GPTs) it's a mistake for single teams to focus on BOTH the UI and AI tech. IMO focus on just UI and build the platform that enables multi competing agents OR focus on the agent and make it multi-platform.
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who's drawing these animals. i want this job when im done writing code. im got some trauma to work out.
I bought this book like 4 years ago and I hate it, it's so overrated. It's too high-level for actually implementing anything. Probably it's good if you're a PM and want to expand your breadth of knowledge. I don't think it's actually good for engineers
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I have such complicated feels on this. IMO open source has been broken for a long time (mb forever). Injection of capital just means different problems. Signaling that in someway things were great before is… not quite right.
I think VC companies might have ruined open source. Or at the very least changed it forever. Devs baseline expectations for OSS seems to now be beyond what is possible with people doing it in free time. At least for anything beyond very simple libraries. It’s not necessary.
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Also fun fact everything was built in react native with reanimated 2…. Which has been shockingly performant - even with my 9mos old trying to eat the iPad. It’s probably the most impressive animated RN perf app I’ve seen tbh
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