Engagement-maxxing!

Damn, you got me!

I made fun of vibe-code-clean-up specialists and boy was I wrong. Af. The most challenging project I've worked on so far this year is a vibe-coded app that's been launched and has paying customers. 1. No history in git for a LOT of changes that just got written directly on a box 2. So many markdown files "explaining" how this works... that conflict with one another 3. No type-safety 🥲 4. YOLO migrations with no schema history or ability to easily rollback 5. Staging? What's that? 6. Tests? What are those? It's an amazing product and vibing out the the MVP was the correct choice. Now it's my mess to clean up. Overhelmed but excited.

Hiring in the SF Bay Area is hard af. I'm a software dev with access to FDE and AI engineer roles in the bay area. (also mobile/fullstack) (also Austin/NY) All I'm looking for is someone who: 1. Lives in area and can go to an office sometimes 2. Builds agents, knows RAG and has shipped 1 or both 3. Isn't weird... no disrespect yo 4. Knows how to code with and (importantly) WITHOUT AI 5. Likes a big fat bag Degrees and certs don't matter. DM me but please, understand I'm taken and my feet pics are more than you can afford.

On this season of LinkedIn Lunatics: AI bro replaces his entire dev team with AI. Discovers why engineering teams exist. Five-product indie hacker explains how software engineers are obsolete. Struggles to reach $1K MRR. Junior developer declares coding solved. Cannot find job. CEO of a company with one employee teaches you how to scale an organization. LinkedIn influencer who has never worked as a software developer explains exactly how to become a software developer. VC announces that SaaS is dead. Invests in SaaS company. Founder ships 47 AI features. Still looking for first customer. Will the AI slop continue? Will anyone actually make any money? Will a software engineer be hired? Find out this season on… LinkedIn Lunatics.

The best developers I ever worked with all happened to be excellent communicators. I think in this current era, the ability to articulate yourself will be even more valuable.

Mostly the AI slop comments. Feature-wise: easy apply.

I for sure work weekends BUT, I prefer when teammates keep this to themselves otherwise it kinda feels like an expectation is being set. Some of us have no lives, OK.

Does every business ad on the main street in your town look like this now? Ya know, @canva isn't that hard to use.

Fuck it, I’ll be a vibe code clean up specialist. This weekend I worked on 2 apps from non-technical coders. I respect their bravery: Tests: 0 Evals: 0 Branches: So fuckin many UI: purple af But honestly… they made more useful stuff than 99.7% of the coders I’ve met.

If I was a full stack dev early in my career, I’d be learning the following things (doubly so if I lived in SF or NY) - RAG (vector stores, chunking, reranking) - Agent architecture (human in the loop, ReAct, orchestrator) - Evals (kinda like e2e for AI systems) - Agentic coding (Claude, Cursor, etc) The era of “learn React and get a fat bag” is over. Companies are hiring for the skills I listed and most devs are only doing the last skill on it 🤷 Don’t overthink it. Here’s a free project I made for above average looking developers to learn RAG: parsity.io/ai-with-rag

I feel like we need to normalize that. I like that our team lead explicitly says "Claude created this" which doesn't diminish all the thinking/planning/review behind it, but yeah, I haven't typed code for quite a while at this point.

That was really fun to make and I was honestly on the fence about the exercise part but I know how much it’s helped me. Thanks so much for the shout out!

This year I got laid off, hired, quit and hired again. Good content but a tid-bit stressful Just a tad. A smidge. I talk about it here with some takeaways I hope you find helpful if you’re on the hunt open.spotify.com/episode/6Ua…

My best networking hack? Get a podcast. I recently interviewed one of my favorite tech YouTubers @jherr who shares tips for junior devs learning React and JS, his takes on the tech content creator space and how he deals with dyslexia. piped.video/883nvJWd7n0

A couple years ago I started making challenges for JS devs who want to learn the hard stuff. Migrations, unit tests, caching strategies and all the stuff that you usually learn by trial and error. It isn't great for beginners but if you actually do the projects, you're going to learn a hell of a lot. JavaScriptProsApp.com

Oddly enough, it's rare I'm working on files I don't want to commit. I always run a `git status` beforehand 🤷

I own a coding bootcamp and I'll admit that everything we teach can be learned online. There are 420 tutorials on React, NextJS, Node and AWS released just this week. I don't advertise this as much - but what you're really paying for is the career change. Learning to code is easier than it's ever been. Being a hire-able developer is incredibly difficult. What any good program/course/school/mentor will do is curate the path from "I know a little code" to HIRED for you so you so you're not stuck on a learning hamster wheel of doom.

“Been rejected after 4+ rounds of interviews four times now (and counting). Applied to over 100 jobs, been auto rejected by about half, despite meeting all the qualifications.” “The market is brutal right now - brutal. Over saturation…” These aren’t quotes from software engineers or coding bootcamp grads. I ripped these off Reddit this morning from people in sales. The market kinda sucks for everyone. You can't time it. Sharpen your skills while the get-rich-quick-kids fall off and you'll be ready when things turn around.

Got laid off at the end of March. I just verbally accepted an offer yesterday (not sure if I will take it 🤫) Here are some themes I noticed that continue to come up in my job searches, including this one: - Working with recruiters is key. All my interviews came from recruiters - basically none from cold applying - LinkedIn easy apply kinda works but it's like playing the lotto. I used Hired.com to get the best traction - Interviews were a mix of code challenges and stories to prove I knew my stuff. These stories always come up: * Interesting project * Leadership example * Driving change or introducing a process * Conflict resolution - Glassdoor, Reddit and Blind can really improve your chances of nailing an interview - Writing down the company values and inserting them into the convo is helpful - I still use Pramp.com to get over my nerves Hope that's helpful.