justin․searls․co

I joined Twitter in 2007 and my brain slowly morphed over the next 15 years from hopelessly verbose to nihilistically pithy. I've kicked the Twitter habit, but the takes keep flowing. That's why I post them here and format them as a social network of one. They're also cross-posted to my Mastodon account. You're welcome to bookmark any of these takes, though I'm not sure why you would.

By the way, the hearts and like counts are fake. They're just there to make you feel safe.


Decided to "treat myself" and pull in a third party dependency to render breadcrumb links in this new app I'm building. Apologies to future me for when this inevitably breaks someday! I was being lazy.

In hindsight, when I was under a lot of pressure to drop CoffeeScript a decade
ago in favor of "modern" JavaScript (defined as using tools like babel and
webpack), I wish I'd held my ground.

Without a doubt I'd be better off today if I'd just gone straight from CoffeeScript to real ESM and import maps. Just spent three hours dealing with bitrot in a webpack config with no end in sight. The JavaScript Dream was always a house of cards.

A weird consequence of Japan spanning a single time zone is that lots of apps stop working outside business hours for "maintenance".

I lost an hour today freaking out over error messages that my account was locked right around 11pm JST because (I now realize) their servers were only partially shut down.

Feels weird knowing—100%, not a doubt in my mind, knowing—that humanity will have cured cancer before it creates a system that can autonomously maintain an accurate inventory of the food available in one's kitchen.

Just realized it's much more acceptable to say I'm too busy writing to have time for reading than it is to admit I'm too busy talking to have time for listening.

Until yesterday, I had never heard anyone but me in the Ruby community express confusion over the fact that Rails produced both paper_trail the audit log gem and Papertrail the logging SaaS.

But seriously, how the hell did everyone else keep these straight in conversation? (My bet is that they didn't, actually)

One of the most valuable things about writing automated tests is that they force you to run your code very many times in very many ways.

It's important to understand this is not a value of testing per se, though, and that there are other valid ways to achieve the same goal.