As of 2026, engineer for two decades, formal leader, including several years of executive management at high-growth start-ups and successfully acquired companies. Worked range of very small companies to huge enterprises. Passionate about growing teams, relationships, supporting the very human aspects of engineering organizations, and pushing them to appreciate and understand the businesses for which they're building. Will never stop coding and building, no matter how much further I progress on the leadership, management, and founder path.
Also, I love gardening. Check out https://app.squardener.com for a handy little garden planning app I built and maintain.
Another project I've built: https://github.com/jodacola/Tokenbrook
My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."
They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.
As an aside, I've seen folks mention respecting reduced animation hints and such in the past and was always curious about this because I've never had any negative experiences with animations... until now!
Something about the animations on this site did my brain in while scrolling through the papers, and now I "get it."
I don't get car sick looking at a screen in a car, but my daughter very quickly does. Excited to set this up for her to see if it helps her, especially with our annual US Independence Day car trip coming up.
Can this same idea be extrapolated to a device that emits concentrated beams onto the surface of a book?
I'm thinking of those clip-on lights for books that allow one to read in the dark, but for this purpose explicitly. My daughter also gets car sick reading paper books while in a moving vehicle.
Curious for folks who have made the switch I’m considering: if I swapped Claude Code to DeepSeek API pricing, would I get more bang for my buck compared to the $100 Max plan I’m using now?
I only hit the 5 hour limit every few days and the weekly limit a day or two before it resets at the most aggressive. I wouldn’t expect my usage to increase dramatically, other than not being stopped by limits.
I’m still apprehensive about shipping all my stuff off to a lab under an adversarial government (to the US), so not just looking at this from a pure cost basis, but my question is from the cost lens at the moment.
I would shell out cash right now for something like Opus on silicon, like what Taalas [0] has built for Llama 3.1.
Having lightning-speed, local inference of a super high-quality model would be incredible. If you haven't played with it, check out Taalas's demo [1].
Honestly, though - I have my doubts. Recurring revenue is just too nice to pass up; I'm sure AI companies wouldn't want me buying a dedicated Opus card and not giving them money for several years until there's something worth upgrading to.
Nice. Yeah, I was checking it out while drinking my coffee and thought I'd share the impact of the experience, because I'm sure you'd like folks to hang around and check it out more!
Very similar thing this week, and an interesting story to go along with it!
I called my normal HVAC company for my rental home because the tenant reported the AC wasn't cooling the house. When I called, I got one of the latest AI voice assistants to help me, and it was an awful experience and I ended up not hearing back after the assistant told me the office would call me back.
So, I went over to the house and used ChatGPT to help me diagnose the issue by taking some photos of the compressor panel outside. It walked me through what to check, I provided some diagnostic codes I witnessed... and it walked me through the very simple repair of replacing the $25 capacitor. It was going to cost me almost 4x that just for the service call to diagnose what was wrong in the first place.
So, the weird experience was: Gen AI made me lose trust in my normal HVAC company, and more Gen AI basically allowed me to replace my HVAC company and do the repair myself all in one day.
It is. I don’t have opened up to the wide internet, but it’s still super convenient to have it on my tailnet, which all my other devices are on, so I can review and manage repos wherever I am, while operating with the privacy of a self-hosted GitHub-like experience.
I've been an avid GitHub user for a very long time.
I remember way back in the "olden days" in San Francisco seeing people with Octocat signs on Market. GitHub was awesome. Fond memories.
But times are a-changin', and for lots of reasons I just don't feel like GitHub is cool or "for me" anymore.
So, with my new Mac Mini, because they were on sale and everyone was getting one for OpenClaw... I put that puppy on my tailnet, installed Gitea, and I've been using it exclusively for all my projects. It's been weeks since I've pushed anything to GitHub.
I won't over-generalize here, because maybe your statement is true in some cases, but I will provide a counterpoint: this is not true (in my experience) in real estate title insurance and escrow services.
I've consulted for and led large teams for real estate title insurance and escrow companies for many years, and the domain expertise is so incredibly deep, nuanced, and multivariate (especially depending on jurisdiction) that building valuable and viable products in the space is incredibly difficult - before LLMs, and even now, with LLMs.
Without getting too deep into it, I'm pretty bullish on AI (and have been very close to it and deep in it for a long time, while also very apprehensive about the effects it'll have on society), and I can tell you, from extensive attempts from myself and many on my teams to leverage the latest frontier LLMs to bring deep domain experience to bear to help drive valuable products: we have not yet seen success. It's not helping engineering folks, it's not helping product folks. It's creating a ton of questionable output and hasn't resulted in real ROI, and it's not capable of accurately answering deep domain questions without hallucinations or assuming what works in one jurisdiction works in all.
I've seen success in many other areas, but not this domain - and, importantly, the regulatory environment in which title insurance operates is incredibly complex and strict, meaning you can't just YOLO LLM output into production (as much as we'd love to try so we can learn at a faster clip).
And the kicker: we've found the way for us to build the best products is still going out into the field, sitting with escrow and title folks, watching them work, asking them questions, and designing for the real world, the regulatory nuances, the local client nuances, etc. You can't get that from an LLM.
> It makes me wonder(i'm korean): how would a Westerner react if they saw me romanticizing the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain? They’d probably find it strange and out of touch with reality.
Quite the opposite - for me, anyway.
FWIW, as a Westerner, I find the Mondragon Corporation to be fascinating and something I've read a lot about because there's no way we've figured out the ideal sort of setup for a business (or government, or any sort of human organization, given appropriate context) in the year 2026.
We have a lot to learn, and while "different" doesn't always mean "better," I strongly believe being exposed to "different" is necessary for us to devise novel approaches to human organization.
Enjoyed this article, but was immediately distracted into another rabbit hole from the editor's note on the time zone, which I hadn't heard before:
> If you’d like to pinpoint the instant when the world entered the nuclear age, 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time on 16 July 1945
So, I went digging because time zones have been a weird fascination for me due to dealing with all their annoyances as an engineer, and found this article from 2019 [0]!
From the article:
> In February 1942, Congress implemented a law instating a national daylight saving time to help conserve fuel and "promote national security and defense," which is why it was nicknamed "war time." The time zones were even known as that: Eastern War Time, Pacific War Time, etc.
Random fun fact (?): I had a little project I let run all of last year which pulled down bills from Congress.gov's APIs and ran them through an LLM to summarize the bills and attempt to provide different political viewpoints, along with some image generation, ultimately resulting in something resembling X or Threads, but fully simulated - as though the House or Senate was "posting" bills they put forth and "people" from different political camps were responding with their thoughts.
I found that for 2025, on average, it took about 20 days for a bill to be posted before its text was made available via Congress' APIs. Sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes almost immediate... but 20 days on average last year.
I learned a lot about congressional processes and such through the project, like this[0] really cool flow chart about the legislative steps (recommend viewing the tiff and really zooming in on the details), with the action codes[1], which is data that can come from the APIs[2].
Is that a subtle 5th Element reference in the crontab?
This is fun!
The following isn’t a knock on anyone doing cool stuff like this: I’ve avoided any sort of tinkering and automation of my gardening because I find gardening to be a slower-moving, meditative escape from technology. My brain shifts into a different mode (almost a flow state?) when I’m out working in the soil and tending to my plants.
Have had success at work, real value, real results.
Example: extracting a bunch of data from a tool we’re required to use at my company for getting a bunch of performance metrics. The data is useful but the interface is awful and it’s impossible to pull out trends and spot the real information I need from it. So, I threw Claude at it after months of dreaming of being able to better use the data. It generated for me in a few minutes all the data I could hope for in a CSV I was able to load into another tool that gave me deep insights almost immediately and allowed me to go make some different decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have.
What I did:
1. I have created and curated a set of sub-agents and commands/workflows for building things for me.
2. I used my build command, which details a workflow for refining, planning, implementing, code reviewing, testing, then conducting a final “product review” to determine if original requirements were met.
3. I then review the code myself before running it.
The code was solid (I’m also a very strong engineer and have tailored my agents and workflows to generate code I’d be comfortable with).
Another example: one of my teams went on a journey to convert one of our internal legacy frontend applications to a newer shared component library and eliminate old cruft that we inherited when we inherited the codebase.
The team was able to get this massive UI rewrite done in under two weeks, the updated code was better than the original code (it was all React to React, TypeScript to TypeScript), and we eliminated (literally) hundreds of thousands of lines of old hand-written over-abstracted code. Bundle sizes dramatically down, higher performance, more modern UX, and the thing is in production and working. Real value: faster product iteration in this now far smaller and easier-to-work-with codebase, far less technical debt, and faster builds, etc.
The team only used GitHub Copilot for this and it required a bunch of iteration and starting over with different instructions, but they got there and still managed to save a ridiculous amount of time; hand-writing the UI migration would have been one of those multi-month projects that went over schedule (I’ve seen and lived that movie many times before).
I’m still very skeptical of all the hype but I’ve seen very real, very valuable results out of this stuff.
This is so cool. Also, it sounds like a cheeky plot to a zombie apocalypse or global contagion movie.
How subtle are the flavors? Unsubtle enough that an oblivious taster might ask, "Does this bread taste like grapes to anyone else here?" Or does one need guidance to search for the flavor?
Also, I love gardening. Check out https://app.squardener.com for a handy little garden planning app I built and maintain.
Another project I've built: https://github.com/jodacola/Tokenbrook