Viewing profile — DavidMcLaughlin

A/B testing is very, very different to handing over control of your content to a reward function that optimizes for time spent over any other criteria. We had 10 years+ plus of hav…

He posted about it here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/sponsorship/

Cloud Platform @ Twitter | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE We're looking for engineers to come work on Twitter's Cloud Platform team in downtown San Francisco. All of Twitter's stateles…

You know there are places where they use Teslas as taxis right? I was picked up in a Tesla at the standard Schipol Airport taxi line.

Twitter | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE We're looking for engineers to come work on Twitter's Cloud Platform team. The majority of this work revolves around develo…

We're hiring at Twitter (San Francisco, CA - H1B welcome). My team is working on monitoring and alerting for all of the different services at Twitter. Zipkin ( https://github.com/t…

I think this is a great way to think about it. People who try everything to extend their life do not die in vain. Over ten people in my family in the last ten years have been diagn…

> Then I use "sudo !!" Wow. For six years I've been doing "UP + CTRL^A + sudo + SPACE" instead. This is much better.

One: The anti-spam systems work because they are based on content of emails and properties across the providers entire user-base. Every time you click "Mark as spam" you are contri…

This guy really should go work for Google and figure out the problems they need to deal with running a service like Gmail. Even for just a little while. At work we had a researcher…

You're comparing Apples to Oranges here. Bootstrap is not a template, it's a framework for people who know what they're doing to quickly build fully customized but aesthetically pl…

Using Java as the language to detect if someone has the "programming gene" does not make any sense. There is so much cognitive overhead to writing a simple program in Java compared…

> While our universities are turning out very able graduates, well versed in the sexy new languages of Java, .net and the like I have been flirting recently with a return home to S…

Note for anyone signing up for this who has been in industry for a while: the prerequisites for this class really are prerequisites and it can be quite difficult to follow along if…

"Learn a new programming language" I would rephrase this to learn a new programming paradigm . There are fundamental differences between static typing and dynamic typing, object or…

Most of the complaints I see from Java programmers amount to this: http://blog.tmorris.net/anti-intellectual-euphemisms/ Specifically: > using the word complex, unnatural, academic…

I don't know how to touch type, I have a "two fingers and thumb" approach and never have to look at the keyboard (I was given a German keyboard at work and I never noticed until a …

> Yes, the ORM layer makes it easier to have structured queries that can be cached . . . it also makes it harder to have one-off queries that can be tuned easily based on exactly w…

This seems incredibly naive. ORMs reduce code duplication. They speed up development, especially when you're treating the underlying data storage as a "dumb" datastore that could j…

The real point is: don't do two-level ACL on websites. At my previous company we had these "auto-login" links in emails and they are extremely powerful. But maybe once every six mo…

Encapsulation is also addressed in the article. I really liked his response to that too, it was like a more succinct version of the Steve Yegge Wikileaks/Java private methods blog …

I took it to mean data objects.

I loved this: > When we drop down to the algorithm level, I think OO can seriously thwart reuse. In particular, the use of objects to represent simple informational data is almost …

> One is dotfree and uses braces. One uses a dot. And one is dotfree and uses parens. I feel like it would be a lot better if there were only one way to do this. I don't disagree w…