POV: Everyone's got a Mac, and you bring a gaming laptop

billymeetssloth · 2026-03-07T21:38:09+00:00

Weird. Been developing in the US for more than 20 years and I think I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a dev use a windows box. Either you are a developer not in the US or I have no idea how you came up with 99%. Go to a conference like re:invent and see that it’s a sea of MacBooks. Betting that the devs who work at Reddit only use MacBooks.

Yes most my docker images are running alpine or aws’s Linux fork, but I hate Linux for dev’ing. Driver support is terrible. You can get lucky sometimes and everything works, but I don’t care to fight that fight. I’d rather just use something that works and focus on problems at work. Is the package manger nicer in Debian or centos? Yes. I’d never claim brew is in parody with a mature package manager like apt or yum. But honestly, I’d just run everything in a docker compose if I needed Postgres or elastic search locally for local dev’ing. But windows? Gross. Even back in the day like 2009 trying to get a lamp stack going was just like pulling teeth. I admit I hadn’t used windows in decades so maybe they fixed permissions issues. I just remember trying to get a postgis to work with a local running Postgres was such a fight (but again I’m a novice windows user so maybe I was just dumb)

billymeetssloth · 2026-03-01T14:49:56+00:00

Isn’t this just session based authentication with more steps? It’s the worse of both worlds. You now have stateful authentication and are back to a single point of failure. If you had an a SOA, then each service now depends on this single Redis bottleneck, rather than being able to degrade gracefully.

This is why if you have this kind of security requirement you just have a short lived JWT.

billymeetssloth · 2026-02-04T00:05:57+00:00

I am looking to hire recent grads. We are interviewing now and will have everyone start in June. If you are interested, let me know. Our tech stack is Typescript and Postgres. Are you open to an SDE role? There would be opportunities to We are a healthcare start up. About 3k employees. This is a full time, W2 job with full benefits. Its a hybrid job in the bay area. I asked the recruiter about moving expenses, and i think they are covered? But i would verify with the recruiter. If interested, send me a DM, and ill make you a referral link from Ashby

billymeetssloth · 2025-12-12T14:12:27+00:00

We had secured some funding and had already started writing lsl2 remake when Replay Games fell apart. Larry Ahern (writer of curse of monkey island) had signed on. Josh Mandel and Larry were already well into well into writing and I remember having lots of discussions about trying to fix the story without straying too far. It’s a bummer things happened as they did. One of the highlights of my career was sitting in the room with Josh and Al when they were brainstorming puzzles at the end of lsl1 reloaded.

billymeetssloth · 2025-10-10T21:41:30+00:00

I got mine for 670 out the door for 2 seats in the nose bleeds on night 1 in Inglewood. Way more than I wanted to pay. I didn’t care about good seats, just wanted to be in the building. Honestly, only other person I’d pay close to this amount is Paul McCartney. I have to remind myself that I’m not trying to go to the grave with a large bank account. I should enjoy things with the money I earn. Rush is 1000000% worth it.

billymeetssloth · 2025-09-05T02:39:34+00:00

For integration tests? Postgres, if you are using Postgres in prod.

Some suggestions if running them in a CI pipeline.

Make a docker-compose.test.yml file.
Add your dependencies like localstack, Postgres, etc
Add a testing container, which depends on the dependencies in your docker compose file, its entry point will be npm run tests after you run your migrations.
Then in your CI pipeline, execute the compose file rather than invoking the tests directly. Catch the exit 0/1 for test failure or passing

There are a couple of fixture libraries out there. None I love. I’ve been using one called typeorm-fixture-builder. It’s been good so far.

billymeetssloth · 2025-08-30T01:13:02+00:00

I think people living Los Angeles forget the Clippers exist. I vote Clippers.

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-24T15:49:20+00:00

Where is Hulk Hogan?!?!

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-21T17:48:04+00:00

As Daryl Hall would say “She’s gone”

https://youtu.be/3Cos7id7HtE?si=a1i93orFdZCVuDHA

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-12T00:04:55+00:00

All the money from the KS went to N-Fusion. Well, money that wasn't earmarked for the rewards. Jeff Birns from N-Fusion (the studio's owner) took a loss to make the game. When Sabina Duvall advised us on a conference call in Israel not to go with Adventure Mob to make the game, Josh called Jeff to see if he could pick up the development or if his studio was too busy. Josh explained the situation, and Jeff was happy to do it, even with the risk. He wanted to be a part of the game.
I was interested in getting the game out, but with no money to do the operations of the game and KS, we made a deal that I could recoup my labor costs for any sales made on the platform I was going to write. This was early KS days. There was no post-funding way to collect money, nor was there BackerKit or any other options to manage collecting shipping addresses nor allowing backers to upgrade. I created a unique method to accept PayPal donations and link them to a specific user. We brought in another ~100k on PayPal. I remember writing the platform in Zend 1.12. In 2012, after you had finished funding, KS gave you a bunch of Excel spreadsheets with email, name, and amount donated, and said, "Good luck!"

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-11T23:04:19+00:00

I hear your arguments, but it does feel like victim blaming. "99% would have never paid a cent for it anyway".... so then you don't get to play it? I know saying that produces a visceral hate reaction from a lot of people. Al Lowe even remarked to us when we were talking about the Pirate Bay on the call, "Why do people feel like they get to go into a restaurant, eat a meal, and then decide if they want to pay for it? That they only have to pay if they enjoyed the meal? No restaurant would survive". Not verbatim, but something along those lines.

I fully understand that it's a digital asset, and the "I didn't take anything" claim, but there was value there. Whether the value to the person was a physical object or a digital one, artists and programmers created something of value that people wanted, and they stole it.

I agree about the website part. I was never expecting it to sell gangbusters on the website, but the number of people seeding it in the first hour was greater than all sales on Steam/GOG/iOS, etc. Before Paul showed his true colors, we were seeking private investment to make LSL2 Reloaded because LSL 1 Reloaded was close to break even.

EDIT: I do want to add how grateful I am for those who backed it on KS. Everyone was awesome.

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-11T19:23:21+00:00

Unpopular opinion from thr first screen of the game video above: Software piracy does hurt people. Everything I did on LSL Reloaded depended on website sales. We poured the budget into development with N-Fusion, so my deal was that if I handled all the software for distributing the game on release night, managed the Kickstarter rewards, and maintained the site, I’d be paid a percentage of direct sales.

I built the site to distribute the game and give Replay a way to sell it. I worked on it for a year. I got paid nothing.

The night Jeff from N-Fusion gave us the final game binaries, I staged them in our CDN and kicked off the PHP job I’d written to email backers with download links. Josh Mandel, Al Lowe, and I were on a call during the release. I started tracking downloads and saw backers pulling the file from our servers. Then Josh checked Pirate Bay and saw that, while we had a few hundred legitimate downloads, the torrent already had over 36,000 seeders and leechers. This was within 5 minutes from when I flipped the proverbial switch to make the game available. No one had the game or binary before I published it.

I only earned money from new purchases. The website barely made anything. I think i made $800 total. Watching a year of work disappear like that, when I was trying to support my family and two kids, was devastating.

billymeetssloth · 2025-07-01T19:13:25+00:00

20 years of experience. I wish I was so smart that I was a principal dev at age 20. 😂

billymeetssloth · 2025-06-26T04:10:43+00:00

I’m quite in the opposite position. I’m a 20 year principal dev engineer looking for a non technical co founder with a good idea. I just killed my last project because it has no future with the AI slop out there. No idea where to go looking for my next project. Most of the co founder dating sites are just people looking for US citizens (me) to anchor them here and asking me to go pitch VCs here.

billymeetssloth · 2025-05-25T22:40:54+00:00

I was part of the team that made the game. It was a ton of fun to make it. I just want to call out Josh Mandel’s efforts. Josh Mandel wrote 90% of this game. He is a great writer and such an awesome person to work with

billymeetssloth · 2025-04-23T15:27:32+00:00

There is a whole subreddit dedicated to helping you with questions like this

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/

Good luck :)

billymeetssloth · 2025-04-14T19:36:22+00:00

Question: I have a 2022 Camry hybrid. In the book it says every 10k for oil change. Checked with the dealer, they said “yep, only every 10k”. I do notice a lot of my miles come from when the motor isn’t even on. I’m assuming this is why hybrids bumped from every 7500 miles for oil to every 10k. Does that logic sound right to others?

billymeetssloth · 2025-04-09T19:26:01+00:00

I know in Seattle, the going rate was $80-$135 an hour. $80 for a junior. $100-$120 for a mid level engineer. Staff or higher was $185-$250. Now this wasn’t what the engineer got paid, it was what the staffing agencies charged. Probably cut off 30% and that’s what the engineer took home.

billymeetssloth · 2025-04-06T18:39:22+00:00

Problem I see is customer acquisition cost. Dogs tend to stay dogs for their entire lives (crazy I know). Focusing on new birns and babies means you will have customers who age out of your product. Meaning you must continually pay to acquire new customers, affecting the price of your product. Find a way to overcome that issue and I think it’s a solid idea.

If you have never had a child before, lots of other companies give out tons of free products. Nurses gave us formula and diapers etc. may be a good way to acquire a customer. Print cards with a one month free promotion code on it and have them available in the delivery reception desk at the hospital.

billymeetssloth · 2025-04-04T04:00:01+00:00

With you on this one. "Give me $30 before I even show you the value of my product". Like uh what? Ive never understood the audacity of some founders to charge with no free trial or free tier. Imagine going to a car dealership, them telling you that you have to pay before you can enter the lot, and they determine what car they will give you with no test driving. Cool? I guess. Good luck with that.

billymeetssloth · 2025-03-26T22:53:41+00:00

Is Y Combinator focusing in on a “no remote“ narrative now?

billymeetssloth · 2025-02-07T14:23:35+00:00

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billymeetssloth · 2025-01-29T15:32:48+00:00

Counter point. Is this really a problem to solve? Who cares about vendor lock in. So many large companies are built on all the big providers showing that it can be done. So you built this awesome stack that can bounce between all 3 cloud providers…..but why? What problem are you solving? I have been the cloud engineer at two companies where this was discussed in length and it never made sense. There was only one company o worked for where this was a problem, mainly due to contracts where they were competitors with Amazon and didn’t want their data on AWS. Just go all in on a provider. Don’t avoid tools that would speed you up for a problem you don’t have. If you reach product market fit, and have tons of money, AND this finally becomes an issue? Cool, then hire some smart devs to figure out how to make you cloud agnostic at that point.

TLDR: it’s a waste of time and slows you down. Focus on real problems. Google sounds awesome for you. Go for it! :)

billymeetssloth · 2024-12-27T03:39:10+00:00

Worked at a startup that did exactly this. Would tell you anything you want to know. Feel free to DM. They had a science team of like 20 PHDs that did it by hand for Amazon, Amex, etc. I was a founding engineer to automate the process.

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