Co-founder of Let's Book · Web engineer · Loves (board) games, snowboarding, mountain biking, math, beers and girlfriend.
Amsterdam
Joined August 2009
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Just tried Mago by @azjezz and I'm genuinely impressed. Formats and improves PHP code ridiculously fast. Haven't been this excited about a dev tool in a really long time!
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I feel the same way. This doesn’t discard AI at all though. You had to know when to use it.
A few things I've noticed as all devs write code with AI.
When you write foundational / architectural code of a new project by hand, you "feel" the code pushing back if your abstraction isn't right. You feel when something is harder than it should be. The code is telling you it's not in the right shape. Good engineers are sensitive to this.
When you're using an LLM, you keep pushing right through this in a way that feels like you're making progress, and it may even be directionally correct in a sense, but the underlying foundation of it all is actually bad in a way that either kills progress of the LLM later as it buckles under the complexity it has created or destroys your ability to maintain the code long term.
Related to this, I see a general restlessness with just sitting and thinking about a problem for a while.
As I've been working on a new library here at Laravel, there have been days where it feels like I mainly just stare at my screen thinking about something. When Claude Code is at your fingertips, it's tempting to just start yapping into the terminal and watching code come out the other end. Again, directionally correct in some ways, but often doesn't land on the elegant solution that is waiting to be discovered.
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Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
The most important skill for a software engineer IMO is debugging. Writing code is easy. Willingness and ability to debug through layers of abstraction, through code you didn't write, perhaps deep into other areas of the stack (libraries, frameworks, the server, the browser engine, etc.) can prevent you from ever being "blocked".
This is a skill I see lacking in a majority of developers these days. Too many people just stop as soon as they hit code they didn't write. They just report it to another team, file a GitHub issue, etc. And then complain when it isn't addressed for them immediately.
Your dependencies are your code. You are responsible for them. You can't rely on other people to fix problems you run into all the time. Understand your stack deeply. Learn to debug. It'll help you immensely.
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
In case you are wondering, the technical term for this is ‘terrorism’.
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
I’ve been working on a new React-like framework in my spare time.
It’s fully compiler driven, there’s no virtual DOM, or component re-rendering. There are signals, but they’re never exposed to the developer and they’re also fully compiled to avoid any runtime lookups.
And…
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
I do not do Scrum, so I have no need to estimate an increment/Sprint. I just work on the most valuable single story next. I pull that story, narrow it down to a set of <= 2-day stories, pick the most valuable (of the most valuable 😄), and build that. 1/3
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
I asked stable diffusion what it thinks photovoltaic systems would look like in the style of various artists.
1/ Claude Renoir
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
Hey everyone, my family need some help.
My wife with daughter and mom are in Poland 🇵🇱
They can live on the current place only till 20th of April. I have 2 weeks to find a new place for them.
Please let me know if you or your friends have some room or flat.
👇
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded @mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
Great tips with very significant improvements
Blogged: Improve @symfony Tests Performance
maks-rafalko.github.io/blog/…
The most comprehensive list of tips and tricks to decrease tests time.
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This has bitten me from time to time. And despite “knowing” all this, it still does sometimes. Computers are hard 😅
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Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
It's taken me over 10 years of PHP development to learn that you can insert an exclamation into the DateTime::createFromFormat method to reset all of the remaining time units 🎉
Laurent van Dommelen retweeted
I'm not paid six figures as an engineer at @Twitter because I've memorized obscure DNS commands.
I'm paid it because I know when to look something up, know how to do it, and can recognize safe and correct answers.
And I'm senior because I can explain that information to others.
[Dutch] We zijn op zoek naar een PHP developer om met ons te werken aan lekker moderne software voor bootverhuurders. Altijd al op afstand een bootje willen starten? lets-book.com/vacature-backe…
