nicksloan

@[email protected]
2 Followers
99 Following
100 Posts
I’m the head of engineering at Matter, the cofounder of UpContent, and a software developer working on the web and iOS. Talk to me about vinyl records, music technology, comedy, Minecraft, Pittsburgh, Detroit style pizza, Democratic politics, or software development if all else fails.
Websitehttps://nicksloan.com
GitHubhttps://github.com/nicksloan
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/nicksloan
nicksloanMar 28, 2024

An ongoing highlight of my career has been working with Sean to build products that respect our users. At Matter, Sean’s leadership in this area has challenged us in the best ways, and he has set a bar that I will measure against for the rest of my working life.

This is very much worth a read. https://scoat.es/@sean/112174277905316470

Sean Coates (@[email protected])

For the past ~2 years, I’ve been working on a neuroscience startup (called Matter). We have an app that—by its nature—needs to operate on private user data. Some of that data is so private that we never actually want to handle it ourselves. So we don’t. We can’t leak data we don’t have. We can’t mishandle private info that never leaves the control of the user. We’re taking a mostly-unique approach to user data at Matter, and I’ve finally written a little bit about it: https://seancoates.com/blogs/matter-and-privacy

scoates
nicksloanMar 26, 2024
Larry GarfieldMar 26, 2024

Videos that auto-play but muted are wrong in every possible perspective. Even if I want to see it, then by the time I unmute I've missed the first several seconds. And if I don't want to, I'm wasting a ton of bandwidth for video I don't want.

There is no situation in which "autoplay muted" is the correct answer. Absolutely none.

If your website is doing it, you are wrong. Please stop. Now.

#Rant

nicksloanMar 26, 2024
Joël Perras - jperrasMar 26, 2024

I'm getting really frustrated by the huge amount of AI generated blogspam that I have to filter through.

While researching some esoteric Postgres operation I came across an (unrelated) article that was adamantly suggesting that you can perform batch `DELETE` operations in Postgres with a `LIMIT` clause, with full examples and output/results.

Well dear reader, Postgres has _never_ allowed `LIMIT` in anything except `SELECT` statements. The whole article was hallucinated GPT shit.

nicksloanMar 26, 2024
Sean CoatesMar 26, 2024

A big thing happened in the Super Mario Maker community (turns out the last uncleared level in SMM1 was not legit), and the announcement was made on a Discord.

I tried to link this to a friend, and I don’t think I can.

It makes me really sad that we have stuff on the web that is locked into a silo like this. Open forums (the good and the bad) were a big part of how I learned about all kinds of things, 20+ years ago. Bummed that we’re stealing this kind of information sharing from the future.

nicksloanMar 20, 2024
Courts should obliterate the business model of training LLMs on copyrighted data without a license. When they’re not propped up on stolen content, LLMs will never be worth the cost.
nicksloanMar 8, 2024
Sean CoatesMar 7, 2024

Know any iOS devs who truly love testing, are meticulously detail-oriented (and don't mind the redundant wordplay), want to work on something interesting (or maybe even much bigger than “interesting”), and are looking for work?

We’re looking for someone someone like that.

https://matter.xyz/jobs/ios-developer-qa

#fedihire

Jobs at Matter | iOS Developer — QA Focus

nicksloanMar 4, 2024
Show threadPaul ReinheimerMar 4, 2024

Things that make me happy about our job posting:

- There is a clear salary range (that isn't like 0 -> ∞)
- We explain our interview process
- There's only three rounds of interviews.
- Total interview time for a successful candidate ~2.5hrs.
- Total non-interview time required resume + ~1hr.
- We tell people who have been interviewed at all when we're declining to move forwards.

nicksloanFeb 29, 2024
@ramsey Happy birthday, pal! I would really love to catch up soon!
nicksloanFeb 14, 2024
There is a blog post by @sean that I’ve been telling everyone to go look up for years. It finally exists: https://seancoates.com/blogs/exists-is-the-enemy-of-good
Exists is the enemy of good

We've all heard the adage "perfect is the enemy of good." I take this to mean: if you only accept perfect, you might miss a good-enough solution. I still try to strive for perfect, but have learned to

Sean Coates
nicksloanJan 31, 2024
Sean CoatesJan 31, 2024

Tonight I was reminded of this 11+ year old post. I still think most of it applies. I’d take the concept of diversification even further, today, and say “don’t even necessarily constrain yourself to the Web”.

I know lots of people who are “JS Developers” or even worse “React Developers”, “WordPress developers”. Some of that won’t even exist in 10 years. Find opportunities to diversify if/when you can.

https://seancoates.com/blogs/web-developer

(I’m sure many but not all of you saw the overlapping conversation…)

Web developer

Over the weekend, I saw a discussion on Twitter about a particular developer who is worried about his future as PHP becomes less the de facto platform for all web development, and he moves to other te

Sean Coates