Aaron Alaniz

My Bluesky mobile app prompted for age verification this morning; no way I am submitting the last four of my social, a credit card, and a photo of my ID. Why Bluesky and none of the other social apps? Wild.

It's remarkable how great AI has improved at writing code with proper planning and yet, writing prose is hit and miss. Less subjectivity when it comes to quality code I suppose.

Unless you are writing libraries, default arguments seem silly with agents coding.

We're wrapping up our migration to Metro internally for Square Android. I summarized some of our challenges and steps we took in a blog post. If you use Dagger 2 for a Kotlin project, then you should migrate to Metro sooner rather than later. engineering.block.xyz/blog/metro-m...

Never thought I would see the word "affordances" so much this year.

In case nobody told you, but kids are tough on door handles? I'm on repair number five in like five months.

Andor season 2 burns slowly initially but the plot arcs together so well. The story brings some much needed depth to the rebels and the empire.

There are lots of think pieces floating around. Nothing new in here; simply my personal reflections about work right now. aaron.alaniz.xyz/discipline/

I am in the lobby of a university waiting for my son to present his science fair project and bless the lady who sat down at the empty seated piano and played a flawless Nothing Else Matters by Metallica. What a beautiful reprieve from a wild time in the software industry.

The Fastmail Android app recently started immediately inserting an email back into my inbox after I swipe to delete it. It seems to be unique to deleting and not archive or snooze 🤔

I switched to a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard and discovered that I type the letter 'c' with my index finger instead of my middle one. How long have I been doing this!? 😅

So glad I finally committed to an e-ink tablet for technical content reading and notes. I went with a Kindle Scribe and readbetter.io to send content — a much more enjoyable experience and I can practice improving my abysmal handwriting.

I was not prepared for how emotional I would get watching my son assemble his first "program" with his Raspberry Pi and Scratch. Completely unguided and offline, he clicked on a tutorial button and just figured it out.

Here's some tangible productivity gains I've found for using AI! blog.mmckenna.me/microdosing-...

chromecast: 60% of the time it works all the time ✨

I am teaching my son how to play catcher and one new thing I notice catchers doing is showing the target briefly and then placing the glove on the ground. I presume this is so they only catch the ball coming up into the zone as opposed to trying to frame a low pitch. Fascinating!

👀👀👀👀 github.com/square/anvil...

Trailblaze got some new updates today! There's an official yaml spec defined in the trailblaze-yaml module. The examples will be updated by the end of this week. There's also new memory tools available so the agent can remember screen state for later assertions. github.com/block/trailb...

As an Android developer I basically have zero visibility into what is happening in Java beyond JDK 8. I am not sure which came first, but it is nice to see convergence on similar concepts like data classes and records.

I gave Omarchy a try and it has made a ten year old laptop fun again. 💻🖲️ aaron.alaniz.xyz/omarchy-trial/

I always looked forward to showing my kids the Ocarina of Time — the look of satisfaction after completing the first boss battle, priceless ✨ What a timeless game

Shift + Esc — the best OOO feature ever made in Slack

I discovered that my son has been using my debit card pin code as the password to the playground forts at recess. 🔓

From a dev at a large tech company: “We were only allowed to use GitHub Copilot as an AI IDE. It was OK. But then more and more of us used Cursor on side projects and it was *so much better* Luckily we have have a dev platform team and we

I just learned about the Savannah Bananas from the @acquiredfm.bsky.social IPL episode — this is so amazing. I love baseball tradition and nostalgia, but this looks so fun. thesavannahbananas.com

The Fastmail bottom bar I always wanted 🙌🏼

My favorite thing about AI is the spike in motivation to write incredible documentation — previously, the incentives were not so tangible. Now, you have immediate feedback about whether your efforts to document something are useful.

I am enjoying shorter lower stakes blogs — here are my findings using Cursor for Android dev for a week 🚀 aaron.alaniz.xyz/cursor-week/

Bruce delivering a sunny day himself this morning ☀️ www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/a...

Two blogs in a month 🙌🏼 — watch out for feature flag drift in your UI tests. aaron.alaniz.xyz/rollout-to-u...

My kids only seem to want an apple seconds after I have taken the first bite of mine. And it has to be mine.

I wrote up some thoughts about the effect of AI on programmer salaries: seldo.com/posts/ai-eff...

I have about ten rough drafts of random posts I would like to finish some day. I managed to complete one about my first time authoring a Kotlin DSL. aaron.alaniz.xyz/kotlin-dsl/

I tried Cursor for the first time today and it is so smooth ✨ From nothing to solution with a short prompt and some chat assisted debugging. All in place, no app or context switching. 💯💯

A discussion about the differences of @github.com merge options came up at work this week. I couldn't find a quick explainer I liked so I wrote down what I shared. I hope it's helpful! blog.mmckenna.me/github-merge...

This must be while RuleChain exists, but I tried to get fancy composing one TestRule with another and found that it is pretty easy to forget a base.evaluate() call and pass every test suite that uses the rule. 😅

Nothing dates me more as an #AndroidDev than frantically switching off the design view for an xml file.

One of my favorite things to do at work is to edit somebody else's PR description to include a new line between the last line of text and an embedded media file so that the media renders correctly. 😂

I won my first silent auction today — guessed just right!

It took me a minute to spot that my six year old has been humming Tangled Up in Blue all evening. 🥺💙

In honor of the Eagles fabulous victory, I've added a new git alias to my workflow. git shove For when the code just needs to get over the line 🦅

Saquon let's goooo 🦅🦅🦅

Invest in a feed you control - powering a Hugo blog with Bluesky Comments kau.sh/blog/bluesky...

I feel pretty vindicated to know that it really was statistically advantageous to gopher it on 4th down in Madden all those years

Let's see what these Packers got! 🦅 @ankitpancakes.bsky.social

Your kids teach you a lot, but I really would like to adopt their liberated sense of time and units into project estimates. 30 thousand hundred hours, 13 million infinity seconds — these are all as reasonable as anything I come up with.

I enjoy the Athletic brewing line, but I just tried Bero and I was so impressed— the pils bites well. Cheers to the growing NA beer movement 🍺

An Unreasonable Amount of Time: A method for doing the impossible.

A new blog post about a contribution I made to Wire (github.com/square/wire) recently. rahulrav.com/blog/mutable...

There were some spicy takes in #AndroidDev about chocolate recently; some of which are confirmed in this great story!