Tom Ballinger

Me: Doctor I have this new disease, please go fetch me a cure for it Doctor: You have the common cold; it's been known since antiquity Me: You've had 5,000 years to fix this?? Please raise this to the top of your backlog! PING?? Hello? Paging again in year 2026! Still getting colds here!!

Little solitaire game you played on Steam 5 years ago, at the time: By popular demand, we added Klondike! Its latest updates today: Play the new MECHAZAR x ED SHEERAN CROSSOVER mode to unlock CORRUPTED SPADEBOMBS in our megascale Co-op PvP tie-in with FRUIT ROLL-UPS and Mr Beast, Tuesday only!

After implementing web streams in multiple runtimes, supporting them for years, talking with other implementers, dealing with issues... I think it's well past time we talked about something better blog.cloudflare.com/a-better-web...

Incredibly proud of our team at @anthropic.com and the work we’re doing. In many ways, this shows how fortunate I am to be working alongside some of the smartest folks in the industry that don’t shy away from doing the right thing. It’s a one-of-a-kind place. www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

I work on Claude Code now, if it is ever falling short for you I'd love to hear!

What we are working on right now: blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev We all need more virtual machines. We keep building software to work around the fact that VM infrastructure is clunky. Let's have good VM infrastructure instead.

After reading this I gave exe.dev a shot and the combination of cheap VMs, the HTTPS proxy with passkey auth and link sharing, and the built-in LLM agent is... incredible. Like, I know how to use each of these things individually, but combining them feels like when I first learned to script things.

anyone know any Good Discourse on "what is programming anyway"? random examples of Good Discourse: - Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming" (gist.github.com/melaniehoff/...) & Lucy Keer's reflection on it (lucykeer.com/notebucket/a...) - PROGRAMme (programme.hypotheses.org)

sounds fake but I'm starting a company with my nemesis Colin P. Zod and our first hire is @AndaristRake and our first product is now in beta

sounds fake but I'm starting a company with my nemesis David E. ArkType and our first hire is @andarist.bsky.social and our first product is now in beta :)

incredible discovery for the impatient, chicken pot pie plus frozen peas to cool it down

leaflet.pub/c37b8a8f-f95... > DNS: an old friend that always takes an extra 20 minutes to do anything

Exciting progress today! Called with @capt.dev about the React "concurrent stores" prototype, and we brainstormed potential Redux integration issues. I then whipped up a prototype branch that reworks `useSelector` to use the prototype, and _most_ tests pass! github.com/reduxjs/reac...

I am looking for a full-time job. Being independent in open source for 3.5+ years has been wonderful. I've gotten done most of the high-level goals I wanted to, and miss having people & structure around me. If you know of a role for a staff-level TypeScript+web developer, let me know! 🙂

📚 Continued writing about @tanstack.com Router this weekend, trying to explain one of the imo best features the router has to offer: Context Inheritance that works in a fully inferred type-safe way across nested routes 🔥

I tried the same prompt injection demo I showed a couple months ago and @anthropic.com's Claude prevented it this time! Interesting to see progress here.

Should we ship pre-compiled code (with the react compiler) for React Query v6?

Tips For Making Friends As An Adult https://theonion.com/tips-for-making-friends-as-an-adult/

IT IS TIME.

“[Wasm 3.0] has much better support for compiling high-level programming languages. Enabled by this, we have seen various new languages popping up to target Wasm, such as Java, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Scheme, or Dart, all of which use the new GC feature.” webassembly.org/news/2025-09...

The WebAssembly 3.0 spec is complete! webassembly.org/news/2025-09... This includes major features like GC, 64-bit memories, exceptions, and tail calls.

If y’all promise not to ask me for docs or blog posts maybe I’ll explain a bit about why creating a cache API for suspense is so hard

Any podcasts or streams want to invite me on to talk about React transitions, suspense, and optimistic?

i wrote a whole thing about wrangling npm dependencies because it's an unglamorous part of the job that's nevertheless really important. also because i wanted to make some watercolor illustrations. blog.val.town/gardening-de...

Observable Notebook Kit and Desktop 1.3.0 are out, featuring data loader cells. You can now (finally!!) write Python and Node.js in notebooks. 🐍 observablehq.com/notebook-kit...

Hey we're hiring for in-person engineering roles in SF. I really enjoy my job and you might too. Come hang out and build developer tools!

"In the weeks since, I’ve found myself unable to commit—grammatically, affectively, institutionally. Where once I might have said, 'I teach,' I now say, 'There are moments in which I find myself adjacent to pedagogy.' Friends have grown concerned. My dog, unfed."

Binaryen, the wasm optimizer project, released version 124: github.com/WebAssembly/... Many changes here, including support for several new wasm features: * Compilation Hints and Branch Hinting * Stack Switching * Custom Descriptors & many new wasm-opt optimizations

me, a relentless refactorer webpro.nl/hire-me i have 1 or 2 days a week availability to untangle & fresh up any JavaScript or TypeScript codebase ✂️

Does everyone know about conveyor belt sushi??

"how does .decode() differ from .parse()?" good question! they're identical at runtime, but their type signatures differ in an important way. unlike .parse()—which accepts `unknown` input—decode and encode expect strongly-typed inputs

Introducing Zod 4.1 and its flagship feature: codecs. z.codec() is a new API for defining *bi-directional transformations* in Zod

End-users have trouble sharing files on the cloud. Are these mistakes just random confusion from non-technical users? No: we show that there's a deep analogy to *programming* misconceptions! Surprised? Read more here: blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/25/c...

This is a fun paper! It never occurred to me that modern end-user software has many of the same footguns as programming languages.

Yay! It's the first Firefox release since I've joined the team, so let's take a look at some of the new developer-facing features in Firefox 142… 🧵

Apollo Client 4.0 is officially out! Take a look at the release notes here: github.com/apollographq...

Here's a quick demo for the auth thing I've been working on I also recorded myself showing a bit of the code but it was so bad I had to cut it

OP: I'd really like it if TS supported the backflow limerick pattern Me: Can you show me a code sample? I'm not familiar OP: You know, just a regular backflow limerick Me: Is this something you do in code? Any examples? OP: The normal kind, nothing fancy, you know Me: I really don't

prompt "mere exposure effect"

Took some time today to catch up with Johann Rehberger's Month of AI Bugs and wow... 15 examples so far of major prompt injection vulnerabilities in products including ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, Amp, Devin, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Google Jules simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/15/...

My ahead-of-time JS engine Porffor eliminates JS cold starts on AWS Lambda. 12x faster and 2x cheaper than managed Node. Still very early but these results should speak for themselves :) goose.icu/lambda/