John Turner

John Turner

@breaking.computer

Music, code, and cooking enthusiast. Staff engineer making developer tools at a reasonably well known tech company/podcast sponsor. Occasionally writes at breaking.computer

180 followers401 following335 posts

this is why a lot of companies are rolling out gateways that let you do per-user rate limits

ill-boo-mi@yallchemist.bsky.social

lol one of our website designers used our organization's entire monthly claude credits yesterday and now half the company doesn't know how to do their jobs. it's october 2nd.

John Turner reposted

What’s this? A “QR Code Link” you say? Yes, it’s Sonic Pi code encoded into a url that opens ready for you to read, play and edit in Sonic Pi in your browser. Share your live coded tracks with greater ease!

I’ve been making Claude do a pass before PR to delete any test that exercises behavior that is guaranteed by the language, framework, or third party, and it‘s helped a lot.

Adam Chalmers@adamchalmers.com

Astra loves to write tests that all your dependencies work how they should. Shhh, Astra, it's fine. Serde is not going to suddenly start including fields that are set to None.

I’m certainly not averse to using AI to help with domestic logistics, but if I ever told my family I wanted to “start the morning aligned,” I’d hope my kids would tell their teachers that everything wasn’t ok at home and I’d be forced to get help.

Most of my greenfield stuff starts with some version of doing C4 diagrams to solidify my mental model before ever touching a coding agent.

P(aul) Frazee@pfrazee.com

unironically? I'm getting so much value out of diagrams these days

Increasingly I just don’t let LLMs write prose. I already had a rule that anything where my voice was meaningful—email, docs—would be completely written by me and possibly LLM edited, but increasingly that’s applying in more mechanical places like code comments.

John Turner reposted

i don't mind people using agents to create PRs, but please at least write the description and replies yourself 🙏

It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

oliver@eikopf.com

maybe this is a universal truth i’m only discovering now, but working on internal tools is way more fun than doing literally anything else

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An ancillary benefit is that you’ll also become known as a trustworthy person to bring issues to, which is very useful when you’re launching the updated version of that new not-so-simple-anymore tool.

Working like this also makes it way easier to “sell” your projects to leadership. The people you’re helping will go to bat for you, and VPs love when you can name their reports whose problems you’re solving with a project.

It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

oliver@eikopf.com

maybe this is a universal truth i’m only discovering now, but working on internal tools is way more fun than doing literally anything else

View full thread

The right way is to ask a single engineer what problems they have, and find the simplest solve for one that’s high leverage. Maybe it’s a script. Maybe it’s patching some existing tool that almost does the right thing. Maybe it’s just showing them how to use a tool and updating your docs.

And then you do it again. And again. And again. Eventually people will have similar-but-different problems and you’ll have to expand a tool‘s capabilities. Do that enough times and you’ll have a good shape for a tool that solves a class of problems in a way folks actually need.

It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

oliver@eikopf.com

maybe this is a universal truth i’m only discovering now, but working on internal tools is way more fun than doing literally anything else

And I mean that very literally. In my experience—I’m currently the most senior engineer in a developer experience org for a company of about 500 engineers, for whatever that’s worth—the best way to make great tools involves asking that question a lot.

The wrong way (which I’ve also done plenty of) is to ask a bunch of people about their problems, generalize them until they’re all a similar shape, and come up with a complex system that solves that general class of problem that everyone has in the abstract but no one has concretely.

John Turner reposted

attention Fastmail executive team: please continue to be normal. If you have any thoughts about anything other than emails, please keep them to yourselves. Please do not fund any external projects that have anything to do with anything other than emails. Thank you.

I’m not averse to a good language debate, and I’m certainly not neutral, but I feel like a lot of the Go discourse is some form of “omg, I can’t believe Go lets you <thing that no one would ever actually do>”.

I want these too, but I think an AI agent would be content with getting served a markdown file with curl commands to run.

Ethan Gardner@ethangardner.com

If you're optimizing your site for AI, the AI wants: - A fast Time to First Byte (200-500ms). - Server-rendered HTML - Lightweight markup - A valid accessibility tree - Layout stability - Captions and alt text - No stupid CAPTCHAs Sound familiar? That's the same stuff that human users want too.

I used to mostly abide this, but the past few weeks PR stacks have muddled the picture a bit. It’s really easy to get Claude to orchestrate a large scale change, break that change up into PRs, and then stack them for easy linkage.

Isaac Corbrey@isaaccorbrey.com

One commit per unit of "I would want to revert to this", one PR per unit of "this is a logical change someone should be able to review in one sitting"

With LLMs becoming increasingly good at using repo information for research, knowing how to keep your commit history easy to read is an underrated skill.

Jess Temporal@jesstemporal.com

typo in your last commit message? forgot to add a file? 😅 git commit --amend fixes the most recent commit without making a whole new one. just don't amend commits you've already pushed ☺️

Certainly the most dangerous I’ve ever done. I missed a decimal point on an amplitude value on my C For Audio class’ “making a sine wave” assignment, which I was testing with earbuds. One of the more unpleasant experiences of my life.

Тsфdiиg@tsoding.bsky.social

The most dangerous area of Programming is Audio Programming. If you are not careful you can lose your ears.

Somewhat tangential to the point of the thread, but this is why I always push back on the idea of giving new grad and junior engineer candidates systems design interviews. There are other reasons too, but the likelihood that they would have studied or experienced it beyond interview prep is low.

Jason Lengstorf@jason.energy

knowing something means you've either experienced or studied something. I can write an HTML form from memory, but I can't invert a binary tree or write a sorting algorithm without looking it up (never needed it for real, never studied it) has nothing to do with my value as a person (lil thread 👇)

John Turner reposted

Sonic Pi v5 is released. Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun. There's something to excite everyone - from the friendlier error messages, to the pro-audio config, to the new dynamic visuals for performance. Enjoy! www.patreon.com/samaaron/pos...

patreon.comSonic Pi v5 Released | Sam AaronHi everyone, today is release day! Sonic Pi is now more friendly, more accessible, more powerful and more fun. Everything has been complete

John Turner reposted

Good news, everyone! We made it easy and free to convert your entire Airtable workspace to durable Markdown files that you own and can use offline. Obsidian Bases supports all your views, filters, and formulas. Your data is yours, take ownership of it.

I was very much on the “nurture“ side of the nature/nurture debate, and believed—quite erroneously, I came to find out—that parents who said things like “they were always like that” were underestimating their role in who their child became personality wise. My eldest disabused me of that one.

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social

Hey parents of bsky: What are some theories of parenting you were very confident in right up until you had your own kids?

John Turner reposted

hanging out with drunk SREs will make you think twice about the internet

Salvatore Zappalà@salvozappa.bsky.social

People thinking "there's no way that OpenAI didn't detect their agent going rogue earlier" have no idea about the state of sausage making in your common tech company simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/23/...

I haven’t been professionally artistic in a while, so what do I know, but by the time you can use the word “inundated,” I think it’s time to just take the L and move on.

Joe Flynn@chinajoeflynn.bsky.social

This is art, to me.

John Turner reposted

It took 7 years of self-funded work, but Sonic Pi is finally at a place I'm happy with. It's even easier than beginners and even more powerful for pro users - and just way more polished in every way. It's also a (friendly) technical trojan horse for SuperSonic. www.patreon.com/samaaron/pos...

patreon.comSonic Pi v5 Release Candidate 1 | Sam AaronHey there, happy Friday and huge love to you wherever you are in the world. Today, it's time to open the vaults and let loose something that

John Turner reposted

my father-in-law is a “I know a guy” Guy. sadly all the old Guys are aging out of the Guy Economy. Guys are fundamentally incompatible with Hustle Culture because it’s not about “winning” a deal, it’s about collecting favors and goodwill in a mutually-beneficial cycle. protect your local Guy Economy

This is just vibes, but on name alone J-space feels like it has the potential to do one of those leaps from science to popular pseudoscience, like “quantum manifestation“

John Turner reposted

A number of the responses here are basically asking, "on what basis can you term the United States a success?" and I'm glad you asked, because I wrote about exactly that four years ago. acoup.blog/2022/07/08/c...

acoup.blogCollections: Is the United States Exceptional?It is the week of July 4th and so I hope that everyone will once again forgive me for taking a break from our normal fare to write out an argument that I’ve had brewing for quite some time. I…
"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social

I think it is just a really strange take to conclude that the world's longest standing written constitution, which also happens to be the constitution of its most powerful and prosperous country, is a "remarkable failure." 'It's not perfect' - sure. But a failure? Uh, scoreboard?

I have no intention of checking the veracity of this result. I have every intention of slipping “I’m Gumby, dammit!” into regular conversation as a reference.

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