Ed Stephinson

The best engineers blur the lines between frontend, backend, and infrastructure. With AI systems, this mindset is essential. LLMs introduce new failure modes. You need structured retries and feedback loops that explain behaviour. Ship fast, own outcomes. sailhouse.dev/blog/enginee...

The workflow is dead. Long live the agent! 🤖 We're shackling intelligent AI agents to 20-year-old orchestrators. The breakthrough: workflow IS the code. Agents should decide their own state transitions, not wait for permission. Event-driven > orchestrated sailhouse.dev/blog/autonom... #AI #Agents

Not every event-based system needs a streaming platform. Kafka’s great if you’ve got a team. Most of us? We just want something that works, retries, and doesn’t explode in prod. What do you use?

I literally remember a moment 12 years ago when I realised that computers understanding semantics was the breakthrough moment, and here we are.

I've spent the past 2 evenings building full-stack deploy previews for @sailhouse.dev, from @planetscale.com dev branches -> @fly.io application with a full multi-node deployment. I am now dead inside, but god is it cool.

This can happen with any AI agent… or human developer! A BIG difference w AI agents: they will write more code, faster than before, and ship a LOT more code to prod! So ship more bugs as well. Software engineers (not AI engineers) will build o11y solutions to solve for this!

They've discovered slack emojis can be HDR-ified at work and my eyeballs fucking hate it

Dog had a good day at daycare

One of the best roles of my career - incredibly proud to see it turn 10

10 years of innovation. 10 years of community. 10 years of transforming the web. Today, Netlify turns 10! 🥳 Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Watch CEO @biilmann.blog reflect on a decade of building a better web, together:

We built an open-source email confirmation system! It uses event-driven architecture via @sailhouse.dev , runs on @netlify.com Functions, sends emails via @resend.com, & requires zero database setup. Classic "I'll save time in the long run" developer move, right? 🙃 sailhouse.dev/blog/email-c...

Warm referrals ("I worked with X, they are amazing, we should see if they would be interested in this job we're recruiting for") seem like they will become a lot more relevant as inbound applications become far, far, far more noisy...

Lovely day to turn older

@raycast.com have cooked

Really doing an awful lot to discourage hiring at this point.

Saying LLMs can be a good thing, on this blessed site, can lead to accusations of: - Not having a real job (true) - Being a cunt (I’m sure someone agrees) - Being a Nazi rapist apologist (not true) - General accusations of being a moron (very very true)

Wonder if react-based ATC management has the same level of discourse around routers as the rest of the ecosystem.

"Is this because of Opus Dei - DEI's right there in their name?"

I've known (and continue to work with) some transgender people who are outstanding in their fields. In the medical industry, in manufacturing (chemical and engineering), in defense, intelligence, politics... any one of them exemplifies the best of what anyone should consider American.

Boris back by the year end?

I’d be very happy to have BYOK GPT-4o/Claude alt text generation for images on Bluesky

Working on ingest perf for sailhouse.dev, quite happy with the fact the SSL handshake is by far the largest component (yay me), but also equally frustrated that I can't guarantee sub-100ms HTTP ingest because of this.

What in the McCarthy is this?

I feel like it’s worth remembering this >> TikTok admits tracking FT journalist in leaks investigation on.ft.com/3WGFJQX

It's been about 10 years since I last tried to build a game engine toolchain so why not now? A break from LLMs atleast (or is it)

Looking forward to Mark Cubans foray into drill

GCP outage mascot

Really wish I could invert my purchasing habits from buying and then researching the hell out of it but some things just aren’t meant to be

Tempted to pay for YouTube premium to rid myself of the god awful free AI voiceovers people are using. Is this the tactic?

So lucky to live in a constituency with actual MP drama now.

🤔

my new years affirmations

I fucking love London

Didn't realise my self-imposed deadlines way of coping with ADHD actually has an adage to go with it. theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/parkinsons...