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I needed a small break from content creation, somehow I lost my drive. But I'm back now, and promise to reply to comments! In this new AI age, I think another important thing to mention is - you'll never see any AI-generated post by me here. It's important for me to train my writing habit as myself, never outsource it, and to mention it transparently. I think it deserves a re-introduction. Hi! I’m Arek. I’ve been coding for about 18 years, which officially makes me an adult programmer. Ten of those years were commercial experience, the other eight were me breaking my parents’ computers and pretending it was "for learning purposes." Right now I work at Buffer - fully remote, fully distributed, and running on a four day workweek, which is basically a cheat code for life. Thanks to that I travel quite a bit as a digital nomad, although Warsaw is still my home base (and the place where I keep the cables I don’t need but refuse to throw away). Before Buffer I worked at Facebook (Meta, technically, but it's hard to make a switch) and Lufthansa. I also freelanced for a few years with international clients, which means I’ve experienced every timezone mismatch possible. If you ever want my take on things like: 🧑‍💻 building an IT career 🧑‍💻 working remotely or surviving a four day workweek 🧑‍💻 digital nomad life 🧑‍💻 freelancing without losing your sanity 🧑‍💻 or anything about engineering in general Just drop a comment. I love sharing my experiences!

Check out my new article: Installing WordPress without opening a browser https://wp.arekpanek.com/installing-wordpress-without-opening-a-browser/ This will help you understand WordPress better! And this one syncs!

Perfect combo on the week with a hackathon!

test post

another t3est

this is a test

gtestes etetes

Mixed media broadcast smoke: image + short video

this is a test post

Threads pilot D head text-only 1783511561274

Threads pilot B multi video 1783511146734

Threads multi-video carousel capability test 1783504779358

Threads mixed carousel capability test 1783504779358

I hope Europe will finally start acting in AI and join the races, otherwise it gets us in a big disadvantage. Another hope is that Chinese models will get on par with frontline American models. After so many US-generated problems for Europe and the transatlantic alliance, I'm actively cheering the development of AI on the other side of the world. Distillation of American models by Chinese companies? I don't care, it's American models that were first trained on stolen data.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law. Even with AI.

I was quite tired with the amount of maintenance work I had to handle last months and started to reflect on where it's coming from (not AI!), and analyzing how it looks like across the team. I'm here at Buffer for 5 years, other engineers handling similar load are at 7 and 10+ years. The question that's forming: are we paying the tenure task? Do you think the amount of pings in different incidents, maintenance tasks, critical decisions to make is just a given with the context you accrue in so many years? Curious to hear other engineers thoughts on that, and how you're dealing with that tenure tax 💰️

This week I'll cross 5 years employed at @Buffer. Bear with me, I'll share some more interesting reflections than "If someone told me I'd stay here for so long, I'd have never believed." You realize you're an adult when you know you have to choose between things and make informed decisions that impact your whole future life. "Should I study law or computer science?", and so on. For me, 5 years ago, the choice was as follows: 👉 continue career in Big Tech, maybe swap employer (Warsaw is an awesome Big Tech hub!) and continue climbing the career ladder aiming for Staff+ roles, possibly move to Bay Area to work with the best of the best 👉 find fully remote and distributed company with a great culture, and go after my life goals of traveling a lot, working with awesome people who want the best for me, and enjoy the flexibility It wasn't an easy choice. It's still not - I get tens of recruiter messages from Big Tech and hyper growth startups. Some of them pay more than I make now ($174,600 as of writing this post). However, Buffer nailed the retention of employees (can you believe that about 50% of employees are at Buffer longer than I am with my 5 years?), because it's not only the salary that matters. I literally designed my whole life around what possibilities I have thanks to working at such a company. We work 4 days a week and I make maximum use of my 3-day weekends when I travel for 6 months each year. We're encouraged to work on our side-projects, instead of having it forbidden. The culture is genuinely amazing, and it's one of the very few companies where you don't have to stress out about interacting with anyone. I could probably be staff-level at some other company and on my way for L6+. I could work at the most recognizable companies. I could work on technically challenging problems in greenfield areas. But it's not the only thing that matters - you spend 1/3rd of your life at work, so it's better if it makes you happy and doesn't interfere with the other 2/3rds - and if it does, then only in the positive way. Would I like to be paid more? Well, who wouldn't? But money is only one type of wealth, and staying at Buffer allows me to not worry about financial future and focus on other types of wealth (physical, mental, social, and time), too. If you want to retain your employees, you don't have to pay more than everyone in the market. It's enough if you're top of the market and offer other benefits that make it stupid to leave. To another 5 (and many more) years! 🎉

Just launched #BufferAPI on Product Hunt, all votes and comments welcome! 🙏 https://lnkd.in/eKy3PpnK

Today, now, we've just launched #BufferAPI 🚀 including CLI and MCP so you can build anything you need as a creator in the AI era! Cannot wait to see all the cool things people will build with it, so many ideas everywhere. If you want to start building, visit https://lnkd.in/e9t6Sf-V

We've just launched #BufferAPI and I couldn't be more excited to see what the world builds with it. As a newbie creator I'm already using it in plenty of my personal projects, the first one being a live feed of my social content embedded into my personal website. Not everyone uses social media, so it's a gateway for these people to check my shorter thoughts and reflections I usually share on socials! And then the other, way more complex - I was wondering what could I possibly use personal agents like OpenClaw for. And then a realization came - I'm always looking for content ideas, why shouldn't I automate it? So, my bot checks all my newsletters I'm subscribing to, my past content I already published, in the future probably comments I got on my posts to distill ten ideas a week for me to post about, based on all the data. Definitely not allowing it to prepare any content itself (I like my voice!), but the topic research is a big thing! Let me know if you'd like to discuss any of those, or if you've got some cool, crazy ideas on how to use Buffer API to help you on your creator journey!

2 days to go for our biggest launch of the year! I've got to admit - I wasn't sure if it's the best thing we should focus on when we were first discussing it a long time ago, but the tech landscape changed so much across the last year that I couldn't have described it better than: right in the bulls-eye! 🎯 Also, it brings so much fun to work on all my personal side-projects using the API, I cannot wait to see what the world will build with it, starting in just 2 days! #BufferAPI

That feeling when you had a 3-month long queue of scheduled posts at @Buffer but it's running out soon and you have to find some time to refill it to keep your consistency. Please send prayers.

If you work with Node.js, have you ever wondered why enterprises don't choose it? It's an interesting thing when you reflect on it, and I've encountered an interesting take on Reddit, spicy but true! It's mostly due to the lack of official and long-term support SDK & libraries. When you take C#, it's got an official lib for pretty much everything. In Java, even for non-official (as in: not provided by Oracle, Spring or JEE) libs like Hibernate, you're sure that when you choose it, it'll be still maintained in this form or the other for the next years. On the other hand, if you develop with Node.js, think about all the times where you had to decide about a library for specific usecase like auth, which is maintained by that one guy on GitHub with a nick BreakingBad69 whose last update was 3 years ago. IMO it's the biggest Node.js (and JavaScript in general) downside, the fact the ecosystem itself chooses a shiny thing for the next few months only to forget it later for the next shiny thing. If you leave your codebase without maintenance for a few years, half of the dependencies will be outdated and your project will have more security holes than a Swiss cheese. Meanwhile in Java barely anything happens. That slow pace of change of course brings its own problems, and is a good explanation why Node is often used at startups and high-pace businesses. I'd love to find some middle-ground for this technology though. The feeling of being tired to always have to choose between thousands of different solutions for each usecase made me want to learn Go for my side-projects. It's so easy when stdlib has got pretty much everything you need! What's your take on it?

Ever thought about sharing more on Social Media and creating your presence, but there was always something holding you back? No idea what to post about, fear of not being original, everything you want to share was already said by hundreds of other people? I started my journey 3 months ago, and I had all of those problems, so I've decided I'll share my perspective, even if it helps just one person, it's a success! First thing, how did I even start? Starting is the most problematic part, whether we're talking about a work project, or social media content. There's no secret to it - I realized that if I was waiting for my perfect moment, it'd probably never come. So I was like "okay, I feel like I want to post a few thoughts so let me just create 10 content ideas so I've got something to start with, and the rest will follow". The rest actually followed 🎉 The most important thing - just do it - it's that simple. No need to fear not being original, because when you think about it - most of the stuff we're talking about was already said by someone else, there's a high probability for it. Unless you're another great philosopher, I can bet what you want to write about was already covered. But it's you, and your perspective, which is original and only yours, and maybe it's your perspective that will reasonate the most with some people, even when they already heard about the topic you want to write about. Once I decided to start and scheduled a few posts (it helps they're scheduled at @Buffer, makes it less scary to click 'Post'!), something clicked for me when I got some likes and engagement and this moment I started thinking of myself as a creator. I like what I do in my work, and read a lot about work-related stuff after-hours, so now whatever I do, like reading a book, article, listening to a podcast - I think "how could I post about it"? It keeps ideas infinite, as long as you've got a growth mindset for your chosen content topic. Good luck, creator!

Are you an engineer who always defaults to action? This will definitely help your career, but watch out because it doesn't always work in your favor! Let me tell you a story. I'm a big believer in defaulting to action and have a great sense of ownership. I get this urge to always surprise everyone positively with the amount of things I'm able to do in short periods of time, especially that as an engineer I've got means to do so. Threads (the social network) implemented topic fields via API? No problem, I'll put it together within 2-3 hours and have it ready for release at Buffer, customers will be thrilled! They were, but at the same time, when we were reflecting on our sprint as a team, it came out that my colleagues felt the pressure to adjust their workload and add this as an extra work to their plates - specifically mobile apps engineers and designer. After all, we want product parity and excellent UX for anything we release. It was a great feedback for me. It is when I’ve realized that my style of defaulting to action is not always positive. I need way better communication that what I do is mostly showcasing and sort of MVP, and not 100% ready for release product that requires us to drop everything else (especially in design and apps) and focus on that new shiny feature instead. So that’s my learning to be more cautious about communication, prioritization, and jumping on features like that in a smart way, with a plan prepared, not hooray-style. Always remember, working in tech is a team game, and nearly each action you take impacts people in this way or another, even when you don't expect it! Clear communication is clear to avoid situations like this. The situation I described - it still could have been done in the same amount of time, equally good, and with less stress, if only I communicated with my peers better. If there's no communication and alignment - it's not worth it!

"Mechanical sympathy - approach of writing software that’s aware of the hardware it’s running on. The term comes from the world of car racing, where the idea is that a driver who understands what the car is doing can best squeeze the last bits of performance out of it." I've been reading "Learning Go, 2nd edition" by @Jon Bodner and encountered this paragraph that made me reflect on the language I use in my day job - Node.js. It's incredibly easy to build "anything" with JavaScript and Node.js. But it's only engineers who understand and apply the concept of mechanical sympathy who can truly master and earn a good living using technology that gives you so many unopinionated choices.

A secret hack to actually get your request for feedback answered? Start with some self-feedback to make it easier for the other person (e.g., your manager) to just "add to the list" instead of figuring it out whole. Example: You want to get some feedback on the project you led recently. Instead of asking your manager "any feedback about that project I led?", you can do it even better if, instead, you go like "In the last project I led, I know I wasn't updating the stakeholders regularly, possibly leading to some lost trust. Did you notice any other things I could improve in my project management skills?" It requires some amount of self-reflection and work from your side, but that's actually a trait you should already have with a growth mindset!

I have to admit I was sometimes afraid of what AI can do and if it'll replace us, but I started being calmer about it when I was reminded that COBOL was created so that business people can write code and replace those nerdy assembler engineers 🤣 Hence the name - common business-oriented language. Our job probably changes, and we need to adjust, but we're not going anywhere!

My main goal for this year is to take daily notes, reflect more and write down as many things as I can - and I think you should too! Why? Let's skip all the obvious things - it improves your writing, brings more clarity, and so on and on. But it's even more powerful in the era of AI. Imagine that in a few years when you're able to have your private model - so security and data sharing is not an issue - you're able to feed it all your reflections and notes and notice things you never would otherwise. I'll skip reflecting if you should do it, if you'd trust the output - but it's important you will have a chance to decide on it! Without all that data written down, you're robbing yourself from this choice and anything good it could bring you. What's your take on it?

Not many things in software engineering are as true as Hofstadter's law: Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law. I'm wondering how AI-enabled coding era will change it, and if it will change it. Have you got your thoughts on that?