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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?

When I decided I will start posting more on Social Media, I got stuck in a common trap: when do I consider my post ready? Let me share some tips with you that helped me the most. After reflecting on the issue, I decided I need to define "done" for social content, and abide by it - and that's the most important thing I've done for myself. You can spend endless hours crafting one paragraph, after all: simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. However, imperfect and done is way better than perfect but still not ready. So I keep a few simple rules: - some learning or observation shared - at least 100 words - no grammar errors - there's a good hook, the content itself, and ideally a question in the end - kept in Buffer ideas for a week, in case I come up with something genius I need to add - expanding on above, I sometimes add image, link, or mention people relevant to the topic - that usually happens in that week - final read before scheduling Having the definition of done and being okay with not being perfect is the biggest thing that helped me to overcome my fear. The second is having Buffer - scheduling in advance somehow feels way less scary than clicking "Publish" button, there's something to it happening in the background. Have you got your definition of "ready" for social media posts?

In one of my previous posts I was writing about the uncertain future for current-day engineers. At the same time - on some of my other Social Media, I was getting a LOT of questions that go like "does it even make sense to start learning software engineering and aspire for that career?" - and that's something I wanted to cover now. If you're a junior, intern, or haven't even started yet - that task will be way harder for you now than it was 10 years ago. It's got both good and bad outcomes for you. The bad - you're expected to be productive and positive net productivity engineer way sooner than your folks years ago. The bar is way higher than it ever was. The industry changes, and we're not yet sure how our roles will look like in a few years, and that means we've got to react dynamically to everything, adjust, and commit time to be on the forefront of it, if we want to remain employable. That last point is the best good outcome at the same time - if you've got it in you to spend time learning and adjusting, keeping up with all the changes and even more - creating the change yourself, you'll make a place for yourself for sure. There's another good thing here IF you think you've got the will - because the bar is way higher now, you'll have less competition, because people who don't adjust will be unable to land a job or remain in it. If you're 110% overachiever type - I'm not worried about you. Curious about your thoughts on the future of people who want to start working in software engineering!

A little controversial thought (and question!) about conferences. I'm a software engineer, and I was at my first conference recently, event with over 3k attendees. I've felt like I'm one of the most experienced attendees there, even though it's not like I'm principal engineer at Amazon - just an experienced senior engineer. I was alone and I'm an introvert with no idea how to approach people, so networking was hard. I'm just a random guy to everyone else. The talks themselves were interesting, but if you've got 30-45 minutes per talk, some of them feel to you like you already know this stuff. Not all of them! But that was definitely a feeling I had with many. And then you can always just browse stuff on the internet about a specific topic and learn more in the same time as you do at the conference. I also attended the after-party but didn't really enjoy it. I was trying to approach it all with an open mind, and I'm happy I tried, but decided that if the same conference happens next year, I won't attend - not worth the price for me. And promised myself that the only time I'll attend conferences is when I get invited as a speaker. What do I do wrong? How do you benefit from conferences you attend to? How do you network? Was it just that specific conference that was bad, or is every conference like that? Do you do it for talks, networking, or what?

You want to work remotely for a company with a great culture, and at the same time you feel you won't make it because you're competing with thousands of other people applying for the same job? There's one little thing that will make your application stand out and immediately catch the eye of reviewers, it's so simple yet almost nobody does it. Just use their product! Want to work for @Buffer? You should use the product like a real user would - start posting on socials. And yes - you should do it for real, like a proper creator. @Raycast? Install it and make it the tool you default to for everything. @Doist? You actually need to be a person who uses to-do lists and make it your daily ritual with Todoist. I promise you, it'll improve your chances drastically!

"Equal salaries are a perfect way to optimize for mediocrity" is a take I heard lately when I shared about the equal salaries approach at @Buffer, @Oxide Computer Company, and similar. When you start reflecting on it, you might be inclined to agree. If you took any random company, that would probably be true. What makes the difference in those mentioned is how much pressure they put on the company's culture, and how it reflects in hiring. Both hire only the best possible people, who always give it all and are fully aligned with the company's values. Well, you might think, who doesn't? The key factor is the moat these companies have, and the pool of candidates they can choose from. It truly ensures the candidates they hire are: the best, always give 110%, always work for the value of the team instead of selfishly, and, as already mentioned - are fully aligned with the company's culture. If the company doesn't incentivize mediocrity through its culture, the employees won't either.

Recently encountered an interesting take from a fellow senior engineer here on LinkedIn "Java the old way [...] should be abandoned. The new way [...] should be embraced and it should also be mandatory that old software must transition to it." Quite a brave assumption, given that the whole reason Java is still so popular nowadays is exactly because it's so stable and doesn't require every enterprise using it to rewrite everything from scratch each release cycle. Is it joyful for the engineer? Probably not. But it fulfills the most important quality of Java as a technology - it's meant to be run the same way for years. Regarding the point of that engineer. If those companies would be forced to rewrite everything in "new way", how many of them would abandon Java completely to move to something else? As engineers, we need to be aware of what are the selling points of the technologies we use. Do you hate old-school development style and want to jump on new things all the time? Go with Node.js. Do you want simplicity and performance? Golang is your friend. We are paid to make business better, so remember: technology is only a tool!

@Lenny's Newsletter, I love your newsletter for the product take and everything you offer, but I don't like the attached claim. I get that the success stories of people who didn't know something is "supposedly impossible" and yet they managed to do it are a beautiful inspiration. Like The Wright brothers who built the plane, even though many experts said heavier-than-air machines could not fly. The thing is, the consensus here was based on incomplete understanding of aerodynamics. The laws of physics allowed flight, it's just that people had the wrong models. Or let's take the another example: for years, people believed running a mile under four minutes was physiologically impossible. Doctors said the human body could not handle it. Then Roger Bannister did it and soon after, many others did too. This was a psychological barrier, not a physical one. Now let's compare these two to engineering. It's a very deterministic field, many impossibles are formal impossibility results based on e.g. computational theory and mathematics, not cultural myths or wrong thinking models. It's not like in the examples attached, there were any technical reasons Chrome extensions or desktop apps shouldn't technically work. Lovable generates code and Chrome extensions are just packaged JavaScript. Desktop apps are typically wrappers around web technologies or native runtimes that are also well defined and documented. If the underlying platform allows it, then it's technically possible. There is no fundamental law being challenged here. The dangerous part is turning this into a belief that you can build anything simply because you do not know what is impossible. In engineering, when someone says something is not possible, it usually does not mean "we lack imagination." It means "this is insecure," "this will corrupt data," "this will fail under real-world conditions" and so on. Those limits are not creative blocks, they are protective boundaries. Ignoring them does not make you bold - it means you will just discover them later, when the cost is higher. And for reference - I love AI and build a lot with it, never had so much fun in my job (and I'm saying it as a software engineer from passion!), and I'm all in for non-technical people using AI to build. I genuinely cheer for them and want more people to create, I just don't want the takeaway to be that limits are imaginary, because in engineering many of them exist to keep you, your users and your data safe.

✏️ If you are a software engineer, do you own a brag document? No? You're missing on performance reviews that could yield way better results for you! Having a brag document is something I learned while at Meta. Whenever I feel I'm proud of something, small or big, I add it there with a short commentary. When the time was coming up for performance reviews, I wasn't frantically searching through my past Slack messages, projects, or PRs - everything was ready for me in the document to put into my self-assessment. I've never forgot about any important contribution I made. That's the first thing I was suggesting on a very first call with every mentee I ever had, because most of them didn't have one. People often expect their managers will remember their achievements. But think about it - would you remember all achievements of 5+ people on your team, in addition to yours own? Brag document is your way to make sure your manager has got all the tools they need for you to succeed. 📈 How do you track your impact today? PS: At @Buffer, we've got now monthly reflections with our managers (think kind of perf reviews, but not 100% the same), which requires us to have our "brag documents" updated, that's what you call a motivation to have one. I'll be happy to write about it more if you're interested!

Wispr Flow please tell me the release for Android will be soon after that waitlist contest ends 🙏 https://wisprflow.ai/android-waitlist

We’re hiring an Operations and Automation Specialist on the People team at @Buffer! 🥳 This role will help improve how we work across a remote, global team by reducing friction in our day to day systems, strengthening how we share context and make decisions, and supporting thoughtful adoption of automation and AI. If you love tinkering, building practical solutions, and bringing clarity to how teams collaborate across tools and time zones, this is for you! 🌎 Fully remote 🗓️ 4-day work week 💙 Values-led, transparency-first culture 💰 $108,584 - $139,952 USD + equity 🔗 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gug2dPEn

Are you able to guess which voice is mine, and which one is an AI clone? After editing, I had to double-check to make sure which one is the original. Also, my dear wife @Olga Dąbrowska guessed it wrong. A little scary but exciting! Got my hands on @ElevenLabs recently, and it blows my mind how accurate it is with voice cloning. Makes me super proud the company is Polish! 🇵🇱 Side note: @ElevenLabs, when I was creating a Deep clone, I used my pro microphone as you suggested in the instructions. Went for like 30 minutes of talking, and when uploaded, it told me "The language of the audio samples does not match provided language. This can happen if the sample is low quality". Understandable, because when I played them, I could hear the background noise, but still made me annoyed because of the lost 30 minutes. I think it'd be better if you improved the UX by requiring a test 1-minute sample from the user to make sure it's okay to continue 😀

I got my hands on all @Replit, @bolt.new and @Lovable to try out the non-technical people's perspective on how easy it is to build apps that genuinely help them, and compared to closer-to-the-metal way of doing it with Claude, I'm not that impressed yet, but the direction is good! The idea for the app was simple: I want to buy an apartment with mortgage, and for years I was using an Excel spreasheet where I've got a simulation covering how much does the interest eats with assumption that I'm overpaying the mortgage, and a few extra factors like my salary changing, extra one-time payments like bonus from work, tax returns, or a sale of our old apartment. I tasked Replit with doing that. What's the most impressive is that it build it within a few minutes and it was (mostly) working, with literally no technical input from me! What's less impressive is that as soon as I started testing stuff and tasking it to fix some small inconveniences, I was discovering more inconveniences and bugs. That's fine - we can iterate on it! But 30 minutes later I completely run out of my $20 credits. So I defaulted to the known method: exported files, tasked @Claude to dockerize it, and fix all the stuff I noticed. Took me 10 minutes and I've got it running locally with the most annoying bugs fixed and a few small extra features. Replit will be awesome for non-technical folks when tokens are way cheaper, for now it doesn't even stand near the value that @Anthropic and Claude provide within its plans. Claude, I love you.

Salary up to $224,272, fully remote with benefits you won't see anywhere else (did someone say 4-day workweeks or the coffee shop coworking benefit from that video?!) We're hiring at @Buffer, come join us! Engineering: • Senior Backend Engineer (Platform & API): $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Engineer, Growth Marketing: $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Product Engineer (Frontend): $156,487 – $202,264 • Senior Developer Advocate: $157,297 – $194,000 Marketing: • Senior Community Manager: $116,330–$144,213 Data Science: • Senior Data Scientist: $192,600–$224,272 All roles are: 🌍 Fully remote 📆 4-day workweek 📈 Equity included 💚 A kind, high-trust, values-led team Link to careers page in comments!