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dpritchett

4,075 karma · joined October 16, 2009

I build backend systems and developer tooling that create leverage.

Professionally: backend systems, cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and developer tooling. Personally: an application developer who enjoys building leverage.

I still enjoy dropping into unfamiliar codebases, building small studies in miniature, and leaving systems a little easier to work in than I found them.

Currently building:

Seevee: an agent-driven resume workbench that treats a career as a conversation instead of a document.

Timerbox: a cross-platform Gio desktop timer inspired by the workflow I've relied on for years.

Blog: dpritchett.net

GitHub: github.com/dpritchett

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielpritchett

Email: dpritchett@gmail.com

submissionscomments
dpritchett··on Show HN: Whisper transcribes 70-year-olds more accurately than 20-year-olds
When a whisper-based agent thinks you’ve stopped talking, it will begin its own reply. If you’re younger, you’re more likely to get interrupted by a bot that’s prematurely decided that you’re done speaking.
dpritchett··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
That is the usual work of high end programmers, right? Growing codebases as consistent, dependable ontologies?

I feel like most mainstream programming languages do this sort of work for their standard libraries and their official docs. Go and Python come to mind, but plenty others do this reasonably well to the point where one mostly doesn’t need to read the implementation code to effectively use the standard library itself.

dpritchett··on A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.
dpritchett··on Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code
Cucumber-style BDD has been trying to do this for a long time now, though I never found it to be super comfortable.
dpritchett··on Why Everybody Is Losing Money On AI
This sounds a whole lot like Pascal's wager (or Roko's basilisk, if you prefer) for trillionaires.
dpritchett··on At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)
Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice.

Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.

Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.

From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.

dpritchett··on Our $100M Series B
It’s a bit of a class thing, isn’t it?

Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in the company’s early years.

dpritchett··on Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.

I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.

dpritchett··on Goblin.tools: simple, single-task tools to help neurodivergent people with tasks
If ADHD-oriented media and discussions provide neurodivergent adults a means to work through decades of internalized shame and anxiety, why get in the way of that?
dpritchett··on I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days
There may never be a perfect taxonomy of programmer archetypes.

I imagine most of us here can agree that some elevate the craft and ritual to great effect while others avoid such high-minded conceits in favor of shipping whatever hits the expected target this week.

I’ve been both at different points in my career. Usually it’s a response to my environment.

dpritchett··on Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model
Could be an exit strategy… maybe he’s tired of running a social network and wants to help run governments and fly to space like the other guys.
dpritchett··on Why I'm skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
Maybe for some the appeal of JS is in (hopefully) never having to learn Unix?

I’ve heard several folks say that about Kubernetes, but in my experience the *nix core always resurfaces the second things get weird.

dpritchett··on Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages
Reminds me of using Ruby ten years ago and having to contend with folks who wanted to default to using the string literal style over another because it was known to be more performant at scale. That awkward stuff surfaces earlier with some languages than with others.
dpritchett··on Sourcegraph went dark
I’d been a huge fan of his for a solid decade, but that post was probably the last one of his I’ll ever read.
dpritchett··on Markdown is meant to be shown (2021)
The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!
dpritchett··on 'We're the last bastion of rental': video stores resisting rise of streaming
I’d guess Click: https://screencrush.com/rob-schneiders-racist-stereotyped-ch...
dpritchett··on Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
The more skilled I become over the decades the more I prefer either Hickey’s hammock-driven development or a simple kanban setup.
dpritchett··on Never write a database, even if you want to, even if you think you should
Good ear. She is cofounder of a company that built their own “distributed column store”: https://youtu.be/tr2KcekX2kk?si=ID0qB-O2ucXF4GXC
dpritchett··on iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus
Likely so the phone can charge off of a nearby MacBook which has usb C ports.
dpritchett··on The theory versus the practice of “static websites”
Can you describe your process? Do you just hand type import-free HTML and rsync it up to a web server?

I’d make so many syntax errors without at least some sort of lint/build step.

dpritchett··on Blizzard manager departs in protest of employee ranking system
That’a a lot to ask of folks who are spending a third of their waking lives on a shared endeavor.

May as well ask family to stop having opinions on my cooking.

dpritchett··on Architecture diagrams should be code
Depending on your chess engine (e.g. a physical board) a player could reasonably move many times without stopping to update the diagram. Maybe I forgot. Maybe I was in a hurry due to schedule problems. Maybe the diagram editor was offline for maintenance but the chess engine was still open so we kept on playing.

This might soon prove to be A Problem for folks who reasonably yet erroneously expected that each responsible player would of course update the diagram immediately after each move.

dpritchett··on Where's All the Code?
From the go.mod file:

> module humungus.tedunangst.com/r/watc

Implies a “go get” should pick it up. Likely a git clone of that URL would do.

dpritchett··on Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper (2019)
Agreed, if folks don’t finish reading the paper you can’t very well claim to have made the desired impact.
dpritchett··on Documenting APIs
Agreed! I like grpc for the same reason. If I need to work with REST, a schema-first approach is ideal as it means various client, server, validation, and documentation dimensions are in sync by default.

I get why folks often come at it from the other end and just layer some swagger annotations on top of their existing server code — lack of experience, the dynamicist’s mistrust of typing in general, or maybe they’re in a niche stack without a workable binding generator.

Still, it’s better for everyone if the API provider can pull off the artifact-driven approach.

dpritchett··on The Google home page is 500K
> Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience

The years really do fly by. Looked her up and she’s currently a cofounder at a company that sells an iOS contacts app.

dpritchett··on Shipping Clubhouse on Android in ten weeks
I had to mute the word clubhouse on Twitter to keep from getting too cranky about it.

Avoiding VCs and accounts in their orbit helped as well.

dpritchett··on uBlock Origin review
Pihole frequently breaks online tv like Disney+ and Hulu when viewed on our Roku TV. Preload trackers or ads get stuck and the show will never start.
dpritchett··on Programmers, teach non-geeks the true cost of interruptions (2014)
Happened to us at a small agency. Allowed WFH days were standardized to specific days of the week so we could show a full house on days when we had client visits.
dpritchett··on Programmers, teach non-geeks the true cost of interruptions (2014)
Firming up your tests, logging, observability, and debugging practices really does help here.

The only time I enter a desperate fugue state juggling too many disparate code modules in my head is when the system is a poorly factored enterprise monolith.

Those aren’t uncommon but I reflexively avoid jobs that make those the majority of my work.

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