thomasfromcdnjs

* Location: Melbourne, Australia * Remote: Yes

* Willing to relocate: Yes - Australia

Technologies: Mostly Javascript. I've coded in pretty much all non functional languages though. Most of the databases sql/nosql. Comfortable with gCloud/aws/heroku etc. Mostly worked with node/rails/laravel/python/golang backends.

17+ years experience

* Résumé/CV: https://registry.jsonresume.org/thomasdavis

* GitHub: https://github.com/thomasdavis/

I'm a full stack web developer who can build apps from the ground up. I've worked mostly at startups so I am used to wearing many hats. I am a very product focused developer who prioritizes user feedback first and foremost. I'm generally very flexible when investigating new roles. Nothing too big or small.

Does anyone have any pro tips for large tool collections? (mine are getting fat)

Plan on doing a two layered system mentioned earlier, where the first layer of tool calls is as slim as they can be, then a second layer for more in depth tool documentation.

And/or chunking tools and creating embeddings and also using RAG.

interoperable*

I've been following agents.json for a little while. I think it has legs, and would love to see some protocol win this space soon.

Will be interesting to see where the state/less conversation goes, my gut tells me MCP and "something" (agent.json perhaps) will co-exist. My reasoning being purely organisational, MCP focuses on a lot more, and there ability to make a slimmed down stateless protocol might be nigh impossible.

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Furthermore, if agents.json wants to win as a protocol through early adoption, the docs need to be far easier to grok. An example should be immediately viewable, and the schema close by. The pitch should be very succinct, the fields in the schema need to have the same amount of clarity at first glance. Maybe a tool, that anyone can paste their OpenAPI schema into, and it gets passed to an LLM to generate a first pass of what their agents.json could look like.

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The OpenAPI <> agents.json portability is a nice touch, but might actually be overkill. OpenAPI is popular but it never actually took over the market imo. If there is added complexity to agents.json because of this, I'd really question if it is worth supporting it. They don't have to be 100% inoperable, custom converters could manage partial support.

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A lot of people are using agentic IDE's now, would be nice if agent.json shared a snippet with instructions on how to use it, where to find docs and how to pull a list and/or search the registry that people can just drop straight into Windsurf/Cursor.

Saw this catapillar one a few weeks ago -> https://x.com/trunarla/status/1893705260142657764

Such a cool company name

Lots of great findings

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I'm curious if anyone knows whether it is better to pass structured data or unstructured data to embedding api's? If I ask ChatGPT, it says it is better to send unstructured data. (looking at the authors github, it looks like he generated embeddings from json strings)

My use case is for jsonresume, I am creating embeddings by sending full json versions as strings, but I've been experimenting with using models to translate resume.json's into full text versions first before creating embeddings. The results seem to be better but I haven't seen any concrete opinions on this.

My understanding is that unstructured data is better because it contains textual/semantic meaning because of natural lanaguage aka

  skills: ['Javascript', 'Python']

is worse than;

  Thomas excels at Javascript and Python

Another question: What if the search was also a json embedding? JSON <> JSON embeddings could also be great?

- Single executable (you know where all the files are regardless of os)

- Config so easy you can remember how to do it in a day

I'll bite;

- When I search for recent news e.g. "australian medical staff jewish" (current topic), all the results are left leaning responses. I would mostly prefer to see the original video without commentary and uncut, and also would like to see more right wing responses. (A lot of issues over the years that were right leaning would just surface late night comedians mocking the right wings perspective on such issues)

- Looking up medical or scientific claims that are "indisputable" e.g. climate change, covid. I was curious to see Kari Mullis speak about his claims around hiv/aids correlation but only one or two videos exist, I had to go to the alt-youtubes to find speeches and lectures he did.

What prevention methods did he use?

I agree with this stance. Junior developers are going to learn faster than previous generations, and I'm happy for it.

I know that is confronting for a lot of people, but I think it is better to accept it, and spend time thinking about what your experience is worth. (A lot!)

I'm an Australian indigenous and have been slowly working on this problem in my own way for a few years.

https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate.com/

In it's current iteration the homepage is just running dictionaries through OpenAI. (my tribes dictionary fits in a 100k context window)

My old ambitions can be found somewhat here -> https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate-server

That being said, the OpenAI models do a fantastic job at translating sentences so I've put my own model research further to the back. (will try to find some examples)

I can't speak of the true preservation, not many native speakers left, but in my mind that's not even all that important from a personal/cultural perspective.

If the youth who are interested in learning more about their language have a nice interface with 70-80% accurate results and they enjoy doing/learning it then that is a win to me. (and kind of how language evolves anyway) (the noun replacement seems to work great, but grammar is obviously wishy-washy)

(At this point, I just rushed to get my tribes dictionary crawlable so hopefully it will be in a few models next training phases)

It's hard to to rate the quality, I just feel like it does a better job of knowing the codebase and what I am working on via whatever mechanisms they have implemented.

I also find the DX better, I only really use the right click to mark code to talk about, and then the chat. The accept/reject changes UI works better imo.

In short, I barely have to do anything to use the AI features, just feels right.

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Just try both, I didn't feel like Cursor suited my style much, Windsurf had me hooked instantly.

Cursor has obviously figured out marketing better.

I switched to Windsurf 2-3 months ago, feels a lot better for me.

This is really really cool insights into the industry and consumer behavior in general.

Going to save it to my google docs so I never lose it.

expressiveness

I'd be more curious about how it differs to Metabase?

I used Windsurf mostly on a feature to build out user authentication and then another tool to generate the PR documentation entirely.

https://github.com/jsonresume/jsonresume.org/pull/176

Meets my good enough standards fo sure

I've been coding for around 25 years, I have 3 or so subscriptions to different AI products that I use for coding.

It is kind of terrifying that I probably would stop coding for the day if those subscriptions end. (I get far too much convenience out of them)

I have tried to rationalize it by the fact that I do pay for internet, and version control, and my peripherals etc

Awesome work.

Sidenote: That marketing video was nauseating, it was moving too fast and didn't show any features for long enough or for enough steps.

I can't agree with the quoted sentiment either. Even I attempt to remove all my bias, most of the tools I use to work (app developer) are fat javascript clients.

Pay wall.

Side note: I haven't liked anything of Harris since about 20 years ago during the new atheist movement, any suggestions for some of his more recent work?

I'm one of those stubborn types that will refuse all medical treatments, lots of fasting is my current go to strategy if some tumor gets out of control.

I'd recommend before others go too far down the ATS rabbit hole to checkout the wiki from /r/EngineeringResumes

https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/index/#wiki...

(In short, they might not be as important as you think they are)

Love the token joke!

That Geraldo episode has me rolling, thanks for the share.

Cross posting a comment I left

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Just wanted to share that I've been working on a schema for job descriptions.

https://jsonresume.org/job-description-schema

I released about 6 months ago, hopefully some of the models use it in their training data. So you can just say "make an example JD, return it in the jsonresume job schema"

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Just realized I should call it jsonjob or something

My friend brought over a blow up pool and beers. Took us 6 hours before we realized we both had our shorts on backwards.

All the code is open source:

ui - https://github.com/jsonresume/jsonresume.org/blob/master/app...

api - https://github.com/jsonresume/jsonresume.org/blob/master/app...

scripts - https://github.com/jsonresume/jsonresume.org/tree/master/app...

This is me too. Windsurf feels perfect right now.