iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 07/09/2025

In Google, you have bodies of litigated law instead of principles. Principles are like "Be Googly" (i.e. "don't be a dick") and are widely ignored. Laws are the tomes they have written about code quality and making services production ready, every word resulting from endless wars and bikeshedding.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 04/09/2025

I see a lot of people complaining that ChatGPT ruined em dashes for them, but I have taken a different approach.

Office Space meme template with Amir and Michael Bolton. Top text says "WHY SHOULD I STOP USING EM DASHES?". Bottom text says "GPT'S THE ONE WHO SUCKS"

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 03/09/2025

Maybe it's just NYC, but if my wife and I did dinner and a movie it'd be north of $100 unless we grabbed falafel or something cheap. That's pretty steep especially for someone in their 20s, unless you land in tech or something like that.

Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 03/09/2025

I liked it a lot more when I started learning as much as I could on every round, instead of overly focusing on getting to the antechamber

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 12/07/2025

They didn't used to have service fees. I just pulled up a random receipt from 2019 and I had $21.35 of items and it came out to $26.48 after tax and tip. Now you'd have a delivery fee and service fee, which varies by time of day, so it's just noticeably a lot more than it used to be

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 22/06/2025

Everyone laughs at New Jersey but we have "Born to Run" at the ready

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 16/06/2025

Tag yourself, I'm "Strange Stones"

* And remember: there’s more to life than tech. Fill your life with stories, not just side projects.

* Learn how computers really work: OS, architecture, protocols. * Understand where the industry is going. Right now? LLMs, agents, AI. * Increase your luck surface area. Talk. Share. Meet. Post. * Be curious. Be humble

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I’ve been coding since I was 14. I’ve worked at places like Google, Etsy, and now Hinge. Here’s what I said, distilled from 25 years of experience: * Learn to code early. * Don’t just take classes. Build something. Even small projects count. * Get internships (or the closest thing you can).

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I got asked a simple question: “What advice would you give a high schooler who wants to work in tech?” I wasn’t planning to write anything this week. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. www.clientserver.dev/p/a-staff-en...

A staff engineer's advice to high schoolers who want to work in tech

Are you a high school student interested in working in tech? Here's my advice as someone who has worked at everything from FAANG to research labs, and has been in the industry since 2008.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 10/06/2025

99% of my naps are about 10 minutes. Every now and then I'll accidentally sleep an hour. My accidental nap record was around 4 hours.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 10/06/2025

I paid $50 for some new NES games 30 years ago. They were trash compared to what you can play today. We're blessed that games didn't keep pace with inflation.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 03/06/2025

Only thing that it's missing is matching Shin guards

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Reposted by Jacob Voytko

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 03/06/2025

OK, this is a pretty solid take on LLMs.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 29/05/2025

But I think the important takeaway is that even if you don’t have a lot of time, it’s possible to publish to a newsletter if you have a strategy. I’m not trying to convince you to run one… but if you just need a little push, I hope this post provides it.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 29/05/2025

6 months ago, I got my first newsletter subscriber. Now I’m up above 260. This is a big deal for me, because after my daughter was born 2 years ago, I didn’t have any time for hobbies. Writing this newsletter was the first hobby that I was able to do for myself.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 29/05/2025

A few people have asked, “how do you have time to write a newsletter?” This post has my full playbook. What is my audience? How do I pick stories? Why is writing an outline so important? What do I do after a post is published? What would I do if I had more time? www.clientserver.dev/p/you-have-t...

You have the time to run a technical newsletter

A dad's playbook for running a newsletter when you have very little free time.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 28/05/2025

On one hand, tools like Cursor are actual skills that require time and effort to learn. I've seen people drop out before they got good at it. But on the other hand, there are parts of my current codebase where I don't bother using it because it has no hope of doing anything right.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 21/05/2025

I'm personally excited to watch a tablet try to potty train a toddler.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 19/05/2025

Hinge dating app: A live map of the world. Little hearts pop up when there's a match

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 15/05/2025

These were widely mocked and mostly went away, except for some vestiges that remain like "hour-long meetings are booked for 50 minutes." One team took advantage of the 50-minute meeting rule in an unexpected way. Read more to find out how!

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 15/05/2025

My latest newsletter is trending on Hacker News! It's a story from 2011 about how Larry Page tried enacting strict rules and conventions around meetings, in an attempt to get Google to stop slowing down. www.clientserver.dev/p/malicious-...

Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.

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Well, not anymore: this is one of the features that sudo-rs is removing. In my post, I go in depth about historical security issues that sudo has faced, and explain the project motivations in more depth

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In the course of this, I also went on a long tangent in my research when I found out that sudo can *send mail*. Like, not just send mail to the Linux mail spool with scary messages about your login attempts being sent to the system administrator, it actually farms out jobs to sendmail.

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There are obvious reasons for wanting to do this: sudo's job is to safely escalate the permissions of single commands. So if an attacker can bypass this using memory safety issues, then there is no limit to the potential attack surface.

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This week, I wrote about something that I found interesting in the Linux world: Ubuntu is actually replacing their implementation of sudo with a version written in Rust. www.clientserver.dev/p/ubuntu-is-...

Ubuntu Is Betting Big on sudo's Rust rewrite

Canonical is rolling out sudo-rs by default in Ubuntu 25.10, embracing Rust’s safety while shedding some of sudo’s legacy baggage

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 12/05/2025

I watched the ~10 minutes around this quote, ready to get my pitchfork, but it's wildly misreported. He says AI will generate the actual code, but code is a small part of software engineering and humans will have all of these essential tasks that the AI can't do. He puts replacement at >10 years out

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That only leaves one possible conclusion, which is in the post. Also, I went an entire post and an entire note without confusing “Spotify” and “Shopify.” Please clap.

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The only bonus skill they list is C++ experience, presumably because they share code between platforms using a C++ binding

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What about frameworks like React Native? Looking at Spotify’s job postings, that goes right out the window. They hire iOS developers for actual iOS developer skills, and not for React Native.

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So over a 24-hour period, you’d want someone to be present from each discipline. It seems unusually tight for this to be done, although it’s hard to argue with the fact that a talented mobile developer likely could develop the screens in that time.

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emily freeman @emilyfreeman.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

For some background, this order came on April 30th, and 1 day later on May 1st Spotify shipped their update. This is unusually fast for a major corporation; you’d expect that they’d need product, design, legal, developers, QA testing, legal review, etc.

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Reposted by Jacob Voytko

Me: “Sorry, I curse a lot.” Them: “I’m from New Jersey.” Me: “Thank fuck.”

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 30/04/2025

We had given up on fixing it, until I suddenly had a flash of inspiration after three months.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 30/04/2025

The fix took us through shredding a backpack, play with BIOS and Windows Registry settings, building a custom battery pack to prevent the machine from being power throttled, and finally a tour through distributed queuing.

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Jacob Voytko @bitlog.com · 30/04/2025

When I had only been working in the software industry for a couple of years, I worked on an augmented reality training simulator for DARPA that required an incredible number of fixes. www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-...