iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 29/09/2026

If you liked Project Hail Mary, and haven’t read the Bobiverse books… go check them out. Great upbeat hopecore engineering sci-fi series. Book 6 just came out.

120

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 23/04/2026

Also congrats on 300 episodes of the podcast!

020

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 16/04/2026

Using completions? 😒 Typing it out? 😒 Pressing up 37 times and editing an old command for some reason? 😏

130

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 15/04/2026

Please note this is not a complaint about Expert, and I’m very grateful we have a concerted effort behind it. I was most likely doing something wrong before. I just wanted to report my findings in case it helps someone else.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 15/04/2026

The main advantages for me so far: - It’s not shown stale data yet (a problem I often had before, particularly if an LLM or external tool made changes to files) - It’s ready ~instantly when changing branches (and doesn’t break) - I haven’t had to think about it since installing

110

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 15/04/2026

Despite how we all might feel about another competing #elixirlang LSP, Dexter is *surprisingly* good. I haven’t had a single problem with it after using it for a few days, which just hasn’t been the case with others. And it’s _fast_. Fast enough that I don’t need to think about it.

150

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 10/04/2026

I feel like I’ve missed some context here, did something happen?

110

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 10/04/2026

What do you mean by “elixir thinking”? Like add that in the prompt or is it something else?

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 26/03/2026

Project Hail Mary was really great, definitely recommend it!

000

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 25/03/2026

When I see people adding a bunch of process, guard rails, workflows, etc. around agents it sounds an awful lot like what you do within a human org to keep things from falling apart as it all scales up. With a very similar list of pros and cons too.

020

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 25/03/2026

I’d never expect a freshly hired dev to push a perfect PR with a single prompt and nothing else. I’d expect bad results, or something in the wrong direction, if there wasn’t more involvement (pairing/cowriting/reviewing). I wouldn’t expect that just writing more context would reliably fix it either.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 25/03/2026

- Go a little too far chasing an idea or implementation - Get ahead of themselves and skip steps - Misunderstand context/needs/the state of things - Make simple mistakes or a bad judgement call - Being a little too opinionated or not opinionated enough at the wrong time

110

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 25/03/2026

I have a theory that a lot of the problems we see with agents are the same problems we’ve always had working with and managing actual devs, too. When we compare agents with people, we tend to imagine some ideal dev in comparison. But even the best devs I’ve known also occasionally do things like:

210

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 20/03/2026

Approximated.app runs thousands of servers, and this is true. Similarly, each 9 added to uptime is exponentially harder. Downtime allowed by uptime percentage: 90%: 36.5 days/yr 99%: 3.65 days/yr 99.9%: 8.8 hrs/yr 99.99%: 52.6 min/yr 99.999%: 5.26 min/yr 99.9999%: 31.5 sec/yr (!!)

000

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 03/02/2026

Theories: - More and more of those people have kids now, so no energy or time - Blogging/posting feels less valuable since AI (key word: feels) - Feels tone deaf squeezing tech posts in between major news events that happen every 45 minutes - Everybody is more stressed, which kills spontaneity

120

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 23/10/2025

This is the first Mac I’ve personally owned. I had a lot of criticisms in the pre-M chip era, it just felt to me like you paid twice as much for branding and kind of weak hardware. But it’s hard to deny how much of a jump the M chips are now, and competitor prices have crept up.

000

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 23/10/2025

Local LLMs, a zillion concurrent processes with elixir, doesn’t seem to matter what it is. It’s just cool as a cucumber at all times. Coming from non M chip hardware, that’s absolutely nuts to me. My old rig would literally be on fire if I did half of this.

120

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 23/10/2025

Picked up a Mac Studio recently because my daily driver Linux desktop hardware was showing its age at about 10 years old (some upgrades along the way). Most impressive to me is that it seems to generate no heat or noise, EVER, despite maxing out every core pretty often with elixir concurrency work.

130

Reposted by Carter Bryden 🇨🇦

LostKobrakai @kobrakai.de · 14/09/2025

There‘s still a bit to go to making this happen. Rebar is an important piece to using erlang not just for erlang, but just as much for elixir, gleam, … Consider backing this effort.

1149

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 18/08/2025

Razing awareness is the new zeitgeist

010

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 22/07/2025

When liveview first came out, I thought it was really brilliant that it can be nested. Even when live components were released, I preferred to just nest liveviews for a while. Today I use components a lot, and like them, but I still think nesting LVs have more use cases than people realize.

190

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 21/06/2025

I think part of the reason why is: If no one’s name is on it, then no one is responsible and so how could any failure be anyone’s fault? Tempting for corps, infuriating for customers. Leads to employees systemically not caring as much about quality or customer experience and general disconnection.

110

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 12/06/2025

You can fit so many spinners in this bad boy 🚗

010

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 12/06/2025

Wearing a white shirt when you have young kids is the height of hubris. I’ve flown too close to the sun once again.

130

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 06/06/2025

A lesson learned by all who have tried to make Reese’s pieces by just mixing chocolate and peanut butter

020

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 28/05/2025

Bold of you to assume I have anything to do on any night

010

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 11/04/2025

Thanks, and exactly! A nice side effect is that it tends to result in features that people are more likely to intuitively understand. And in the code base, something other developers can understand more easily.

120

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 11/04/2025

I have the dumbest trick ever when I can't figure out how to implement something, but it works. I ask "If a person had to manually do this, how would they do it". That's it. So many things feel complicated when I think only in coding terms, but dead simple if some guy named Steve had to do it.

161

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 10/04/2025

That's a good question! I just assumed they are because that would make the most sense, but I haven't actually used this method to grab events themselves before so I'm not sure.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 10/04/2025

For your use case where you want the events themselves, I'd call the events API and grab those instead, triggered by receiving a webhook.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 10/04/2025

A frustrating but (I've found) more reliable option is to trigger an API call to get the latest data when webhooks come in. Depending on frequency and the situation you can debounce/deduplicate so you're not slamming API calls more than some rate, too.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 07/04/2025

That's probably true, but no, I think I don't think I'd feel right doing that. At the end of the day it's a US corp, with all of the unfortunate things that entails, and I wouldn't want to mislead people about that even by accident.

020

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 07/04/2025

Being Canadian while having a US corporation has been a uniquely tense experience lately, I'll say that.

110

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 04/04/2025

This is in addition to the inbound load balancing we already have, which balances based on region, connection count, etc. That inbound handles which part of your Approximated cluster a request should go through, and the upstream load balancing decides which upstream to send it to.

000

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 04/04/2025

This is extra handy if you want to have your app running on multiple hosting/infra providers and load balance between them for redundancy, costs, etc. Or if you just don't want to manage a global load balancer on your own infrastructure (or your provider makes it hard to do).

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 04/04/2025

Added upstream load balancing to approximated.app! Now you can: - Set multiple upstreams per custom domain - Set policy (least conns, round robin, etc) - Optional sticky connections - Upstream health checks and rerouting - Configurable over API or dashboard And it'll just... work!

210

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 03/04/2025

Also, is there anything with liveview that could work similarly? Wondering about ways to have frontend stuff coexist with liveview easier. Maybe the same thing but for event handlers?

020

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 03/04/2025

We should 100% steal this idea for #elixirlang Phoenix. Such a simple but obvious in hindsight idea. Automating turning controllers/routes into importable frontend packages would eliminate a lot of boiler plate for frontend heavier teams.

1100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 26/03/2025

I can also 100% see even the most experienced people letting their guard down and letting through some real doozie bugs as AIs keep getting better. It's just too tempting to get lax when it can help you do 5x-50x more work. Often work that would have been a brutal grind, too.

000

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 26/03/2025

People should totally mess around with it for fun projects. But more than that and it's a bit like deciding you don't need an architect or engineer to sign off on a building. It might be standing. It might even look good. But you have no idea if it's safe or what's going wrong underneath.

100

Carter Bryden 🇨🇦 @carterbryden.com · 26/03/2025

On the flip side, I can't really imagine how sketchy it would be to strictly vibe code something serious with where AIs are at currently. Especially with junior-or-less dev experience.

100