iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by John Crickett

Overcommitted Podcast @overcommitted.dev · 28/04/2026

@johncrickett.bsky.social built Coding Challenges (90k+ subs) by posting honestly on LinkedIn with 3,200 followers. No funnel, no growth hacks. The post that broke through was him publicly walking the walk on a $100 MVP. 🎙 New Overcommitted out now!

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

"Forget 10x programmers. 1,000x programmers really exist, we just don't fully acknowledge it." Naval Ravikant He's right. The difference isn't speed or talent. It's direction. I have spent weeks building features that nobody used. Asking "should we build this?" would have created more value.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Yup, selection by the procurement department, not the engineers.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

GitHub Copilot will beat Claude Code. Not because it's better. Copilot is the new IBM. Checks the enterprise box. Microsoft is already on the PLS. If it under-delivers, everyone else bought it too. "You won't get fired for buying X" really means "you won't get blamed for buying X." Big difference

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

An OpenAI forward deployed engineer is coming on my podcast tomorrow. FDEs sit between the models and the companies using them. They see what works, what breaks, and what surprises everyone. I've got my questions ready, but what would you ask?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

Every programmer should learn C. Implement a linked list, hash table, and binary tree. Then build a simple CLI program and a basic network server. Not because you'll use it daily, but because it strips away the abstractions and shows you what's really beneath whatever language you use daily.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

What AI newsletters are you actually reading? Not the ones covering the latest model. The ones writing about AI in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, defense, energy. Drones, autonomous vehicles, robotics. The applied stuff. The "boring" stuff. The stuff that's actually changing industries.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Who are the people writing about applying AI to real-world problems? Not the next coding agent, not the latest LLM wrapper. What about AI for robotics, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing? The other 99% of AI. Drop names below. I want to follow them.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

In any new role you should always seek to understand before you act. Make sure you understand not just the what, but also the why. Only then should you start changing the what, if the why is no longer valid. Exception: if you've been hired to put out a raging fire.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

The software engineers who understand the full system, from data flow to failure modes, don't just use AI. They direct it. That's the difference between generating MVPs and shipping products.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

What changes is that the finer details of syntax, compilers, module systems, and type systems won't matter as much to everyone. But you should absolutely understand how the pieces fit together. From syscalls to pixels.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

AI amplifies the skills you already have. It lets people with less experience write code and it’s great that more people can build software. But it also means experienced engineers ship even more, even faster.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

There's a take going around that not knowing how to code is an advantage when using AI. It’s wrong. The more you understand coding and software engineering, the better your prompts, the better you manage the context, the better your feedback, and the better the product you ship.

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Reposted by John Crickett

Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 29/01/2026

Joined @johncrickett.bsky.social's Coding Chats podcast, if you like podcasts Youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Rr... Spotify: lnkd.in/eNJw955r Apple Podcasts: lnkd.in/epZnMjZz Overcast: lnkd.in/eFNPGVvS

youtube.com

What to do when AI gets expensive and other CTO challenges

YouTube video by Coding Chats

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Tips for AI-assisted software development: Boring tech gives AI superpowers. AI coding agents performs best with tools, languages, and frameworks that have been around long enough to show up in its training data. When use the bleeding edge, it hallucinates.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Tips for AI-Assisted software development: Work in small batch sizes. Humans and AI have limited short term memory. Ensure the task you're working on fits within your and AI's short-term memory. When switching tasks start a new session, clear the context of you and the AI.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

“AI is incapable of programming well thought out and complex code” This is both true and irrelevant. The goal is to write well thought out and simple code (which may solve a complex problem).

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Is that working? Did they take that approach to Scrum / Agile / Kubernetes / Programming Language / Interviewing Skills ?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

I wonder if any other profession just has the "give it a go" approach to new tools :)

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Did either company have a push for AI adoption?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

If you use AI to help you build software professionally, has your organisation provided any training? If so, what did it cover? What was missing? If not, why not?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

That will depend on the scope of the user stories. I tend towards stories that are as small as possible and will break those into subtasks. I never have large commits or PRs. A lot of my PRs are single or double digit numbers of lines.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Software Engineers - need a project for the weekend? How about building your own LLM powered chatbot? codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/c... Or one of the 80+ other real-world projects you can build to level up your coding skills: codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/i...

codingchallenges.fyi

Build Your Own LLM Powered AI Chatbot | Coding Challenges

This challenge is to build your own LLM powered AI chatbot. The chatbot will play a specific role and offer advice to the user. For example I’ve created one that is trained to behave like me and recom...

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

If you code with AI, and don't do Test-Driven Development, have you tried or are you going to try doing Spec-Driven Development? What is the attraction? What do you see as being a blocker to doing it?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Why do people feel the need to post stuff like this: "So far only the uninformed and b-players are using LLM" LLMs are way over-hyped, but attacking people is a weak argument.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Yes, I fear there's that real danger of making yourself ignorant.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

I certainly agree building a project is the best way. I'm still on the fence about using AI for it. I think it can work and I fear too many would lack the discipline to then read the code and try to understand it. So it would end up just like watching a tutorial and copy and pasting the code.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

If you use AI to develop software, do you vibe code or do you do AI assisted engineering?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

In today's Coding Challenges I used Augment Code to develop a project in Gleam: codingchallenges.substack.com/p/using-ai-t...

codingchallenges.substack.com

Using AI To Solve A Coding Challenge

Trying out augment code on the Spelling Correction Tool Coding Challenges.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

If this doesn't look like an AI bubble, what does?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

There aren’t enough good software engineering managers in most companies. And this problem is getting worse. The biggest, hardest and most common problems we have with software delivery are not technical, they're people problems. AI won't fix that.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

In software engineering, “it depends” often sounds like a smart answer. But if it’s the only answer, it’s useless. It suggests enough experienced to know that context matters, but not enough to be able to articulate why. Next time you are tempted to say “it depends”, complete the sentence.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

“If someone was a very good communicator but a terrible software engineer would you hire them?” This is a false dilemma. To be a good communicator, you need to understand the domain that you are communicating about. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

Exactly, we now need to really focus on that loop - getting the specs, which has always been the hard bit that people try to avoid doing (because it's hard).

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

The hardest part of software engineering has always been writing good clear requirements in a natural language. Using current AI requires we do more of the hard bit to automate the easier bit of writing code.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Finally, be prepared to replace members of the team who are not able or willing to learn and adapt to deliver quality software. If your software engineering team is not delivering, a rewrite is not going the change that.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

They can identify those areas that need most immediate attention and prioritise the changes, processes and procedures you need to turn around the development and keep your business moving!

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

That will only be fixed by developing the team's skillset. Find someone who can lead, mentor or coach your team and have them work with the team to incrementally improve your software.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

It wasn’t the language, library, platform or architecture that was wrong – after all they managed to deliver something and you have customers getting value from the software – it was the people, processes or procedures that resulted in poor quality, late software.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

It’s not true. If you throw away your product and start again, you’re setting your business back months, maybe years, all whilst losing revenue and market leadership. And there’s no reason to believe that your team is going to do a better job this time around.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

I’ve met many tech executives frustrated that their software teams were failing to deliver. In each case they’ve been advised by their software engineers that the answer was to rewrite all their software with some awesome new approach, technology, language, library, platform or architecture. 🧵👇

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Is anyone using Zig in production? If so, what and why did you pick it?

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

29. COBOL is fairly readable - yes someone has used COBOL to do some of Coding Challenges! 30. Docusaurus is an amazing tool for building documentation websites, it powers the Coding Challenge website. 31. All the skills mention are best learned by doing!

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

25. There are far more algorithms than I imagined. 26. A lot of software developers don’t know how to read or write binary files. 27. A lot of software developers still struggle with internationalisation and unicode formats in text files. 28. I’m one of them.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

20. Writing a README file for your repo makes it so much easier for someone else to understand. 21. Yet most don’t write one. 22. Go’s testing support is fantastic. 23. Go’s compiler is fast! 24. I’ve learned several new algorithms, i.e Meyers for longest common subsequence.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

16. Many software engineerings don’t know how to handle application protocols written on top of TCP. 17. How to solve many of the challenges in Go. 18. Go. 19. Rust doesn’t natively support parameterised tests - my first disappointment with Rust. Fortunately there is a parameterized crate.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

11. git diff supports four different diffing algorithms. Try saying that fast several times! 12. How to solve many of the challenges in Rust. 13. Rust. 14. Clear acceptance criteria is important and hard. 15. Writing that acceptance criteria get’s better with practice too.

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John Crickett @johncrickett.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

7. And it had no version number, but was later versioned 0.9, so it could be distinguished from 1.0. 8. The original Redis version was around 300 lines of TCL. 9. Software engineers love building real projects - I am not uniq! 10. Many people don’t get my humour - comment below if you do!

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