Remote

Jesse Skinner

@JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

mastodon 4.7.3

I'm a software engineer, coding since the '80s and building web apps since 2001. I love simplifying complex & messy legacy systems. I still help clients that emailed me decades ago.

I live in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, with my German wife and our two sons.

I enjoy reading, writing, travelling, playing zelda, minecraft, and chess. I try to live according to daoist & buddhist principles.

My interests include decluttering, neurodivergence, burnout, climate, politics, economics, linux & svelte.

1899 Followers

1227 Following

36 Posts

Joined May 20, 2019

Blog:

https://www.jesseskinner.com/

Work with me:

https://www.jesseskinner.com/hire/

Email:

jesse@jesseskinner.com

Pronouns:

he/him

Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Boosted by @kcarruthers@infosec.exchange

Replying to

# Avoiding the rewrite I work with companies and organizations struggling with old, dusty, messy legacy software. I help them to transform their software and systems into something fresh and functional. With 25 years of experience, I love taking on those older projects that nobody else wants to touch. I understand that rewriting is an expensive and risky approach. I focus on learning and making sense of complexity in order to minimize the costs and effort involved in making changes.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

## Handing it over I'm always thinking of the person who's going to come after me. Even though I've taken full ownership of the system, I know eventually I'll need to hand it over to someone else. I want the next person to be able to come into this system and understand it quickly. I want them to be empowered and enabled to make changes to the system with confidence and ease.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon whether or not it becomes more popular than the birdsite.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 7mo ago

Reduced one of my clients' AWS bills by $1,300/month. That's over $15k no longer going into Jeff Bezos' pocket every year!

I'd love to help more companies and organizations with this. If you know anyone that could benefit, feel free to pass my contact info along to them.

#aws #webdev #amazon

Toot Café

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 4mo ago

My ten-year-old got his first laptop. Windows install was a nightmare, the Microsoft account nonsense meant we couldn't even get Minecraft installed after 2 hours of working on it.

Of course, I suggested we nuke the disk and install #Linux. Considered Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and then I found #Zorin.

Zorin is FANTASTIC! I've never seen such an easy to use OS. The software "shop" is outstanding. Really impressed. I'd consider it for myself if I wasn't so married to my arch btw + i3 setup. ;)

Toot Café

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 4mo ago

AI today is similar to the industrial revolution, but I think LLMs are like the first steam engines, filthy things barfing out massive amounts of waste and noise and pollution to do very little useful work. A brutal, rough proof of concept.

"Compute" itself, as an abstract resource, is the thing that's become increasingly valuable.

What we decide to compute can be as mundane as gaming, as wasteful as generating social media videos, or as important as solving proteins for medicine.

Toot Café

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@codinghorror oh, blog post link is here, curious what you think: https://www.codingwithjesse.com/blog/coding-with-llms-can-still-be-fun/

codingwithjesse.com

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 6mo ago

The high egress data fees at #AWS make it a black hole for your data - once it goes in, its costly to get it out again. At very high volumes of data, it's an expensive mistake. There are better options out there!

Toot Café

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 6mo ago

Ultraman: How to Train Your Kaiju

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 6mo ago

I've been optimizing for flow, and really enjoying it. Key ideas:

- Have LLM do medium-sized things it can get right on the first try. Too easy and you waste time prompting. Too hard and you waste time reviewing & revising.

- Don't switch tasks while waiting. Do something related to the same task eg. write email/docs, tweak the UI, think about next steps, etc.

The result is no burnout, no context-switching, minimal reviewing, and doing my best work ever 2-3x faster than before.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@obc@mas.atmx.ca in this case it was a bunch of changes.. cleaning up unused stuff, better utilizing savings plans, etc. Reduced monthly spend by 20%.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 5mo ago

This audiobook is free on Spotify premium. Thinking about running it through speech-to-text to convert it into a free ebook. 🤓

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 5mo ago

Is your business AI-ready and built for Internet scale?

If so, do you mind explaining what those things mean? Because I have no idea.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 10mo ago

Replying to

@codinghorror You're right.. I've come to realise they're really good for working with code if you minimize how much code they generate.. I paste in specs and have Claude Code look through the codebase and plan things for me, and I do almost all the implementation myself. Saves me a lot of digging and tracing and remembering, limits the hallucination, sycophancy and slop.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 7mo ago

Shout out to all of those who go extra hard on the MagiQuest at Great Wolf Lodge. You're my people. 🪄🧙‍♂️🧙‍♀️

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@Cerulean I think they may only need 12 testers now? But I might be wrong. https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/community-guide/255621488/everything-about-the-20-testers-requirement

support.google.com

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@adam_caudill @wlach @codinghorror great points from you both, and that spurred me to rewrite the first two lines of the post, because I wasn't trying to dump on code review in general.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@transponderings@eldritch.cafe @Bdellar@mastodon.social agreed, not something I will be doing again! Just excited to have found a new home. 😊

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@jkbecker@infosec.exchange haha fair enough! I'm not trying to grow, just wanted to celebrate finding a new home 😊

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@loke@functional.cafe @jkbecker@infosec.exchange haha it might've been a technique growth hackers use, but I just wanted to shout my decision to stay here from the rooftops.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@grin@mastodon.grin.hu yep, same for me.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@WeissbrotDE@social.broti.tk yeah I should have written "Mastodon and the Fediverse".

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@dr_g_e_e@mastodon.social I hesitated to post this for that reason, definitely not something I've done before or would do again. Not looking for attention, just excited about Mastodon.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 47mo ago

Replying to

@grin@mastodon.grin.hu that's right! Also, 7 minutes of bad luck for every new tweet on the birdsite!

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 10mo ago

Replying to

@codinghorror thanks, I will!

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

There may only be a few parts of the system that are still in use. Maybe some of the piles in the back are dusty and untouched in years. Some things were put there temporarily, and nobody remembered to remove them. Through documenting current processes, speaking with users and stakeholders, and observing activity, I can start to understand any complex system.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to on toot.cafe

## Taking inventory First thing I'll do is carefully look through the system. I'll work to understand the history, and the archaeological layers of the system. I want to know who started it, how the system looked when it was young, and how it evolved over time. I'll trace through the parts of the system, see where things flow, and how it all fits together.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

Once some space is made, and only useful sections remain, it becomes easier to understand the system as a whole. ## Organizing Working with a cleaned up, simpler system, I can start tidying and organizing. This means putting like things together, grouping by function and use.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

I achieve this by maintaining the simplicity in the system. I want the system to be easy to learn, with small and understandable parts. Documentation is important, but so is having a system simple enough that it makes sense from the start.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

## Turning on more lights Like a dark and dingy basement, it helps to bring in more light to work in a space like this. With a complex system, this means collecting information and statistics. It means testing to see what works and what's broken.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

## Archiving and clearing out junk As the system becomes more clear, and we know the parts that are still needed and those that aren't, I can start clearing out some of the unused parts. These dusty piles make it harder to find what you need. They may have served their purpose once upon a time. Since they're no longer used, it's okay to archive them, removing them from the current system, but keeping them around for future reference.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

That "rewrite" instinct can finally come back into play here. We may well decide that one of the parts of the system can be replaced. We don't have to replace everything at once. We can keep the 90% that is working well, and replace the 10% that is causing all the problems. The whole time, the system can remain functional, the company can continue to depend on it as always.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

As things become organized, there can be opportunities to split a system into two or three separate systems. This splitting allows for even more understanding and simplification, as you can better observe any interactions between parts of the system. ## Time for something new Now that we have a more organized, tidier and well documented system, we're ready to start making real changes to the system. We can trust we have a better understanding of how everything works.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 2w ago

Replying to

I'm not there to judge, I'm there to learn and understand with empathy and kindness. I know whoever built this did the best they could at the time. Usually weird decisions make more sense if you understand the context.

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Jesse Skinner @JesseSkinner@toot.cafe

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@BartyDeCanter sounds great. I'm still fine tuning it as well.

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