Author | Lightnews

Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal.bsky.social

4.6K followers 650 following 290 posts

Cofounder at Freeman & Forrest, author, cartoonist, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. Ex-Google. Here to help.

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Feb 7

This is the wildest screenshot I've ever shared in my life.

Somehow, my debut novel has sold to Ballantine / Penguin Random House.

The elevator pitch is simple: what if Silicon Valley invented the time machine?

Look for the book in stores next year! newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/breaking-s...

Deal announcement from Publisher's Marketplace for my debut novel, THE BLEB PROJECT

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 11d

To put it more bluntly: newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/when-every...

When everybody's down, nobody is

you want a take about the AWS outage? fine, here's a take

newsletter.goodtechthings.com

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 11d

I feel like the biggest takeaway from the latest AWS outage is that there’s simply no architecting around them at this point. Even if you are 100% redundant/multi-whatever, your vendors and customers are certainly not. Order volume is dropping no matter what you do. We’re all in this together.

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 15d

A little encouragement for everyone dealing with the AWS outage today: youtu.be/rK_7ozvm53o?...

That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song)

YouTube video by Forrest Brazeal

youtu.be

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 15d

Watching an old musical that includes some fight choreography. And I’m again confronted with the sad fact that in modern movies, our fighting looks better but our dancing has gotten much worse. 😢

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 19d

it's 9 am on a Wednesday and my 3 year old is chilling in pajamas, eating a cup of noodles and watching Spiderman. How do I tell her it only goes downhill from here

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 20d

naming things Charity Majors is truly one of the hardest problems in computer science

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 21d

There is no such thing as a children’s book

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 21d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 25d

I’m a pretty diehard Tigers fan but I have to admit that a Mariners-Blue Jays ALCS would be insane. I’ve been to Blue Jays games in Seattle before. The crowd is 65% Canadians who sneak down from Vancouver. That playoff atmosphere would be unlike any other.

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 26d

“Please do not adjust your seat and ask a crew member for assistance” is a grammatically ambiguous instruction. So you want me to do neither of those things? Or I can adjust as long as I don’t ask? Or I can ask if I don’t adjust?

Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks this every time I fly

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · 26d

Planning to stop by All Things Open in Raleigh next week - who else will be there? Would love to say hi and catch up in person!

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 29

Apparently the Girl Scouts now give out corporate-sponsored badges which you can earn by completing key life skills challenges like going to see Gabby’s Dollhouse The Movie.

Seems fine

A screenshot from the Girl Scout website showing the “exclusive Gabby’s Dollhouse patch”

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 25

It’s a tough call. You want to max out his at-bats while resting him. But on the other hand, his OPS is like 150 points higher when he catches. Does that matter when he’s chasing the AL HR record?

(Spoken as a die-hard Tigers fan who would much rather think about the Mariners at the moment)

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 23

Realizing our business needs rapture contingency planning. 🤔

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 19

pronouncing “vegemite” like “Yosemite” to own the libs

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 15

at last, a sign that will REALLY piss off your Southern neighbors

In this house, we believe:
Cornbread should be sweet
BBQ means grilling burgers
A crockpot makes perfectly fine pulled pork
You eat fried chicken with a knife and fork
Sweet tea is gross
Grits are just oatmeal with cheese

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 4

Heartbroken, utterly shattered, to report that today I structured some data and retrieved an actionable business insight

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 3

cc @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 2

who called it "silicon valley office decor" and not faang shui

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Sep 2

May all of our future Wikipedia intros go this hard

Screenshot of Henry Louis Gates’ Wikipedia page. “He was a pioneer in the use of the X-ray machine and psychological warfare.”

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Aug 29

Watching Lady & the Tramp with my kids on Disney+. I am STUNNED by how gorgeous the full CinemaScope frame is compared to the pan&scan VHS prints I remember watching on square tube TVs.

Seriously, go rewatch the animated classics in widescreen if you haven’t! That art is too beautiful to miss.

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Aug 27

A lot of people assumed LLMs would drown out human creators with an infinite buffet of fresh content.

In reality they produce ONE kind of content: AI slop. And slop loses its novelty fast, no matter what stylistic sugar is on top.

There’s never been a better time to share your own thoughts.

Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · Aug 27

Ironic: as LLMs make writing much easier, I am finding not more, but less interesting and novel things to read online.

And so I keep paying more attention to the fewer people who still write their original thoughts (without LLMs - you can tell how repetitive it gets with them)

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Reposted by Forrest Brazeal

Stu Fleming @thebasement.nz · Feb 23

Manager: "What's this milestone 'Living on a prayer' ?"
Me: "That's the documentation deliverable."
Manager: "What's the status of that?"
Me: "We're halfway there"
Manager: "Why is progress so slow?"
Me: "You fired Tommy"
Manager: "So?"
Me: "Tommy used to work on the docs"

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Aug 25

A common social media interaction I will never understand:

Person A: makes easily disproved false claim

Person B: “that’s wrong, here is the correct fact+source.”

Person A: “OK, but my point stands.”

wtf no it doesn’t

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Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Aug 21

a thing about James Dobson is that — unusually for his time — he encouraged evangelicals to go get therapy

Meanwhile the rest of his teachings put millions of people in need of therapy

Dobson was a therapist

RIP to a master of vertical integration

Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal.bsky.social · Aug 21

the vibes are shifting

bullish on professional software engineers

A Venn diagram with three overlapping pink circles on a blue background. The top left circle is labeled “Vibe Coders,” the top right circle is labeled “Rodeo Cowboys,” and the bottom circle is labeled “Prisoners.”

In the “Vibe Coders” circle: “Given way too much rope.”

In the “Rodeo Cowboys” circle: “Given just enough rope.”

In the “Prisoners” circle: “Not allowed to have rope.”

Where Vibe Coders and Rodeo Cowboys overlap: “High risk tolerance.”

Where Vibe Coders and Prisoners overlap: “Ordered around by disembodied voices.”

Where Rodeo Cowboys and Prisoners overlap: “Get their exercise in a fenced yard.”

Where all three overlap in the center: “Unlikely to deliver production-grade software.”

Credit in the bottom left corner: “@forrestbrazeal.”

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