Author | Lightnews

sophie alpert

sophie alpert

@sophiebits.com

10K followers 230 following 480 posts

you have the ability to understand things principal engineer, react person, super gay, still masking

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sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Sep 21

catching up on @dropout.tv's @smartypantsshow.bsky.social and @paulrobalino.bsky.social is amazing

On Smartypants, Paul Robalino presents a slide that reads "YES to Racism, Sexism, Transphobia, Xenophobia, Discrimination and Hate". Paul's a well-dressed white guy and he's standing in front of a fireplace in an ornate room with piles of old hardcover books delicately arranged below the TV showing his slide, which has a checkmark next to each type of discrimination

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Sep 9

h/t @simonwillison.net for writing a lot about AI security

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Sep 9

More blogging! I don't want AI agents controlling my laptop. Not because that's not useful, but because it's incredibly hard (impossible?) to do securely: sophiebits.com/2025/09/09/a...

I don’t want AI agents controlling my laptop

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 25

yes! I didn’t realize until this week that it used similar techniques

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

no need to deviate from the style you use for everyone!

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

love it! (btw I use she/her pronouns)

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

probably cases where all three make sense! I know some providers eg Materialize also offer subscriptions on top of materialized views so you can have both in the same system

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

I wonder why you still need memory turned on at the account level to enable it!

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

I keep getting into conversations with engineers where I talk about how desperately I want my database to support materialized views with incremental updates and too often I get a blank stare in response.

so I wrote a new post about why you should care! sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/m...

Materialized views are obviously useful

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 23

right now I'm at Clay! hiring mostly in NYC and SF only for now www.clay.com/jobs

Open roles at Clay | Clay.com

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Aug 7

"there’s no way to get at those thinking traces via the API; all you get is silence" — this isn't true, you can pass {"reasoning": {"summary": "auto"}} in Responses API to get similar "thinking summaries" streamed

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 23

you gotta say which processes!

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 22

@estradiol.bsky.social your username goes hard

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 22

I wrote a blog post sophiebits.com/2025/07/21/t...

TODOs aren’t for doing

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 17

if you’re seeing it in screen recordings then it’s probably this

if you’re seeing it IRL then idk maybe something else

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 17

I have a confession to make. I've gone back and forth on whether to say anything, but I can't keep quiet any longer—not only does this look bad, it makes no sense. Please stop doing the cursor-smoothy effect that Screen Studio does. It's so bad. Not how hovering on things works!! Hello!

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 12

(logos are kimi, deepseek, qwen, openai, anthropic, gemini)

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 7

A provider component like in your screenshot makes this mostly moot.

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 7

so that if `theme` changes and App rerenders, then it won’t also rerun MainContent and its children and their children, just the descendants that actually listen to the theme.

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · Jul 7

I’m pretty sure what I meant is like if you have

function App() {
const [theme, setTheme] = useState();
return (
<ThemeContext value={theme}>
<MainContent route={…} />
</ThemeContext>
);
}

then you want MainContent to have a memo()…

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · May 31

you’re just like Padparadscha

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · May 17

you can always do the “5 whys” in your incident review but be careful about going past that because after like 8 whys it’s just “capitalism”

Reposted by sophie alpert

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · May 7

every time you think "maybe I should add a layer of caching in the application", take that energy and make the database faster instead

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · May 7

may not be production ready but github.com/lolopinto/ent

GitHub - lolopinto/ent

Contribute to lolopinto/ent development by creating an account on GitHub.

sophie alpert @sophiebits.com · May 7

every time you think "maybe I should add a layer of caching in the application", take that energy and make the database faster instead