yen is building stuff
weiyen.net
yen is building stuff
@weiyen.net
I post about databases, web development, software engineering and other nerdy stuff.

Sydney 🇦🇺

Website: https://weiyen.net
The internet is a wonderful source of inspiration, but a terrible source of truth
November 17, 2025 at 6:37 PM
❌ Solar panels
✅ Thermonuclear fusion harvesters
November 17, 2025 at 9:00 AM
So tempted to get a Stanford degree and memorise leetcode so that I can work at Google and fix the YouTube Music app
November 14, 2025 at 10:05 AM
This X screenshot blocker has significantly improved the quality of my feeds.

If I wanted to see tweets, I wouldn't be on here!

@xblock.aendra.dev
November 14, 2025 at 4:14 AM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
There is an image labeler that hides (or blocks if you prefer) screenshots, and you can mute posts with links. Not single built-in features though.
bsky.app/profile/xblo...
bsky.app
November 4, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
PSA if you think a news article is dumb, DON’T share it. That just makes the problem worse
November 1, 2025 at 10:31 PM
Apple is worth 391 Garfields
You can measure the economic value of something in Garfields. Garfield makes about 1 billion USD in revenue annually, so if an industry is smaller than that it's worth less to the world than Garfield
October 25, 2025 at 3:57 AM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
More like us-east-none AM I RIGHT?
October 20, 2025 at 11:48 AM
I try to be clear about what form of AI I'm talking about.

I was chatting with someone about their experience with "AI", and then I realised they were referring to Bixby
wild how often i see antis casually claim their main experience with AI is the Google search AI Overview and then pontificating seriously about the implications for AI in general based on that experience, when literally every single AI user and also the people at Google all hate that specific tool
October 12, 2025 at 3:37 AM
TIL we have 4 different types of horsepower, including a metric horsepower.
September 28, 2025 at 1:14 AM
Slightly diminish a band: The Beatless
Slightly diminish a band:

Old Order

(Maybe more than slightly)
Slightly diminish a band: CRT Soundsystem
August 13, 2025 at 4:30 AM
I like Jetbrains tools, but it is brave of them to increase subscription prices, right when AI-powered dev tools like Cursor or Claude Code are gaining market share.
August 12, 2025 at 10:09 AM
Finally figured out how to integrate Claude Code with ChatGPT
August 10, 2025 at 2:00 AM
*Checks words we haven't seen*

I am kurfuffled that no one has used freebooties on this site!
Can Bluesky say every word in the dictionary?
I dunno but I plan to find out!

I made a website that tracks every single word said on bluesky (as of yesterday).
August 7, 2025 at 1:00 AM
Google Maps had trouble deciding if I'm using the light theme or the dark theme, so it chose both
August 6, 2025 at 10:02 AM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
350B rows in is a bit late to realize this Clickhouse gotcha:

"Due to historical reasons, UUIDs are sorted by their second half. UUIDs should therefore not be used directly in a primary key, sorting key, or partition key of a table."
August 5, 2025 at 7:46 PM
A cool concept when coding is the idea of "code locality" or "locality of behaviour".

Roughly speaking, it is how much of the surrounding code do I need to understand, in order to work out what a function does.

htmx.org/essays/local...
</> htmx ~ Locality of Behaviour (LoB)
Carson Gross explores the Locality of Behaviour (LoB) principle, which emphasizes making the behavior of code units obvious on inspection to enhance maintainability. He discusses the tradeoffs between...
htmx.org
August 5, 2025 at 2:09 AM
macOS has a builtin command-line tool `screencapture` to capture screenshots programmatically

I finally found a use for it: scanning QR codes from the terminal.
August 1, 2025 at 7:02 AM
Whoever set today's Connections must be feeling pretty pleased about themselves
July 31, 2025 at 1:18 AM
This is a headline that will never be topped
July 30, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
Just making a note to self that I got much better discussion saying "what do you think" instead of "here's why you're wrong." There's probably a lesson here.
July 19, 2025 at 6:44 PM
Reposted by yen is building stuff
Fun game a reader sent me: www.word.golf
word.golf
www.word.golf
July 7, 2025 at 10:40 PM
I was looking up MCP servers for mobile simulators.

On the first result, the first few example prompts were basically "leave a fake like and comment on a video" and "leave a fake 5-star review on an app" 🤦🏻‍♂️

AI folks really aren't fighting the allegations here huh
July 2, 2025 at 11:56 AM
As a fan of algebraic effects, Context Parameters in Kotlin is a very exciting feature.

It's probably the closest we'll get to a mainstream implementation of algebraic effects. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the real world.
Looks like Kotlin's implementation of implicits is becoming a reality. I think the community doesn't realize that this feature changes Kotlin forever, even though it's still experimental and bare bones. #kotlin carrion.dev/en/posts/con...
Understanding Context Parameters in Kotlin 2.2.0 – Carrion.dev
Exploring Kotlin 2.2.0's new context parameters feature and how it can improve your code's readability and maintainability.
carrion.dev
June 25, 2025 at 2:39 AM
Naming things doesn't have to be hard. Just look at Python's copy2(), the replacement for copy()

docs.python.org/3/library/sh...
June 18, 2025 at 1:29 AM