Paul Keen

Pull Requests shouldn’t feel like this. We’ve all opened a large PR review and thought: “Well... this is going to hurt.” Sure, small PRs are great, but sometimes you need the full picture. That’s where stacked PRs help (been using Graphite for that, a tool for managing PRs and code reviews). Stacked PRs treat your feature development as a chain of commits / PRs layered on top of each other. Think of it like a Jenga tower: each block (PR) builds on top of the previous one. pr1 → main pr2 → pr1 pr3 → pr2 Now it’s getting even better. I just got early access to Graphite Chat 👇 - I can literally ask it “what’s going on in this PR?” and it gives me the full story, codebase history, past PRs, even outside context. - I can just highlight it and ask “explain this”, instant breakdown. - Flags risks before reviewers even show up. - When someone leaves feedback, it helps me make sense of it and suggests fixes. - And the best part? When CI blows up, I can just ask “why did this break?” and actually get an answer. I’ll even be able to pop open the Graphite Editor right inside Chat to view and edit the codebase. Reviews feel lighter, more collaborative. Exactly how they should.

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This is huge. Cursor can now control your browser for testing purposes. Debugging in the browser, sharing screenshots & test results with Cursor is a huge time sink. Not anymore. It's unclear to what extent visual issues are analyzed, but I suspect this will get better with time. Update to the latest version and then enable it in Settings → Beta. #ai #cursor

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The A/B Testing Safety Net for Software Development. People often ask how to “sell” A/B testing internally. Zach Flynn recently wrote that experimentation culture should be guided, not forced by “laws” [1]. Guidance alone is not enough. You must show the value, and one of the best ways to encourage a “test everything” mentality with A/B testing is to show the value of the safety net.  While most A/B content focuses on power, p-values, and finding winners, an overlooked benefit is operational: detecting egregious regressions and aborting quickly, shrinking the blast radius. When Microsoft Office for desktop moved from a 3-year release cycle to monthly releases, the key problem was turning off a bad piece of code after the client shipped.  They adopted A/B testing for its kill-switch capability—safe deployments. When A/B testing was integrated, it was an easy step to also evaluate the value of features [2]. Every (good) engineering organization runs weekly postmortem (sometimes called AAR for After Action Review) to understand the root cause of outages and severe incidents and learn how to avoid them in the future. The questions to add to the postmortem form are: - Was this change behind an A/B test? While postmortem are blameless, people quickly learn that many more outages are associated with code deployed without an A/B test, driving adoption. - If yes, what guardrail metric should be added that would catch and auto-abort a similar issue? Remember the “other tail” of A/B testing: the safety net that lets you abort bad deployments fast! [1] https://lnkd.in/geZr2CmU [2] https://lnkd.in/gCSBHeTv #ABTesting #ExperimentGuide #DevOps #postmortem

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Hot take (with love): your To-Do app won’t get you hired. I’ve built them too. They’re great for learning CRUD, routes, and state. But the market’s seen a thousand. Hiring teams skim for signal. What they want to see: • You solved a real problem (yours or someone else’s) • End-to-end thinking (API design, auth, validation, tests) • You shipped (deploy + README + screenshots + a 60-sec demo) • You made it visible (why you built it, what’s next) It doesn’t have to be flashy—just useful and yours. How I’m doing it: FinLume. Not perfect. Not fancy. Still needs alot of work, But it solves my real headache (bills/subscriptions) and forced me into FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, auth, and testing. That’s the point. Simple non-To-Do ideas you could ship: • Renovation expense tracker with monthly summary (been living this! 🧱) • Job/quote scheduler for trades (my gardening days inspired this) • Interview tracker with follow-up email templates • Subscription cancel-reminder + renewal timeline Bottom line: Different > generic. Visible > invisible. Post progress. Ask for feedback. Make noise without screaming. #JuniorDeveloper #BuildInPublic #PortfolioProjects #LearnInPublic #PythonDeveloper #FastAPI

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AI won't make your team faster on its own. Better developer experience will. I sat down with Laura Tacho, CTO at DX, to talk about what actually improves engineering team performance and what just looks like it does. We covered: 1. Why most metrics fail (and how to use them properly). 2. What developer surveys can tell you that GitHub stats never will. 3. How to track DevEx without a fancy tool, even at a 10-person startup. 4. The real impact of AI on engineering workflows (spoiler: it’s not replacing your team). The big takeaway? Developer performance isn’t about shipping faster. It’s about removing friction. Whether it’s bad tooling, unclear goals, or noisy metrics, the teams that win are the ones that make it easier to do great work.

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Most teams don’t actually know what to do with engineers who think. Because engineers who think won’t just take the ticket and smile. They’ll ask: ❓ “What’s the goal here?” ❓ “Have we validated this with real users?” ❓ “Are we solving a real problem or just shipping noise?” They’ll skip useless meetings. Refuse to rubber-stamp nonsense. And press for the why when everyone else is pretending it’s fine. That kind of thinking makes traditional orgs deeply uncomfortable. If your team isn’t thinking, maybe it’s because the system taught them not to. Product Driven is the book I wrote to transform that system. Get it here: https://buff.ly/2qOL6oE

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5 ARIA attributes every dev should know (and 2 to avoid) Most developers know ARIA exists, but which attributes actually matter for everyday accessibility work? Before we get started, remember the first rule of ARIA: Don't use ARIA unless you have to. If semantic HTML can do the job, use that instead. But when you do need ARIA, here are 5 ARIA attributes that are actually useful: 1. aria-labelledby - Describe the current element with the text from another element on the page. Better than aria-label because it allows you to reference existing visible text on the page and keep it translatable. 2. aria-describedby - Connects help text, error messages, or extra context to form fields and other elements. Screen readers announce this after the main label. 3. aria-expanded - Essential for dropdowns, accordions, mobile menus - anything that opens and closes. Bonus: pair it with aria-controls to define which element it's controlling. 4. aria-current - Perfect for programatically defining the current page in navigation, active step in a process, or current item in pagination. Much clearer than visual styling alone. 5. aria-live - Announces dynamic updates to screen readers. Use "polite" for status messages, "assertive" for urgent alerts. Two to avoid (or use carefully and thoughtfully): 1. aria-label - It's typically a better choice to choose another way to label elements, with text inside a button tag, a label tag associated with a form field, or visible text associated with the aria-labelledby attribute. Treat aria-label as a last resort when no other method of labeling an element can be used. 2. role - Most of the time, there's no need for that role attribute when you use semantic HTML. Skip adding role="button" on a div - just use a button tag. A proper heading tag doesn't need a heading role or an aria-level attribute. The best accessibility starts with good semantic HTML. ARIA is intended to fill in the gaps, not replace the foundation. What ARIA attributes do you find most useful? Any that trip up your team?

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