Mariatta Wijaya

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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If you're looking for a new docs framework for your dev tool, I can't recommend Docusaurus enough. 1. You can change the appearance of any component—no matter how big or small—by ejecting its raw React code into your source tree. I've ejected almost all of its major components and restyled them with Tailwind. 2. It supports content written with MDX, which is like Markdown but better. MDX lets you write JSX tags so you can render React components (like badges and banners) directly inline your content. No more messy templating. 3. It bundles Prism for code snippet highlighting. So you if you want to change how each and every token of your language gets styled—which I do—you can override it with a simple centralized map—which I have. 4. You can swap out its on-site search engine with Algolia, now widely considered the best option for developer sites. It is, in other words, the perfect tool for people like me who are obsessed with every pixel.

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Whenever you start a new embedded project, here’s what most teams do: - Grab a development board - Set up a development environment - Run some sample code - Figure out the rest of your client’s needs This is what I call the bottom-up development. However, that approach will make the team over-focus on low-level decisions: what GPIO pin to use, what drivers they need, and how to integrate middleware. And yet they delay the application layer for later… way later until near the deadline… Only to find out they need to do major rework due to the customer’s feedback. If your goal is to ship the right product on time and on budget, the fastest path is often by flipping the stack: Bottom-up 👉 Top-down. Instead of worrying about drivers and GPIOs, start worrying about the application layer. Focus on the application, get feedback early. If needed, you can mock the USART with network socket, simulate I2C responses, replace sensor data with dummy data. The top-down approach will give you: - Faster validation of features and UX - Decoupled architecture that’s super easy to test, port, and reuse - Elegant abstraction between business logic and hardware details. Yes, you still have to think low-level code eventually, but only once you know it’s worth building. So the question is, which one are you really building, drivers or the actual product?

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styled-components has entered maintenance mode. Its maintainer was refreshingly honest: "Don't use this for new projects." Respect. But what about the millions of components already in production? My colleague Cody recognized the problem immediately. He submitted a PR with React 18 optimizations back in July 2024. With maintenance mode, that PR wasn't going anywhere. So Cody did what great engineers do. He turned our lingering PR into a fork, optimized it further, then opened it up for everyone. Linear tested it: 40% faster initial renders. No big code changes needed. The kicker? styled-components never implemented React 18's useInsertionEffect - a hook specifically designed for CSS-in-JS performance. It shipped in March 2022. Cody PR'd it fixed it in a day. We're calling it styled-components-last-resort because that's what it is. Not a new maintenance path. Not a forever solution. Just a performance bridge while teams migrate properly. Sometimes open source isn't about building the future. Sometimes it's about helping each other manage the present. Massive credit to Cody Olsen for the implementation, Kenneth Skovhus at Linear for testing, and Evan Jacobs for maintaining styled-components for years. Technical deep dive: https://lnkd.in/dk4CfsP8 GitHub: https://lnkd.in/duzY-Vy6 What's your styled-components migration plan?

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We did something cool the other day and I can't help bragging about it (names, details, etc, obfuscated a bit.) A client came to us with some big reliability problems. They had user behaviour monitoring, and they had mobile client stacktraces. But there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and the team had no idea where to start a fix! We discovered that we could map client errors to user behaviour metrics very closely. It turns out there's just tens of _those_ - and they have a much larger effect on user reliability than the others. Additionally, we found lots of clusters of issues that happen together, which suggests there's some contributing factor underneath them. Fixing them together is also much faster, since you're usually doing so without having to jump around lots of codebases. Now, we can turn your error logs into prioritised to-do lists for developers, directly focused at the user experience, SLOs, or 3rd party service availability. Let us know if this is interesting!

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🚨 Many tech leaders are realizing something important: Using Code Gen tools for testing and code review isn’t enough. I’ve spoken with many VP Engs and CTOs, and they say that while they tried to apply code generation frameworks and tools across the SDLC, it didn’t really move the needle. I've even seen CEOs X/LinkedIn posting this! Why? Because, Code Gen tools are optimized for writing code, keeping developers in flow and prioritizing speed. But code review & testing require different thinking frameworks, where high-quality context retrieval and verification of standards are critical. AI tools for code review shouldn’t optimize for “how fast can we generate tokens or time to first token” - while this is important for code gen tools. Code review tools should optimize for how well they enable the dev teams they empower to standardize quality and understand and improve a code change or entire codebase. That means grounding in relevant context, learning organizational standards, “spending more tokens” to check that rules and standards are really applied, and importantly, reporting on all of the above. --- Let’s quantify it 👇 If your team’s time looks like this: • Planning – 21% • Coding – 22% • Reviewing – 9% • Testing – 8% • Debugging & Fixing – 20% • * – 20% Even if you 3× planning and coding efficiency, overall velocity improves by only ~30%. Amdahl’s Law in action! To truly 3× overall velocity, you need to apply AI across the entire SDLC, with tools built for each phase, not just repurposed code generators. --- The attached is a 1-minute video from my ~20min talk at the AI Eng World's Fair 2025'June -- I'll share more parts in the following days

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The biggest lie in tech hiring: "We hire the best developers." No, you don't. You hire the developers who interview the best. I've worked with brilliant developers who can build entire systems from scratch but freeze up in technical interviews. They know every design pattern. They've solved complex production issues. They've mentored entire teams. But they can't explain FizzBuzz under pressure. Meanwhile, less experienced developers who practiced mock interviews land the $150k+ offers. Here's what I discovered after helping 100+ developers: The interview is a completely different skill than actual development. And most experienced developers never learn it. They think their GitHub speaks for itself. They assume their experience is enough. They walk into interviews unprepared. Then they wonder why they're getting lowball offers or straight rejections. The solution isn't becoming a better developer. It's becoming a better interviewer. After working across different continents with developers at every level, I've seen the patterns. The ones who succeed treat interviews like any other skill: They practice. They prepare. They get feedback. They improve. Want my complete interview preparation framework that helped developers increase their offers by $50k-$80k? Comment "INTERVIEW" and I'll send you the free guide. Stop letting poor interview skills cap your career.

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You may see folks claiming that they can get "A.I." coding assistants to do exactly what they want by completely and precisely describing the software they require up-front, and hailing the return of Big Design Up-Front. Anyone who's spent more than a handful of hours using these tools will know that this simply isn't true.

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Proposal: move RubyGems (the gem and bundler CLI tools) to the same Ruby org that governs the language itself. It's an accident of history that Ruby, its dependency tools, and its dependency hosting are managed by three separate entities. (And it hasn't gone great.)

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We're getting a lot of positive comments on Parlant's documentation quality. We've definitely put considerable effort into our docs, because, as a team of long-term engineers, we know just how valuable that is. For those writing technical documents, I'll share our top 2 technical writing principles. // 1 Don't seek to convince. Seek to be understood. // 2 Don't seek to sell. Seek to serve. For better open-source docs! parlant.io

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AI is everywhere. But it's not the first wave we've seen. The Evolution We've Witnessed: 1. We started with manual testing, that’s how most of us learned the craft 2. Then automation arrived: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, CI/CD 3. Now AI dominates every discussion, every team, every meeting Here's what's different this time: Unlike automation, which took years to settle into the industry, AI is already transforming how we work today. But here's the constant truth: Those with strong fundamentals (problem-solving, critical thinking, domain knowledge) always adapt faster.So what do we do? 📌 We keep learning. 📌 We stay curious. 📌 We explore the new. But we also hold on to what really matters. Because the people who grow the fastest and last the longest, are the ones with strong fundamentals. Ready to start your AI journey? If you’re interested in AI but aren’t sure where to begin, I’ve put together a beginner-friendly playlist on YouTube that can help you get started: https://lnkd.in/gtTBT9rr #AI #Testing #Automation #CareerGrowth #QualityEngineering #Learning #ABAutomationHub

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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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Agent to Agent. Instead of staying purely at the narrative level or talk about trivial 1:1 request/response scenarios, let's look at something that is a bit closer to what we'll eventually be asked to build when it comes to the "agentic world". I think of this as "simple", even if you need to zoom and pan through the Mermaid sequence diagram to see anything. The programming model in the included C# code is hypothetical. There is no such library at the moment, but the API shape is absolutely plausible. C# is also just used as an illustration vehicle here. https://lnkd.in/ev-mtPVM

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Shout-out to 💻 Octavian Contis, who recently posted about the Shopify theme inspector being a bit tedious. I felt that, so I added a little something to Alfred to help out. You can now set Alfred to: - Automatically disable the inspector. - Restore your previous inspector state. - Or just let Shopify do its thing. The setting persists across all Shopify stores and browser sessions as long as Alfred remains active. It's a small change, but hopefully, it saves you a few clicks and a bit of frustration. Hope you find it useful! *Extension link available in description* #Shopify #ShopifyDev #ThemeDev #WebDev #Productivity #BrowserExtension

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Tired of hearing excuses from your dev team? (Here’s what high-performing teams do differently.) Every time you ask why a project isn’t done, there’s a new story: ⤷ “We ran into unexpected challenges.” ⤷ “The requirements changed.” ⤷ “It turned out bigger than we thought.” It’s like playing whack-a-mole with your own roadmap. But here’s the truth: Good dev teams don’t hide behind blockers. They build with boundaries. What the Best Teams Do: 1/ Set unmovable deadlines → Not vague estimates → Real dates that drive accountability 2/ Define scope clearly → What’s in? What’s not? Put it in writing → Scope creep dies in documentation 3/ Protect momentum → No shifting goalposts → No sprinting in circles ⤷ Why It Matters: A dev team that avoids hard lines doesn’t just delay launches. They build a wall between you and your goals. If that’s what you’re up against, it’s not a people problem, is a standards one. Ready to work with a team that delivers? Start here: https://lnkd.in/gBr3wFRC 👉 Follow for more no-BS advice on building faster, accountable dev teams.

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