Thomas Lillington

What is a TypeScript Engineer? I keep seeing this pop up in recruitment posts, which means clients are asking for it...right? Has this replaced the FullStack Engineer, which, lets be honest, meant a NodeJS developer. That was back in the good old days when it was only NodeJS. Now we have Bun, Deno, Hono and more. Or perhaps its asking for a Javascript developer...whatever that means in todays world of a thousand js frameworks and evolving ES standards. Or are they actually asking for a Java developer, because someones used Gen AI along the way and it got confused between Java and Javascript (*shudders*) Are they seriously in need of a type system engineer, thats kinda niche. It's hard enough trying to explain what you do as a job to "normal" folk as it is, without this level of obfuscation. How would you even explain this when asked "What do you do?". Do kids nowadays needs to consider themselves experts in everything inside package.json to land a job? When will the industry move beyond this fixation on specific languages? I get it, it's an important consideration, but asking for Typescript Engineers...it's not going to help you find the devs you actually need.

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Myself and others at Crafted will be talking at #DenverStartupWeek sharing strategies to adapt to the SaaS rollercoaster 🎢 of the past 18 months. In our talk we're planning to discuss: 🔍 Business Context - WTF is going on in SaaS right now, we'll share some curated data 📊 Why the Business Context matters - Companies are struggling with profitability and growth curves in an era of scarcity 🛠️ How this impacts Product Development teams working hard to do more with less 🎯 What teams can do about it to take their destiny back - delighting both a company’s users AND their boards. Now more than ever, #focus is key and we will share a #framework and #stories to help teams #build what matters. We are community driven and open to feedback - please help us tailor the talk for maximum impact! 👉 What resonates? 👉 What would you like to hear about that is not represented above? Register for our talk here: https://lnkd.in/gkxzTCKJ

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🌟Big news from Flexiana🌟 We’re kicking off some awesome new Clojure projects this year,, and we still have experienced Clojure teams ready to take on more. Here’s the deal: 🛠 Our teams are packed with senior devs who’ve been working with Clojure for 5–10 years. We’re not just about writing code—we deliver clean, maintainable solutions tailored to your needs. 🌐 We’ve got expertise in web apps, functional programming, and even integrating Clojure with Python for AI projects. 🔧 We’re all about using the best tools for the job, drawing from a tech stack that spans 25+ programming languages (yes, we’re nerds like that). Why work with us? ✅ You’ll be working with senior-only teams—no juniors learning on the job here! ✅ We use agile methods, so we can pivot and adapt with you as needed. ✅ We’ve nailed projects in fintech, ERPs, web apps, mobile—you name it. If you’ve got a Clojure project in mind or just want to chat about ideas, let’s talk! We’d love to help you bring your vision to life. For a glimpse into our team's experience, check out this video:

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So I seem to started this screencast thingy with Raymond McDermott. We've embarked on building a CMS in Clojure, and we're starting very much from scratch. There is a small twist to this, which is that we want to defer any decision to adopt technology for as long as possible. So rather than discussing which routing library to use, what database we're going to have to set up and so on, we just start coding in a remote repl. Enjoy (or not) https://lnkd.in/dHUWwfjH

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I thought it might be fun to start a bit of a LinkedIn Challenge - to meet 100 Developers in 100 Days I've been a C#/.NET software developer for over 2 decades. I've actually been coding with the .NET Framework since one of its beta releases Post a comment of what your primary coding language is and how long you've been mastering your craft #softwaredevelopers #coders #100devsin100days #linkedinchallenge

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Just to prove my point on AI assisted product development... As a little weekend project I created https://companychat.uk/ from scratch in net 2 days. That is from idea to a fully functional MVP (not just a demo proof-of-concept), delivering value to the end user. Feel free to give it a go, you get 5 free tokens to play with! It's an AI aided advanced search tool for the publicly available Companies House dataset. It can help finding leads for all sorts of campaigns and help research by answering questions and prompts such as "How many companies in Brighton were founded by under 30s last year?" or "Give me a list of companies in Bournemouth that will turn 10 years old next month!". It's hosted on a tiny EC2 instance (£6 per month), connects to an on-premise database server via Tailscale (PostgreSQL with GIS support, hosting Companies House dataset through an ETL pipeline) and to a local SQLite database for system data. Application stack is FastAPI with Jinja templates for the backend and HTMX + TailwindCSS for frontend rendering. AI stack: Cursor + Claude Sonnet 3.5 for development, Langchain and Langgraph with gpt-4o-mini for AI assistance End to end implemented by yours truly using Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5.

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Me: "I'll give that public speaking thing a try in 2024." Also me: Getting stuck right into the big games apparently... I'll be talking at BigDataLdn this year. It's a solid mix of hype and anxiety, Hanxiety if you will! But mostly hype. #BigDataLDN #data #dataengineering #dataleadership

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Leading Cross-Org Tech Reviews Josie has written a great post about driving a cross-org multi-team tech review practice. It's very focussed, as only senior principal-level engineers are usually tasked with those projects. I do think that org leaders as well as senior engineers will benefit from reading the article and adopting the best practices described there. It's also an excellent example of how to scale one person's efforts across multiple team, and thus applies to more than just tech surveys. Project planning, roadmaps, and tech explorations all have the common characteristic of standardized templates, parallel execution, and open questions. Read on here: https://lnkd.in/gX6bnXzq

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Praying to the altar of holy DATA to make any decision in an organization is an insidious disease. It feels like the right thing to do, but when you get down to it, the data is just there to cover your ass if you're wrong. Speed matters, weeks and months matter, and non-measurables also matter. Good leadership isn't about doing what the data dashboards tell you to do. It's understanding that sometimes you have to make gut decisions FAST, and being willing to eat the result, whatever may come. Great leaders have great instincts, they act them on quickly, and they take full accountability for the results.

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Every month our N-able Head Nerds provide a huge amount of practical and insightful content in the shape of Bootcamps and Office Hours. This content is specifically created to help you build your business and make the most of the products you use. And they are designed for ANY #MSP....you don't need to be an N-able partner to register and participant in ANY #HeadNerd event. As we close out May and welcome June, it brings us a new round of Boot Camps and Office Hours! Highlights: ☑ This month there is a renewed focus on lead gen and equipping your team with the skills with my “Cracking the Code to Lead Generation” series taking place June 6th and June 12th ☑ I am also co-presenting a BRAND NEW boot camp with Head Security Nerd Lewis Pope focused on N-able MDR called: “Winning Strategies for Pricing and Selling N‑able MDR” on June 26th ☑ Lewis Pope returns with “Cyber Liability Insurance: Planning for Success” on June 20th ☑ Joe Ferla shares more about Cloud Commander with both an intro session and deep dive into the platform! But these are just the highlights. Check out our latest blog that outlines the complete training schedule for June. Links in Comments.

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The 2024 StackOverflow survey is out, and for the 8th year in a row, Clojure has ranked near the podium in the Top Paying Technologies category—often occupying rank 1. I don't talk much about why I choose to use a weird Lisp—mostly because nobody cares—but the results speak for themselves. If you can hold your nose long enough to learn something very different, you'll find yourself in a high-productivity environment that features: 🔥 Hot code reloading 🦆 Dynamic typing ♻️ Best-in-class garbage collection 📂 Highly performant immutable data structures 📚 Access to the entire JVM's ecosystem of libraries 🧩 Cross-platform compilation to JavaScript 🧠 An unbelievably smart and humble community Sure, you'll pay a high mental price to learn the language, but as a reward, employers will pay a high price for *you*.

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I'm working with a team in Go and they have these "err != nil checks" everywhere. To me it's a really big smell. I'm not familiar enough with Go to know better though. Feels like in the InitialCall if there's an error a Functional Null Object Pattern should apply. Any Golang experts want to offer up some constructive help? Note, everything has been abstracted out, so don't try to make too much sense of what the code is doing.

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Trying to hire a junior to mid-level engineer in Scotland with great benefits and remote working is hard... https://lnkd.in/eQNHVqGR Not because the role isn't attractive (you'd be working on exciting large-scale system infrastructure challenges writing code with Golang - 1,000's of Kubernetes clusters, 10,000s of cloud VMs) or because the team are all crazy (they're thought leaders in their field including multiple upstream Kubernetes contributors from 3 continents!)... you got me... maybe there's a little crazy - but only the good kind! No... my challenge is whether this AI-generated image to go with my LinkedIn post makes any sense! I never have much luck with images containing generated text. Even using prompts like "spell check any text" or as is the case with this one "do not include any text" doesn't seem to work. Not to mention, I know what a Scottish Terrier is... but that "thing" in the bottom right looks more like an angry, tartan-wearing Capybara. Comment below for your biggest concerns with this image... or if you're a junior/mid-level, talented software engineer based in Scotland - maybe just skip over the image and apply online - https://lnkd.in/eQNHVqGR

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This is interesting. I always found that technical interviews and technical tests was less a matter of proving you can do things, and more about trying to gauge what *they* think the right answers are. They're arguably more of a test of the employer and/or the interviewer than the candidate. Your interviewing process reveals a lot about you as an organisation.

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9/10 times, there is only one reason that developers fail their take-home tech tests - and it has the simplest solution. "Coding projects are a polarizing topic: some candidates love them while other candidates find them unfair. On one side, coding projects allow you to showcase your skills in a more natural environment, using the tools you love." Love them or hate them, they're a non-negotiable part of numerous development interview processes. I completely agree that these tech challenges should always be general tests so that applicants are not expected to provide free contributions to the client's platform, but there is one huge point missed in this article. TEST YOUR CODE! The most common feedback I’ve had for why a candidate has been unsuccessful with their tech challenge is “code does not compile”. If you’ve taken the time to complete a tech challenge, it is imperative that you check to see if it works. You may have spent 3 hours on it, maybe even longer; don’t skimp on Unit testing. https://lnkd.in/dP4Nd5u2

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I contributed to Abi Noda's article on when different companies established their first DevProd team. At Thoughtspot, we had about 50-75 engineers when the team was formed. This timing was appropriate for us, given it was right as we were beginning the work of scaling across multiple aspects and beginning our now complete cloud transition. These projects included: - Scaling our on-prem infrastructure to create a hybrid cloud environment with focus on cloud agnostic testing. - Scaling the workload handled by our developer facing critical services such as jenkins, gerrit(back then), artifactory, self help portal across compute, memory, storage - Scaling the automation for triggering multiple builds and tests as our headcount grew. The increased demand for the sandbox environment, which could be provisioned almost 10 times faster, reflects our focus on velocity while optimising for cost, a commitment we continue to prioritise at ThoughtSpot. Read the full article to learn from when other companies formed a dedicated DevProd team:

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Thinking of taking a Team / Tech Lead role? Might be worth thinking again... Unless you have a burning desire to Lead and Manage teams full time down the line (in an Eng Manager, VP, Head of or CTO level position), taking a Team/Tech Lead role is likely a BIG mistake. Sure, you might get a bit of title prestige, but with it comes a few major negatives that for most will significantly outweigh the pros... - Tech Lead type positions are currently at the bottom of the list in terms of demand from companies. - Tech Lead salaries are (for the most part) sitting below Senior Eng salaries in the current market - Tech Leads (perhaps wrongly, but I don't make the rules) are often considered to be less sharp technically than their more hands on colleagues - Tech Leads will generally have a much harder time switching to a Staff or Principal level position in the future (again, perhaps wrongly, but it's true nonetheless) - Tech Leads are often the first to go in redundancies, with preference regularly shown to more hands on Senior Engineers - And finally, most people don't actually like it. Leading and Managing is a slog, and all the fun parts (mentoring, leading by example, high level decision making etc.) can often be done as a Senior, Staff or Principal Engineer anyway. (This is what we are seeing in start-ups and scale-ups, your mileage may vary in the corporate world).

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