swyx's site

Latest content

I do a bunch of personal and work-related writing, and recently published The Coding Career Handbook with the best of my nontechnical writing.

Learn in Public My most impactful essay, read by millions.
How to Create Luck Luck is random, but creating luck is a skill.
Third Age of JavaScript Documenting the changing of the guard in JavaScript.
The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy Economics, tech & society.
Eating the Cloud from Outside In AWS plays Chess, Cloudflare plays Go.
The Part Time Creator Manifesto Have a job, but don't BE your job.
Temporal - the iPhone of System Design Why Temporal is a big deal.
The Rise of the AI Engineer Why AI Engineering will become its own, possibly larger, discipline in contrast to ML Researchers/ML Engineers.
Swyx's Simple Guide to Singapore Self explanatory.
The Upload So far my only fiction sci-fi work.
Cognition: The Devin is in the Details My thinking for why Cognition is working in the age of the Agent Lab.
About My personal story, README, and podcast with Quincy Larson (2023 update now available!).

You can find all my writing on RSS or on the /ideas page.

I have done a bunch of talks and podcast appearances. There are different eras:

The modern era:

The Operating System of You The last chapter of my book, in talk form, as a closing keynote at CascadiaJS Conference.
Paradigm Lost My career covering the four most interesting trends in tech: local-first, async programming, data engineering, and AI engineering.
Mapping Developer Experience A talk I did with Silas Sao of DataStax on how I think about devrel/devtools startups.

The JS/Beginner Era:

Getting Closure on Hooks My most well received technical talk, where I explain a mental model for React hooks by livecoding a React clone at JSConf Asia. Started as a tweet, then a blogpost.
Why React is not Reactive My first conference talk ever was at the biggest React venue in the world, React Rally. I spent a month writing my CFP on the most interesting React question I could think of.
Contributing to React My first meetup talk ever was at React NYC. This was accepted into the React docs as a guide for other contributors.
Learn In Public My first verbal exposition on the Learn In Public philosophy. Video is frozen at the end, sorry.
I Can Babel Macros and So Can You! (the Moana talk) My first JSConf appearance ever, at one of the most competitive JSConfs ever. This talk is where I first started experimenting with theming talks, and it came out really well with the Moana theme.