UX engineer building offensive security tools @dreadnode. weak opinions, strongly held
South Florida
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Spent years building Matry as a coding tool for designers. Then Cursor and Claude Code made it redundant.
But they aren’t really built for designers, so what should the next design tool look like?
I think it looks like a browser.
waitlist here → matry.design
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In the summer of 1998 my 14 year old self became obsessed with Minesweeper. I played it constantly and eventually was able to complete the biggest puzzle in 17 seconds. Years later I looked up the Guinness World Record and it’s like 23 seconds. So unofficially, I was the best.
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Mindhunter. Tragically only ran for 2 seasons, but the dialogue is superbly written. You get to watch 2 FBI agents and an academic lay the theoretical groundwork for the psychological profiling of serial killers.
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If the button doesn’t respond, some people do press rapidly in frustration. It’s an easy scenario to design for, so no reason not to fix it.
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1. The drawings have the same line weight and texture, suggesting they were drawn using the same utensil on the same surface.
2. They are evenly spaced, requiring a level of coordination that children don’t have.
3. They’re all a similar size. Near 0% chance of that happening spontaneously.
4. There are no haphazard marks, surrounding details, marks of erasures, scribbles, or anything else children usually produce when they draw.
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Bottom line, there should be at least one period of your life where you explore the limits of what you’re capable of.
It’s possible to get by without it, sure. But you deprive yourself of your own potential, and you deprive the world of the gifts you could have given it.
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I don’t know why but Python. Something about the environment setup just irritates the shit out of me.
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I have this extremely unscientific theory that the only Europeans who didn’t leave for the Americas were the ones too timid to do so, and that this has had significant downstream consequences hundreds of years later.
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There are some rules. It can’t have sleeves, the dress can’t extend past your knees, and it either has to have a floral pattern or it has to have ruffles. If you don’t have either, it doesn’t count.
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Personally, I didn’t feel attacked. For me, the offensive part was the implication that these terrible behaviors are what masculine culture *aspires to*. In their eyes, the bully and the rapist are not aberrations but the *quintessence* of our cultures’ masculine ideals.
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1. Buy up a bunch of small town theaters - the old ones that are falling apart or have been abandoned.
2. Sign deals with various subscription services, not just Netflix but also Max, Hulu, etc.
3. Serve beer and food
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It makes reading the code feel like calling a 1-800 number and getting passed around 15 times before you find the person you need to talk to
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Not only the hardest CS, but also the hardest art form.
- game theory
- UI/UX
- story telling
- voice acting
- music
- sound effects
- environment design
- animation
- illustration
- 3D modeling
And on top of all that (plus the insane CS), it has to be *fun*. It’s insane.
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tbf there’s a difference between mental and manual labor. I’ve worked physical jobs that required me to be on my feet for 14-17 hours straight, and I was able to push my body to do it.
But your brain has a hard stop, if it doesn’t want to work, it simply won’t.
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One of the boats in his stickers is for sale:
northropandjohnson.com/yacht…
And this is the charting company website:
controlledchaosfishing.com
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My favorite thing about Donnie is that his entire role in the movie is being told to shut up, all because he missed the first few seconds of context when the dude was telling Walter the story. Absolutely hilarious.
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Not gonna roast you like the other responses, but just so you’re aware, that’s not normally how free work is requested. If a dev works without pay, typically they’re considered a founding engineer, and are either directly paid equity in the company or paid via sweat equity.
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I think a big part of it is trust. Courts know and trust Docusign. People who write legal contracts know this, and vastly prefer Docusign for that very reason. It’s a network effect that can be penetrated but probably never dismantled.
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I came across this at The Met a few years back and it stopped me in my tracks for a good 20 minutes. It’s an amazing work of art. Peder Balke, 1848.
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I refuse to believe it because I’ve given it several tries. The fun stuff I work on is fairly complicated and AI regularly shits the bed.
Either they’re lying or they’re building low effort copypasta features.
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I get made fun of for being afraid of gas, but I don’t care. I don’t want it in my house.
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It’s actually an interesting idea. “Lifestyle vacations” where you get to experience life of a completely different style, for about a week.
Could be a solid business model, and would simultaneously halt a good deal of complaining.
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You don’t need math to be a programmer, though after my own 10-15 years of experience, I kinda wish I’d put some effort into learning it.
Depending on what you want to do, some things will be much easier to learn if you know math. Graphics, for example.
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Kinda sucks for the first company to not take him back. If he had only given notice a week prior, I have a hard time believing they’d already backfilled his position.
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You jest but I’ve known people who have stated that they “just aren’t that into food.” Like they eat it to stay alive and to nourish themselves, but they don’t really care about flavor. Just completely insane to me.
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anyone who looks at what happened to crowdstrike, and then considers the systems running today that rely on the Linux kernel, should understand why
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I love engineering but I love my family more, and money is how I take care of them. If you gave me 800k I’d literally just do whatever you asked, no questions lol.
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This is my goal. I don’t like buying fancy things or chasing material possession, I want my wife to have the option to work rather than the requirement.
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This is why I buy all my clothes from Target and exclusively wear sandals. I’m communicating to other people that I’m incredibly lazy and that they shouldn’t depend on me for anything 😂
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I’m not a fashion-oriented dude, but I’ve always been painfully aware of this. If a shirt doesn’t sit correctly on my shoulders, it makes me cringe inside and I cannot wear it.
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I’m a big proponent of traditional standalone servers, but this does need a caveat. It matters what the server is doing. For typical CRUD, yes I’m sure this is right. But if the request is transcoding video or something, that’s a very different question.
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Not trying to nitpick, just curious - was there an uptick in dev hours committed to infra support? I’d imagine that human capital is bound to eat up some of those savings, no?
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“You’ve never designed a system more complex than a tutorial project” imagine saying this to Casey lol
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My brother works for an undisclosed sector of the government as a database administrator. The database he oversees uses PDF files as their records. Yes, PDF files.
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One mental model of a conflict is to imagine two people facing against each other, with the problem between them. Another model is to imagine two people side-by-side, working together to solve the problem in front of them.
In other words, decouple the problem from the person.
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It’s a collaborative editor, so every interaction on the platform is synced across clients. Then you have the storage costs and designers aren’t exactly known for being efficient with disk size.
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the only reliable metric is number of complaints on Twitter. If a bunch of devs are shitting on your project, that means it’s getting real traction
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Just the fact that it can support multiple cursors is impressive. That’s such a pain in the ass to pull off with web tech.
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Would be cool to have some sort of Wreck-it-Ralph type game where you hop between these worlds.
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lol. My first job in tech was doing QA for Disney, and a lot of the times I literally was doing this. Just to see if I could get it to break. The devs hated me 😂
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I feel like this should be a rich area for puns, but I’m not clever enough to think of any.
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Yeah, that way we could cut out a lot of the typical English grammar, which is usually just there for social reasons and has no real content.
So we define these very concise phrases that may not be entirely legible to everyone, but the computer will understand it! Genius!
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I find myself wondering whether she actually works there, or just happened to be in a situation where she got access to the building. I’ve been there before and wasn’t a Googler.
My brain just can’t accept that someone could be so stupid as to post this online.
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I’ve been in the interviewing trenches for the past 3 months, and what I’ve noticed is that the higher the pay, the easier the interview process.
I’m close to getting an offer at FAANG-level salary (knock on wood), and I’m not even gonna have a technical interview. Bonkers.
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Had my first, a girl, just over a year ago. I always thought parents were hyping up parenthood to make themselves feel better, because surely it must be miserable to be surrounded by cartoons, toys, crying, dirty diapers, etc.
Nope, it’s amazing. Best decision I ever made.
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I’ll forever love showing this feature to people and seeing their jaws drop. No one knows about it because it’s ultimately useless lol, but it’s a fun party trick.
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the openai one is fitting because it looks like an environment that was generated by openai
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The first paragraph of the article says “in this study we compare two websites with similar design” aaand that’s all you need to know.
It may have escaped their notice, but you can build similar websites in different ways [shocked pikachu]
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You don’t advertise, you don’t optimize, you don’t use ci/cd, you don’t hire employees. You go against pretty much all common advice and it works. I genuinely love it.
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web tech especially lends itself to being really flexible and dynamic, and therefore a ton of framework churn. new ways of doing shit every other week. you can only keep up for so long before you throw your hands up and say “welp fuck this”
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Eh, I don’t know how indicative this result is. I’ve been doing browser dev since 2009, and I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head. Mostly because I never write a form without specifying whether it’s a GET or POST. Feels like minutia IMO.
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whereas if you flip the image horizontally, you see the past 30 years of software development
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our politicians should definitely be teaching courses on “how to invest your way into millions of dollars on a $300k/year income”
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Waiting for the #htmx gotcha but it hasn’t come yet. I’m several chapters into hypermedia.systems and this is the most excited I’ve felt about web dev in a long time.
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Figma’s article on their approach to CRDTs:
figma.com/blog/how-figmas-mu…
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Growing up during this time was incredible. Felt like every year things were just getting unimaginably better, and we were constantly hyped for new stuff. But yeah shooting the bottles was a peak experience.
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or you could go the other way and put the java in javascript:
document.queryHTMLElementNodeByIdentifier
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Yep. I’d honestly like to see browsers support a completely new document format and rendering engine. That way browser developers can stop bastardizing html into something it was never meant to be.
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Free parking and free valet. Why valet wasn’t always a thing at hospitals baffles me. If there’s anywhere in the world you want that specific service, a *hospital* is the place.
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Yep that was part of my approach. I remember employing a lot of tactics to whittle down the time.
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Remote as a junior is a terrible idea. Nothing replaces pairing alongside another dev, in person.
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I’ve been writing JavaScript for 13 years and never knew that you can separate the dot of a property accessor.
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Imagine giving your life to try and end his, but instead you give him the worlds greatest photo shoot and probably ensured his nomination. Biggest L of all L’s lol
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