Jake Sikma

“Developers are a resource. They don’t talk to product people.” I overheard that on Seattle’s light rail, and it stuck with me. I make it a point to talk directly with the people who use the software — delivery drivers, paralegals, and others doing the real work. Every conversation saves me hours of coding the wrong thing. When developers are treated as “resources,” they’re cut off from the feedback that makes their work valuable. Talking to users isn’t a luxury — it’s how you build the right thing faster. You don’t need a big product team or AI tools for that. Just curiosity and a conversation.

Stop hiring creatives like engineers. Great portfolios beat keyword-packed resumes, but the best signal is a live brief. When we run 24–48-hour micro-challenges (clear prompt, brand context, constraints), we see three things that resumes miss: idea diversity, iteration speed, and feedback maturity. Pair that with a 20-minute critique session and a collaborative Figma or copy doc, and you’ll spot who can navigate ambiguity, defend choices with data, and play well with cross-functional partners. Bonus: anonymized reviews reduce bias and surface unconventional talent you might overlook. If you’re scaling brand, content, or product design, rethink your funnel: less screening, more making. What’s your take? Let’s discuss in the comments.

Here's a terrific example of an intelligent interface that supports designer tasks instead of replacing them. A+ stuff from my pal and collaborator TJ Pitre. Quite aside from AI integration to help automate code production downstream (that's all very useful of course), this plugin is just a great all-around sanity check to ensure completeness and good hygiene for components.

I don't hire editors any more. I am hiring automation engineers. I used to flex how creative we are. How brilliant our solutions are. I do not any longer. Agencies are still bragging about their “creative team.” That’s not the flex anymore. The flex is systems that create, cut, repurpose, and ship content faster than any team of humans. The agency of the future isn’t a bunch of editors chained to Adobe. It’s an army of automation engineers and set of agents who make production infinite. Most agencies don’t get this. That’s why they’ll be gone. Soon.

UX designers: I often get asked for tips on what should be included in a portfolio. Here's an article where Shopify shares key tips for designing a UX portfolio that gets you noticed and opens doors! https://bit.ly/43ntWgn

Beware of any “recruiter” who directs you to a third-party service to rewrite your resume. Bigger red flag? That service slaps you with a fee.

Rest in peace, Dreamweaver. 🪦 Adobe Dreamweaver hasn’t received an update since 2021. No announcement. No funeral. No “sunset” blog post with a tasteful gradient background. Just… silence. The tool that taught an entire generation of web developers what a <table> layout was (and why they should stop using one) is gone. Not with a bang, but with an abandoned changelog. Pour one out for the WYSIWYG editor that let you drag a rollover image onto a page and feel like a god. Meanwhile, every 3 weeks someone publishes “WordPress Is Dead” and gets 4,000 likes from people who build nothing. WordPress powers 43% of the web. It got a major release this year. It has an active core team, thousands of contributors, and a plugin ecosystem that prints money. But sure, it’s “dead” because someone made a landing page with AI in 47 seconds. Here’s what nobody talks about when they’re writing hot takes for engagement: A hammer didn’t die when the nail gun was invented. The nail gun didn’t die when prefab housing showed up. They’re all still in use, because they solve different problems at different scales. WordPress is a tool. React is a tool. Laravel is a tool. AI is a tool. Dreamweaver was a tool. The difference between “dead” and “alive” isn’t hype cycles or LinkedIn discourse. It’s whether the thing still gets maintained, still solves real problems, and still has people building with it every day. Dreamweaver failed that test quietly in 2021. WordPress passes it every single week. So the next time someone tells you WordPress is dead, ask them one question: “Dead compared to what?” Because if the bar is Dreamweaver, WordPress is doing just fine. RIP Dreamweaver. You were the gateway drug. We’ll always have <marquee>.

I once met someone with zero coding background. No engineering. No software experience. He walked into a training center and said: “I want to learn how to code. I want to build my own financial software. Something like QuickBooks.” He asked a simple question: “How long will it take?” The answer he got? “Three months. Full-stack. You’ll be able to build it.” I remember thinking: This is impossible. Not unlikely. Not difficult. Impossible. And it’s not arrogance. It’s reality. QuickBooks isn’t syntax. It’s systems. It’s accounting logic. It’s edge cases. It’s years of iteration. It’s knowing what breaks before it breaks. Two months later, I checked in. He checked out three weeks after he started. Three months barely gets you past the shock of learning to think like a programmer. Maybe you can build a landing page. Maybe sprinkle some CSS and JavaScript. But a real product with moving parts? No. And here’s the part nobody advertises. Coding isn’t about intelligence. It’s about endurance. Can you survive the 2am moments when your brain feels broken? When nothing makes sense? When you feel stupid? When quitting feels logical? That’s the filter. Not tutorials. Not bootcamp promises. Not AI. Which brings me to a question for 2026. Now that AI exists… Do you genuinely believe you can learn coding in 3 months and build a product in the league of QuickBooks? I’m asking out of curiosity. And honesty. Because i beIieve tools don’t replace the grind. They just expose who can handle it. ____________________ 👋 Hi, I'm Adebayo Bamijoko — a software engineer with a big thing for solving problems. I build solutions that improve existing systems, fix bottlenecks, and make tech more accessible. If you like real, watch this space.

Something I noticed at Shopify that has stuck with me: at a certain scale, the tools your developers use every day become the loudest problem in the room. Builds slow down. Tests become unreliable. Onboarding takes a week instead of a day. That is when someone creates a platform team. The reason those teams exist is genuinely underappreciated. Going deep into developer tooling is hard. Knowing how a compilation graph distributes work across cores, recognizing when a configuration choice made two years ago is costing you minutes on every build, understanding why certain dependency orderings create bottlenecks... this is not something you pick up quickly. And asking a product engineer to context-switch into this is a real stretch. At Tuist, we have been thinking about how to frame this whole space with a shared mental model. What we arrived at is three layers. The toolchain layer sits closest to your project. It is the interaction between your code and the build systems, test runners, and tools that turn source files into something that runs. It is the least glamorous layer and the most neglected. Each ecosystem requires dedicated, years-long investment to understand properly. This is the narrow waist of developer productivity and unlike TCP/IP, there is no universal protocol here. Every ecosystem has its own. The compute layer is where most of the money flows because it is tangible and easy to sell. But compute alone has a ceiling, and that ceiling is physics. The interesting failure mode I keep seeing is organizations pouring money into faster machines while completely ignoring how their projects use them. One massive bottleneck module in the compilation graph means fifteen cores sitting idle. An expensive machine doing very little work. The cache layer is what breaks through that physical ceiling. But caching introduces the network, and suddenly latency becomes the new constraint. Cache and compute have to be colocated. And the cache needs to be accessible from everywhere your code gets built: your laptop, your CI runner, an agent sandbox, a colleague's machine. Not a feature bundled inside one product but a piece of shared infrastructure. The reason we wanted to articulate this framework is that without it, it is easy to build a product that is a collection of loosely related tools. A cache that does not understand the toolchain. Analytics that show you numbers without telling you what to do about them. Each piece working in isolation. With the framework, every decision has a place. When we expand into Gradle, we know exactly what to build. The structure applies regardless of the ecosystem. The specifics change, the architecture does not. https://lnkd.in/ddWUUPus