Michal Wallace

Not web/work related, but journaling my story of my brain crash and recovery on a Substack, as well as journaling my attempt to create a game/simulator to help Epilepsy survivors. Still development related for sure https:// maineinventor.substack.com

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Nearly 100% of the code in the new platform I'm working on is written by agents. Not a POC or experiment. We've been doing this for five months and are rolling to production now. Short version of what I've learned: TDD goes from nice-to-have to non-negotiable. Line-by-line review of 30k lines a day puts you back at human velocity, so you need quality defense in depth — pit robots against robots. And your new coding partner is neither your replacement nor a slop machine. Full post: https://lnkd.in/gKANJcMG

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SDK documentation is not supplementary material... it is a vital component of the SDK itself. It lets developers harness the SDK's potential by serving as a highly sophisticated technical bridge. However, the tone must be instructional, and the approach must be simple. Here is a quick explainer video on the need for SDK documentation and its essential components.

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The tech industry doesn’t lack talented Black builders. What it lacks is infrastructure that puts them at the center of the story. For years we’ve seen the same pattern: Someone builds something incredible… but only a small circle ever hears about it. Not because the work isn’t good. But because the spotlight rarely points our direction. That’s one of the reasons I started building BIT Voices Network. A place where technologists, creators, and innovators can share what they’re building and connect with each other. We’re still early. But every movement starts with builders who believe something better can exist. And when builders find each other… small sparks turn into real momentum. BIT Voices Network A creator-first tech community. Amplifying Black excellence in tech. #BlackInTech #TechFounders #Community #BitVoices

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The best test is the one that actually catches bugs. Testing is an expense. Sometimes a justifiable expense, sometimes not so much. I don't love E2E tests for most apps. I feel they are brittle, take a ton of time to write and maintain, and rarely catch real bugs. We have some smoke E2E tests, but other than that, it's mostly unit testing, integration/feature testing and snapshot testing (codecannon generates apps, so snapshots are super useful for catching any unwanted changes to generated codebases). Besides that, Sentry and Prometheus + AlertManager do wonders. We focus on reasonable test coverage, good code review hygiene and fast bugfix times. Anybody else not fully bought into E2E testing?

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So interesting... the sample size is small, so we'll see how other studies present, but this article suggests that AI coding assistants don't make us much faster. There's some data in here that suggests they do if you are practiced with them, but 30% more, not even 100% more (2x). In my experience AI can get new ideas bootstrapped quickly but it starts to get confused with the code base gets larger. It requires developer skill to get more out of it. For existing or large codebases, you need to focus it with good requirements documents and let it go in "agent" mode. I think our workflows need to change as these tools evolve to make best use of them. https://lnkd.in/gwUTBehz

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The purpose of this post is to touch base on Ollama and how it can help with both privacy and running a cost efficient pipeline for indie devs. If you haven't heard of ollama, I highly recommend checking their website and read https://lnkd.in/gUvgcRSY. In a nutshell, it allows you to run certain models locally or in a docker container which can help with hosting models on your machine or server. It has a lot more features which I'm still learning about. I've been playing around with qwen3:30b for majority of the time and just recently updated to qwen3.5:35b. Both run smoothly on M4 Max / 48GB but could've run better on 64GB only if I knew better to get that upgrade. I'll write more on the projects that I'm working on in future, but in a nutshell, I used LLM to run a two-phase pipeline: - Filter 1.3million records from jsonl and reduce it to 50K useful records for the app - Run through all 50K records to select most meaningful samples among several examples for each record. In addition, fallback mechanism for any missing data needed

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If we're being honest, formats like Toon JSON and VSC feel like solutions in search of a problem. People hype them as if they're revolutionary, but in practice they end up being far less intuitive than the formats they’re trying to replace - JSON. Yes, AI models can infer the structure. Yes, it’s technically more compact. But that compactness comes at the cost of clarity, readability, and long-term maintainability—pretty big sacrifices for something that’s supposed to make development easier. At the end of the day, a format isn’t “smart” just because an AI model can guess what it means. Developers still have to read it, debug it, and collaborate with others using it. And if it’s harder for humans to parse, then it’s not really progress—it’s just noise dressed up as innovation. Sometimes “new” doesn’t mean “better.” It just means “different… and harder.”

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The Narrative Code Contemplating how our systems tell stories: Simple state models: "This is how things are now." Event sourcing: "This is how we got here." CQRS: "Different questions need different stories." The architecture you choose shapes the questions your business can ask about itself. #softwarearchitecture #ddd #coding

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Your performance review didn’t go sideways in December. It went sideways in February. When your brain decided “I’ll remember this later.” Spoiler. You won’t. Most QA reviews aren’t hard because you’re “bad at writing”. They’re hard because you’re trying to reconstruct 11 months of impact from Jira archaeology and emotional damage. Here’s the core mistake. You submit a list of tasks. Not a case for business impact. What usually shows up: - “I improved quality.” - “I supported releases.” - “I helped automation.” What your manager needs. - What changed because of you. The fix is unsexy. That’s why it works. A weekly 5 minute wins log: - Add 1-3 bullets. - Each bullet includes one of these: a number, before vs after, risk avoided, customer or revenue angle - Add proof: ticket, pr, dashboard, praise Examples that instantly level you up: - “Raised checkout critical flow coverage 62% → 81%.” - “Cut regression time by 35 minutes per build.” - “Introduced smoke test for 12 top journeys.” If you want this to be easy, keep a lightweight career memory system. Even a simple tool like CareerJourney can help you store wins with context so review season becomes copy-paste, not panic. #QA #SoftwareTesting #QualityAssurance #PerformanceReview #CareerGrowth #TestAutomation #Engineering

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​WICK-A11Y keep climbing the Cypress charts every week! ​Turns out, making accessibility testing "wicked" fast and usable is something the community really values. ​Why it's gaining traction: - A Wicked High Quality - ​CI/CD Ready - ​Tester Intuitive - Superior User Experience - Accessible Features Integrated: Voice feedback and Compliant reports - ​100% Free ​It’s becoming the go-to alternative for QA freelancers and engineers, and Small-Mid size companies with a short budget, who are serious about building a more accessible web. Used by several European companies to support their official accessibility statements. ​And we’re just getting started. New "intelligent" features are coming soon to make this plugin even more wicked. 🙂 GitHub: https://lnkd.in/gvYhDSVu ​#Cypress #Accessibility #OpenSource #A11y #WickA11Y

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