punkbit

paywall article

I enjoyed reading this article and learned a lot from it.

Lately I’ve been writing on paper again, sharpening pencils and slowing down. It helps me stay closer to my own thoughts and to a more human pace.

A pencil is just a tool too, but a very unique one. It disappears if we abuse it, leaving only the traces of our existence.

That’s true! Naysayers keep mentioning it’s due to over hiring during Covid. I’d say it’s AI investment related and AI replacing a lot of software needs. Plus, people seem to use just a couple applications or platforms nowadays.

C’mon! So, when HR manages to get real candidates, why do we have to go through 8 stage of interviews that take months? It’s humiliating.

Imagine spending 6 to 8 hours a day looking for opportunities and nothing for 1, 2 years. What are people supposed to do?

Yes, got contract work and got a couple offers too. In the past, hired developers from the list, as a hiring manager in a previous company. Overall, it’s quite hard to predict but better than nothing!

Location: London (UK)

Remote: Yes (Remote/Hybrid depending on location)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily Typescript, React, Bash, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://punkbit.com/docs/cv-punkbit-helder-oliveira.20260417...

Email: info (at) punkbit (dot) com

I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).

I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.

I care about clean code, great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).

Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as pi, opencode, claude and LLM, including kimi over fireworks inference.

Want to know more? https://punkbit.com

Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.

Are you suggesting using AI/Agents to apply for roles?

This is actually impressive. If it can output each frame as layers, even more.

Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.

Finally someone else notices it!

Job candidates keep facing a lot of hurdles, including scams, Trojan horses like the one presented here, ghosting, wasting candidates' time, nepotism, etc. As a candidate you can easily spend more than 8 hours a day looking for opportunities, switching stacks, studying, doing take-home projects, etc, for absolutely nothing. Life is precious and shouldn't be burned like that!

I like this article and simple concise way of explaining what an agent is: Agent = Model + Harness

Have you tried to verify if those job positions are real? Try to apply yourself and go through the interview process to understand what's going on.

That's true! In 12 months, I got two contracts: a 3-month fixed-term contract and a previous 10-day contract role. Let's say that the landlord decides to sell the place I'm renting, I won't be able to rent another place due to unemployment.

Thanks for the sanity check!

Had a quick read on my mobile, and that was my first impression.

Guess its more of a way to make the maintainers accountable instead of making npm reputation the main focus.

The resulting allowlist is written to package.json

Couldn’t this effectively result in the same process we get in pre-12 defaults?

Spot on "AI Native".

The company is hiring; the author mentioned they are talented and unemployed for the past 8 months. Why not remind the company to re-hire them?

Opencode+Fireworks+Kimi2.5 and git worktrees mainly

I stick with Conventional Commits as a standardised way for communicating changes. Most contributions in the form of open PRs are squashed before merging into base branches. A team member can commit as personally wished in the feature branch. I still use CC for my own sanity and I’m very glad I do comparatively to what usually find in others feature branch commit histories.

Without standards most developers I’ve seen are very careless.

I generally work with changesets to curate changes at the time of contribution in accordance to semantic versioning.

What’s great about CC is the simplicity.

Note: This is an AI interview. It'll show after uploading your personal details and resume.

If you add the initial HR call, that’s 5. The difference between that and the 7 is the chat with CEO and CTO etc. 8 step offer, a no or a low ball. A complete waste of time.

It happens to candidates! Let's not forget what we have to go through, 6 or 7-stage interview processes, that requires a lot of preparation, as if we don't deserve the time to have a life too. Fake jobs, scammers, dodgy "take-home tests" containing malicious packages, cancelled interviews on the day, cancellation of the role in the middle of the hiring process, change of hiring plans, requests to record videos before talking to someone, ghosting, interviewers not interested in interviewing, zero feedback, etc.

Location: London (UK) Remote: Yes (Remote/Hybrid depending on location) Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily Typescript, React, Bash, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://punkbit.com/docs/cv-punkbit-helder-oliveira.20260417...

Email: info (at) punkbit (dot) com

I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).

I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.

I care about clean code, great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).

Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as pi, opencode, claude and LLM, including kimi over fireworks inference.

Want to know more? https://punkbit.com

Maybe they want to build their own cloud infrastructure, host open source models themselves as an inference service provider?

Just curious, given the $113M investment, and the state of the economy as you described. Why don’t you build it then?

"Daily Mail" is an embarrassment! For example, naming Nuno Loureiro in these conspiracy theories is shameful; he was killed by an ex-colleague from IST in Lisbon due to jealousy.

They have a lot of users paying to track their listening habits; I'm surprised.