My Bluesky mobile app prompted for age verification this morning; no way I am submitting the last four of my social, a credit card, and a photo of my ID. Why Bluesky and none of the other social apps? Wild.

It's remarkable how great AI has improved at writing code with proper planning and yet, writing prose is hit and miss. Less subjectivity when it comes to quality code I suppose.

Unless you are writing libraries, default arguments seem silly with agents coding.

We're wrapping up our migration to Metro internally for Square Android. I summarized some of our challenges and steps we took in a blog post. If you use Dagger 2 for a Kotlin project, then you should migrate to Metro sooner rather than later. engineering.block.xyz/blog/metro-m...

Metro Migration at Square Android

How Square Android migrated its monorepo from Dagger 2 and Anvil to Metro over nine months and saved thousands of hours of build time.

engineering.block.xyz

Never thought I would see the word "affordances" so much this year.

In case nobody told you, but kids are tough on door handles? I'm on repair number five in like five months.

Andor season 2 burns slowly initially but the plot arcs together so well. The story brings some much needed depth to the rebels and the empire.

There are lots of think pieces floating around. Nothing new in here; simply my personal reflections about work right now. aaron.alaniz.xyz/discipline/

Discipline

I spent most of 2025 triaging and debugging system behaviors. Thankless, but important work that I certainly used AI to help with, but not exactly an area where AI shines. Now, it's a time for buildin...

aaron.alaniz.xyz

I am in the lobby of a university waiting for my son to present his science fair project and bless the lady who sat down at the empty seated piano and played a flawless Nothing Else Matters by Metallica. What a beautiful reprieve from a wild time in the software industry.

The Fastmail Android app recently started immediately inserting an email back into my inbox after I swipe to delete it. It seems to be unique to deleting and not archive or snooze 🤔

I switched to a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard and discovered that I type the letter 'c' with my index finger instead of my middle one. How long have I been doing this!? 😅

So glad I finally committed to an e-ink tablet for technical content reading and notes. I went with a Kindle Scribe and readbetter.io to send content — a much more enjoyable experience and I can practice improving my abysmal handwriting.

I was not prepared for how emotional I would get watching my son assemble his first "program" with his Raspberry Pi and Scratch. Completely unguided and offline, he clicked on a tutorial button and just figured it out.

Here's some tangible productivity gains I've found for using AI! blog.mmckenna.me/microdosing-...

Microdosing AI for Mobile Dev

Small usages with real productivity gains

blog.mmckenna.me

chromecast: 60% of the time it works all the time ✨

I am teaching my son how to play catcher and one new thing I notice catchers doing is showing the target briefly and then placing the glove on the ground. I presume this is so they only catch the ball coming up into the zone as opposed to trying to frame a low pitch. Fascinating!

👀👀👀👀 github.com/square/anvil...

Anvil Moves to Maintenance Mode · Issue #1149 · square/anvil

Hey all! We wanted to share an update on the state and future of Anvil. We previously published a roadmap covering the major work we had planned, including K2 support and making Anvil a standalone ...

github.com

Trailblaze got some new updates today! There's an official yaml spec defined in the trailblaze-yaml module. The examples will be updated by the end of this week. There's also new memory tools available so the agent can remember screen state for later assertions. github.com/block/trailb...

GitHub - block/trailblaze: AI-driven mobile testing framework.

AI-driven mobile testing framework. Contribute to block/trailblaze development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

As an Android developer I basically have zero visibility into what is happening in Java beyond JDK 8. I am not sure which came first, but it is nice to see convergence on similar concepts like data classes and records.

I gave Omarchy a try and it has made a ten year old laptop fun again. 💻🖲️ aaron.alaniz.xyz/omarchy-trial/

Omarchy Trial

There is a lot of sameness in technology these days ­and while convergence is fine, it's nice to explore. The announcement of Omarchy­ – an opinionated Arch Linux + Hyprland setup – reminded me of the...

aaron.alaniz.xyz

I always looked forward to showing my kids the Ocarina of Time — the look of satisfaction after completing the first boss battle, priceless ✨ What a timeless game

Shift + Esc — the best OOO feature ever made in Slack

I discovered that my son has been using my debit card pin code as the password to the playground forts at recess. 🔓

From a dev at a large tech company: “We were only allowed to use GitHub Copilot as an AI IDE. It was OK. But then more and more of us used Cursor on side projects and it was *so much better* Luckily we have have a dev platform team and we

I just learned about the Savannah Bananas from the @acquiredfm.bsky.social IPL episode — this is so amazing. I love baseball tradition and nostalgia, but this looks so fun. thesavannahbananas.com

The Fastmail bottom bar I always wanted 🙌🏼

My favorite thing about AI is the spike in motivation to write incredible documentation — previously, the incentives were not so tangible. Now, you have immediate feedback about whether your efforts to document something are useful.

I am enjoying shorter lower stakes blogs — here are my findings using Cursor for Android dev for a week 🚀 aaron.alaniz.xyz/cursor-week/

A Week with Cursor

Technology waves swell, crest, break onto shore, and then, some time later, mobile developers show up, board in hand. I committed to using Cursor exclusively for a week as my daily driver editor. A we...

aaron.alaniz.xyz

Bruce delivering a sunny day himself this morning ☀️ www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/a...

Bruce Springsteen Will Release Seven ‘Lost Albums’ in June

The singer and songwriter announced a boxed set featuring 83 songs, of which 74 have never been officially released in any form.

nytimes.com

Two blogs in a month 🙌🏼 — watch out for feature flag drift in your UI tests. aaron.alaniz.xyz/rollout-to-u...