Sarah™️

@ladybluenotes.dev

I write code and explore hobbies with a curiosity that refuses to debug itself senior SWE @ microsoft oss → @solidjs.com @tanstack.com she/her → https://github.com/LadyBluenotes

Big week: we officially moved into our new NY office 🗽 Now the fun part begins. I'm starting to build our engineering team from the ground up, and we're looking for talented software engineers who get excited about hard problems, tight loops, and shipping real things fast.

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i've been reflecting a lot lately on how so much of getting better as a developer doesn't show up in your commit history. it takes months and has no real PR/ artifact to show for it until one day you just... notice you got better at something. wrote a post on it: sarahgerrard.me/posts/slow-p...

The Slow Parts of Getting Better - Sarah Gerrard

Most of the growth that matters as a developer happens slowly and invisibly — building mental models, learning to articulate what you know, getting better at reasoning about tradeoffs. This post is ab...

sarahgerrard.me

And with that, so ends my last day w Astro Docs. So proud of the docs our community made, & honoured I had the chance to lead them. Open to new adventures in docs/community. If you liked learning, using, or contributing to Astro...maybe some of that was me! Maybe I can bring that to your project!

👋 my recent contracts have ended (and my buffer’s running a bit thin) so I’m looking for what’s next spent the last year focused on OSS work, which I’ve loved, and now open to new opportunities! if you’re looking for a dev, pls to reach out! I've shared more about how I work below 🫡

Introducing TanStack Hotkeys! Setting up keyboard shortcuts is supposed to be easy and only take a few lines of code, right? Well, there are enough small "gotchas" that can eventually add up to an annoying amount of complexity. TanStack Hotkeys aims to simplify the edge cases and bring type-safety

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Lately I’ve been more aware of how much of engineering is decided before the code exists. It's shaped by things like the questions we ask or any assumptions we make. Even the tradeoffs that we don't really write down...

Very excited to announce that I have joined @powersync.com as a Developer Relations Engineer! Sync Engines are the future of app development on every platform, not just the web, and provide a necessary abstraction for AI applications and agentic engineers.

I've always been aware that regex is slower than for loops but seeing just how much slower it is with a benchmark is kind of crazy. Regex -> 13 mill ops/s For loop -> over 33 mill ops/s

this whole balancing act of everything i want to do is getting to be difficult there's the coding i want (need?) to do, the games i want to play, then ofc the stuff for health like going to the gym, cooking, swimming, sleeping, etc. they're all competing sos

There are some great people, @yanthomas.dev included, looking for their next adventure! Oh hey, and me included, too! I'm not in a rush, but keeping my eye out for the right opportunity in docs or community leadership. If you've liked using or contributing to Astro, maybe part of that came from me!

Yan@yanthomas.dev · 6mo ago

The part of the team that worked full-time under The Astro Technology company did join Cloudflare -- and we are all happy for them! But, the overall Astro team is bigger: some of us worked as contractors or voluntarily, and currently depend on the very hard-to-get OSS sponsorships.

Using AI felt clunky whenever I reached for it. I’d tweak prompts, add guardrails, repeat myself, and things still felt brittle. Prompts got longer, outputs varied, and it was hard to tell what actually caused a failure. What helped was realizing I was using prompts as a configuration system.