Ty Smith
@tysmith.me
Principal Engineer at Uber - AI, Dev Productivity, Mobile, & Open Source Advisor, Investor, Founder, GDE, Public Speaker & Open Source Foundations Formerly at Twitter (Fabric), Evernote. @tsmith from Twitter tysmith.me
At KotlinConf’25, @tysmith.me discussed the strategies and tooling implemented by his team at Uber to migrate millions of lines of Java code to Kotlin. Join us at KotlinConf’26 for even more insights, best practices, and deep dives! 👉 https://kotlinconf.com/ 👈
🎙️New episode alert! Hear @tysmith.me, Principal Engineer at Uber, talk his career path, the coming validation/observability crunch, and the rise of AI-driven development. Check it out here, or wherever you get your podcasts👇 bitdrift.io/podcast/beyo...
beyond the noise - Scaling Mobile at Uber: Ty Smith on Community, Toolchains, and the Next Dev Productivity Wave
Matt Klein sits down with Ty Smith, Principal Engineer at Uber and longtime Android community pillar, to trace a career from tinkering on a Pentium at age six to building at Uber scale. They discuss m...
bitdrift.io
GREAT example by Yuan Games is actually a fantastic example of what happens when you remove the obstacle that everyone thought was the biggest hurdle in building a game: needing to build a game engine Easier to build games… still very hard to build great games!
Gen Z with their hip email signatures like "Would you like a slightly more persuasive version or one that sounds even more casual?"
The video for using Agents, LLMs, and LSC techniques to migrate Java to Kotlin for Uber's Android apps from @kotlinconf.com is now public. www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PN... #Kotlinconf
Large Scale Changes with AI – Migrating millions of lines of Java to Kotlin at Uber | Ty Smith
YouTube video by Kotlin by JetBrains
youtube.com
🚀 The Kotlin Foundation Annual Report 2024 is here! 🔹 2.5M+ developers coding in Kotlin 🔹 $182K+ invested in ecosystem growth 🔹 Student contests, grants and open-source contributions Check out the full report to learn more and see what’s next! 👇 📖 kotlinfoundation.org/news/annual-...
The Kotlin Foundation Annual Report 2024
Kotlin Foundation – protect, promote and advance the development of the Kotlin programming language.
kotlinfoundation.org
@tysmith.me had some fantastic predictions. He has a front seat view at how engineering is changing in real time, given his influential role at Uber. You'll find his thoughts here - jetpackcomposeapp.beehiiv.com/p/dispatch-i... Not available in the main site yet so use this link in the meantime
Dispatch Issue #11 - "Future of Android" Special
💌 In today's issue, we talk to some Android experts and hear from them about their hot-takes, predictions, wishes and advice about how they expect the Android ecosystem to change and how to best prepa...
jetpackcomposeapp.beehiiv.com
Ty Smith@tysmith.me · 2y agoThanks for including my insights on the future of Android in the latest issue of Dispatch, @vinaygaba.bsky.social ! www.jetpackcompose.app/newsletter
Thanks for including my insights on the future of Android in the latest issue of Dispatch, @vinaygaba.bsky.social ! www.jetpackcompose.app/newsletter
JetpackCompose.app's Dispatch: Get Smart About Android & Jetpack Compose
Keeping up with the Android Development landscape can be hard. Dispatch makes it easy, entertaining and rewarding. It's a newsletter that delivers just the bytes that matter.
jetpackcompose.app
Some great opportunities to push the Kotlin ecosystem forward in this year's Google Summer of Code with Kotlin. Several will have you working closely with my team. kotlinlang.org/docs/gsoc-20...
Google Summer of Code with Kotlin 2025 | Kotlin
kotlinlang.org
I was at @evernote.bsky.social when they started migrating to React Native in 2018. Against all advice from tech leads the SVP of engineering (coming from Amazon) pushed through. The quality of the Android app went downhill over the years not only performance wise.
** It's happening!! ** We managed to convince Google to open source PebbleOS. Took a while, but they just did it today! github.com/google/pebble With that, we're bringing Pebble back! I blogged about it - ericmigi.com/blog/why-wer...
Why We’re Bringing Pebble Back
Eight years later, you still can’t beat a Pebble
ericmigi.com
Calling for Kotlin for Server-Side Content Creators blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/... #KotlinServerSide
Kotlin for Server-Side Content Creators | The Kotlin Blog
Calling all Kotlin for server-side developers! Share your articles, videos, or projects with #KotlinServerSide, and let us help amplify your work.
blog.jetbrains.com
There are 21 million Black people in the US. Fewer than 6% of us earn over $100K a year. The median net worth of Black households fluctuates between about $20K and $40K, depending on how much scamming happens that year (eg crypto, asset forfeiture). Black. People. Are. The. Working. Class.
More to say on burnout and I'm probably going to boost it a few times because folks need to hear it: Burnout is a form of brain damage. It happens when stress conditions persist until they damage our brains. It's an injury that needs to heal, not a weakness that needs to be pushed through.
Annalee@flowerhorne.com · 2y agoMan burnout can mess you up for a very long time. And it can sneak up on you: things can seem stressful but mostly manageable until suddenly they're not manageable. Self care and vacation are great, but they're guardrails: they don't help when you've already fallen in.
Benchmarking can be tricky! In this blog post, I show an example of how easy it is to get the wrong results and how to fix it: www.romainguy.dev/posts/2024/y...
You Are Going to Need It
Optimizing code can be a difficult task because there are so many traps you need to avoid at every step of the way. Today I want to focus on one of the (numerous) benchmarking traps, which you may hav...
romainguy.dev
Will I understand Luigi's Manifesto if I haven't played Luigi's Mansion?
Of course archive.org has it and the worse offender is … United Healthcare. archive.is/czb76
archive.is
I’m building out Uber's first dedicated Kotlin Language platform team in our Amsterdam office to make Kotlin first class across Bazel, IDE, LSPs, Android, KMP, AI language migrations, backend services, and to help in our Kotlin Foundation particiption. Apply here: www.uber.com/careers/list...
Staff Software Engineer, Kotlin - Amsterdam, Netherlands | Uber Careers
Apply to the Staff Software Engineer, Kotlin position on the Uber Engineering team, based out of the Uber Amsterdam, Netherlands office.
uber.com
Traveling in Japan and still incredibly annoyed that Google doesn’t enable FeliCa for Pixel phones sold outside of Japan, even though the hardware exists and can be used under root. Brought my test iPhone just for easy Suica cards in Apple Pay. github.com/jjyao88/unlo...
GitHub - jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel: Unlock Felica on non-Japanese Pixel devices that you can use Felica cards in Japan!
Unlock Felica on non-Japanese Pixel devices that you can use Felica cards in Japan! - jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel
github.com
This is so on point. So many use cases are barely working reliably (if that) with state of the art models and non-deterministic operations makes testing a beast. I cannot begin to imagine trying to build apps on anything that's not top of the line.
Corey Quinn@quinnypig.com · 2y agoThe first bullet point is "it's cheaper." That only matters once you've built something successfully and need to scale it. First, you need to figure out whether a thing is even possible, THEN you figure out how to optimize the economics, generally speaking.
@danabra.mov the Bluesky language translate experience isn't super great right now. I assume you're trying to avoid Google translate api costs by forcing a web link. Consider the MLKit translate SDKs (free and on device translations) and then do web fallback. developers.google.com/ml-kit/langu...
Translation | ML Kit | Google for Developers
developers.google.com
Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty Red Team: We replaced it with decaf.
Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist@nameshiv.bsky.social · 2y agooptimist: the cup is half full pessimist: the cup is half empty me: which one of you bastards drank half my coffee
Personally, 2024 was finally the year of Linux on the desktop. After years of dual booting (mostly for gaming), I've been running Universal Blue images (atomic distro based on Fedora Silverblue) all year without issue. Modern game tech, enthusiast hardware, & game compat on launch are pretty good.
Universal Blue - Powered by the future, delivered today
Universal Blue is a diverse set of images using Fedora Atomic's OCI support as a delivery mechanism. That's nerdspeak for the ultimate Linux client!
universal-blue.org
The video recording from my DPE Summit talk is now out and covers some of the cool AI Developer Productivity work we're doing. dpe.org/sessions/ty-...
This Year in Uber’s AI-Driven Developer Productivity Revolution | DPE Summit 2024
Presented by Ty Smith and Adam Huda (Uber) at DPE Summit 2024, an event developed and hosted by Gradle.
dpe.org
Not true—no data ever showed Twitter’s character limit had any impact on literacy. We analyzed this deeply in 2015. Despite having a 1k limit, the average Facebook post was far shorter than 140 chars :) The limit increase was for use-case expansion, not fixing something broken most users.
Being Liberal ®🗽🏳️🌈@beingliberal.bsky.social · 2y agoLet's talk about the Blueskye's 300 character limit - it continues to make us dumber. It can be argued that Twitter's 280-character limit (initially 140 characters) had negative impact on literacy. Reading multiple threads on Twitter always sucked.. How TF one can post a thread here?
Had a friend explain their political stance following the election as going from vocal liberal to American Nihilist. "They voted for this, time to let them see how bad it'll get. I'm too exhausted from fighting against the tide for so long." I wouldn't be surprised if that's a new normal.
