https://www.bitlog.com Jake Voytko's personal log of bits en-us Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:42:42 -0400 https://www.bitlog.com/2026/04/23/experimenting-with-youtube-shorts/ https://www.bitlog.com/2026/04/23/experimenting-with-youtube-shorts/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:42:42 -0400 I made my first YouTube short, and I learned a lot about the format. You can watch it . I'm not going to embed it because the YouTube embedding payload is like a megabyte, which is bigger than the entire rest of my blog. So click the link and go watch it. As usual, my... youtube https://www.bitlog.com/2026/03/16/we-havent-adapted-teams-to-the-magic-wand-yet/ https://www.bitlog.com/2026/03/16/we-havent-adapted-teams-to-the-magic-wand-yet/ Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:12 -0400 This does not reflect the opinion of my employer TL;DR: we are DDoSing each other with code reviews, but it doesn't have to be this way. Software engineering was solved until about last year. More or less. Most projects got finished. We know which roles to hire and what levels they should be. We even... software-engineering https://www.bitlog.com/2026/02/28/claude-code-is-a-great-dad-side-project-environment/ https://www.bitlog.com/2026/02/28/claude-code-is-a-great-dad-side-project-environment/ Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:24:29 -0500 I finally did it. I moved my blog off of Wordpress. It's running on a Go server on a small Digital Ocean droplet. Why now? Because side projects are fun again. I'm excited about software engineering for the first time in about 15 years. Agentic coding is so new and unsolved! And even better, now... blog https://www.bitlog.com/2026/01/04/2025-year-in-review/ https://www.bitlog.com/2026/01/04/2025-year-in-review/ Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:24:09 +0000 Professional year in review I got a lot done professionally in 2025. For most of the year, I was a backend engineer on the recommendations team at Hinge. We started the year by rolling out my big 2024 project, which was adding Elasticsearch to power new candidate generators in Hinge's recommender. The initial launch was... uncategorized https://www.bitlog.com/2024/01/02/2023-year-in-review-interviewing-for-jobs-with-a-baby-on-the-way/ https://www.bitlog.com/2024/01/02/2023-year-in-review-interviewing-for-jobs-with-a-baby-on-the-way/ Tue, 02 Jan 2024 17:26:14 +0000 Our daughter set the pace for the entire year. Even before her birth! We needed to prepare for her arrival. It turns out that babies don't take up much space, so our 1-bedroom apartment was fine for the year. But kids require lots of support items, so we needed to buy and install storage. This... review https://www.bitlog.com/2021/11/16/seven-steps-to-writing-a-better-software-engineering-resume/ https://www.bitlog.com/2021/11/16/seven-steps-to-writing-a-better-software-engineering-resume/ Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:18:48 +0000 Over the past few years, I've reviewed lots of resumes for friends and former coworkers. I've also reviewed resumes from strangers, like on Twitter, . I've been told that my reviews are helpful, so I'm documenting my approach, which focuses on whether the resume is a good fit for the job that the candidate wants.... software-engineering https://www.bitlog.com/2020/12/31/2020-year-in-review-living-in-interesting-times/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/12/31/2020-year-in-review-living-in-interesting-times/ Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:07:31 +0000 TL;DR: Holy shit. Health First, the pandemic. I have not contracted COVID-19 and I don't know anybody who died from it. I know people who were infected by the virus, but they've all turned out okay. I've been lucky so far. I was tested in December because I had a fever and a cough. Thankfully... review https://www.bitlog.com/2020/06/28/i-used-hey-for-a-week-but-im-going-back-to-gmail/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/06/28/i-used-hey-for-a-week-but-im-going-back-to-gmail/ Sun, 28 Jun 2020 23:19:08 +0000 I've been trying alternatives to Google services lately. No offense to Google. I just used their services uncritically for years. Now I want to evaluate them against their competitors. For example, Basecamp released HEY recently. It is a privacy-focused email client that aims to give power back to the user. This sounded like something that... review https://www.bitlog.com/2020/06/17/finish-something-every-day/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/06/17/finish-something-every-day/ Wed, 17 Jun 2020 11:15:40 +0000 When you write code in an engineering organization, you will do the following: Type the code out. Test some of it. Hell, maybe you'll test all of it. Get someone to review the code. Push it to source control. These items aren't discrete or ordered. Test-driven development and pair programming are practices that reorder or... business industry https://www.bitlog.com/2020/05/18/the-multi-year-process-of-getting-promoted-to-staff-software-engineer/ https://www.bitlog.com/2020/05/18/the-multi-year-process-of-getting-promoted-to-staff-software-engineer/ Mon, 18 May 2020 13:05:33 +0000 Note: these are my thoughts, and not the thoughts of my employer. I wasn't interested in promotions for most of my career. I had a simple reason: I didn't want the jobs that promotions would give me. They would have made me unhappy. But then I joined Etsy four years ago. This put me in... business