Hi, I’m Tom.

I just listened to ThePrimeagen talk about “Meta’s Crime Empire,” and there was a number I can’t unhear: 10% of Facebook’s 2024 ad revenue—$16 billion—came from scams. Not indirectly. Not accidentally. Directly. From scam ads. An internal team investigated, escalated the worst offenders, and presented them all the way up the chain. Leadership looked at the findings… …and kept many of the scam ads running. Because they did a cost–benefit analysis and realized something horrifying: ...

Last week I applied to 10 jobs. One rejected me. The other nine will probably never say anything at all. And weirdly… that is what finally pushed me to change my entire strategy. First, let me be clear: there is something wrong with the market. Ghost jobs are real. Getting ghosted is real. Broken processes are real. I have the receipts. I have been tracking every direct application in a spreadsheet (this does not even include recruiter-led processes): ...

Every few years, a PHP RFC comes along that’s interesting enough to make me pause—and ask a simple question: Is this actually solving a problem we can’t already solve? The new Context Managers RFC introduces a using keyword intended to mimic Python’s with statement. It aims to make resource handling cleaner by automatically running setup and teardown code around a scoped block. Here’s the motivating example from the RFC. Today, you write something like: ...

The programming interview is completely broken in 2025 A few weeks ago, I got invited to a screening interview that was completely automated. No human interaction. Just a timer and a problem. Fine—it’s screening, I get it. This is common now. I open it up and the problem is simple: merge and sort two arrays. Okay, that’s easy. Two lines of code. I was using PHP, but it’d be the same in any language. ...

AI did not give me my writing voice. It just helped me finally hear it clearly. People assume the hardest part of writing is the words. It is not. The hardest part is the quiet humiliation of thinking something deeply, believing it matters, writing it down… and then being too afraid to share it. For most of my life, that fear won. I have always had ideas. Not trendy ideas or manufactured ideas, but the kind of thoughts that stay with you for years because they refuse to leave. Evergreen thoughts. Stable beliefs. Recurring frustrations. Things I have been turning over in my head since I was a teenager. ...

System design interviews used to be my favorite part of the full-stack engineering hiring process. They were the one place where senior engineers—the ones who actually understood how the internet worked, how data flowed, how systems behaved under pressure—could shine. And the best part was always the format: just two engineers talking through a problem, asking questions, exploring constraints, and stress-testing each other’s ideas. Exactly how real system design happens in the real world. ...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been brushing up on LeetCode to prepare for interviews. And something happened that I genuinely didn’t expect: I was enjoying myself. I was getting that old hit—the “holy shit, it works” dopamine spike I haven’t felt during my day-to-day work in years. Maybe a decade. That feeling didn’t come from my job. It didn’t come from a product I’m building. It didn’t come from shipping a ticket or closing a Jira task. ...

Every startup divides equity based on contribution. A technical co-founder might get half the company because they build the product. A business co-founder might get half because they handle distribution, sales, partnerships—the work that actually puts the product in front of customers. Even early employees get meaningful ownership when they take on responsibilities that directly create value. Equity, in other words, matches contribution. You give up a piece of your company when someone takes on a core function of it. ...