He thinks about developer experience as a kind of systems engineering. SST is the artifact, but the way he talks about it on streams is the real material.

“The best abstractions are the ones you can replace in an afternoon.”

Tools that feel inevitable in retrospect. The discipline of shipping small, sharp libraries — unocss, vitest, slidev — is a craft I keep trying to learn.

“If a tool is annoying enough to use that you write a wrapper, ship the wrapper.”

Loud takes, but the underlying engineering judgment is sound. The yearly stack videos are an honest accounting of what changed and what did not.

“The framework you pick matters less than the boundary between your code and the framework.”

Writes the kind of documentation that you wish came with every framework — narrative, specific, opinionated where it counts.

“Boring deploys are a feature.”

An ongoing demonstration that one PHP file and a domain is enough to start. The opposite of my usual instincts, which is why I keep paying attention.

“Ship before you are ready. Refactor only when something is bringing in money.”

A Philosophy of Software Design is the book I quote at code reviews. He treats complexity as the enemy with a precision most working engineers do not.

“Modules should be deep — small interface, large implementation.”

The clearest technical writing on the internet. Every zine I have read has changed how I explain something the following week.

“If you cannot draw it on an index card, you do not understand it yet.”

The patron saint of running the boring thing in production. His talks have aged better than almost any other engineering talks I have rewatched.

“If you cannot operate it on a Sunday morning, do not deploy it on a Friday afternoon.”