davemo

I love XState. It has solved so many problems in quite a few codebases for me, most recently it has become the backbone of a voice app I'm building for the banking sector. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into making it great.

I blogged[0] a bit about my experience with Finite State Machines, and about the architecture we landed on with XState and Mastra (although since publishing we have swapped to Pipecat).

[0] - https://blog.davemo.com/posts/2026-02-14-deterministic-core-...

I've got a bunch of irons in the fire at the moment, most leveraging or built with agentic coding tools; my harness of choice these days is pi+codex.

- An internal apps platform built with bun, pg-boss, and railway

- A smart music setlist manager that downloads chord charts, creates spotify playlists, and automatically drafts emails with attachments and practice schedules

- A recruiting intelligence platform called Spotter that I built in a weekend[0]

- A voice-agent for a client in the banking sector, implementing deterministic workflows using openai realtime voice + finite state machines[1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOedMSddGDg

[1] https://blog.davemo.com/posts/2026-02-14-deterministic-core-...

Tommy drew a lot of inspiration from Chet Atkins who was really the pioneer of the bass+guitar "one hand band" style of playing. Tommy just improved on it a lot, adding more rhythmic elements, but to your point, yes, he was largely self-taught and driven to learn.

A good interview on his background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py4T1qv9bnQ

I swapped to Bazzite on my gaming rig (5800x3D, 64gb DDR4, 4080 Super 16gb) and it's been fantastic. I tried going with Omarchy for a bit to try and have that machine do double duty as a dev/gaming machine, but I felt like the gaming experience on Omarchy is a second-class citizen compared to what the Bazzite experience is optimizing for, and I realized that the Hyprland setup and tiling window manager adds a lot more friction for my normal gaming needs. (I just want to have a few Path of Exile 2 windows open to tab between while gaming, and the tiling window setup in Omarchy had me hitting more hiccups between fullscreen and windowed mode than I care to troubleshoot on my gaming rig).

Immutability in OS updates is also something I didn't know I needed until I experienced it on Bazzite; pretty advantageous as a gamer using Linux with nVidia hardware these days.

This is my second go around on Bazzite, YMMV but I opted for Gnome over KDE this time and have had zero issues running the games I am into (WoW, PoE2) and no funky window management issues that I seemed to run into with KDE.

I'm considering a move to a Framework machine in the very near future, and still need to settle on a distro for dev; most of that is done on an M3 Max Macbook these days.

I was an avid user of Pipes and blogged a bit about the experience of using it to build an aggregated set of feeds from various employee blogs to feed into our company site back in 2009 [0]. It holds a special place in my memory alongside early internet greats like del.icio.us [1]

- [0] https://blog.davemo.com/posts/2009-04-06-yahoo-pipes-at-vend...

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

I can appreciate the effort put into the goal of optimization shared in the post, even if I disagree with the conclusions. All of that effort would be much better directed at doing a manual (or LLM-assisted) audit of the E2E tests and choosing what to prune to reduce CI runtime.

DHH recently described[0] the approach they've taken at BaseCamp, reducing ~180 comprehensive-yet-brittle system tests down to 10 good-enough smoke tests, and it feels much more in spirit with where I would recommend folks invest effort: teams have way more tests than they need for an adequate level of confidence. Code and tests are a liability, and, to paraphrase Kent Beck[1], we should strive to write the minimal amount of tests and code to gain the maximal amount of confidence.

The other wrinkle here is that we're often paying through the nose in costs (complexity, actual dollars spent on CI services) by choosing to run all the tests all the time. It's a noble and worthy goal to figure out how not to do that, _but_, I think the conclusion shouldn't be to throw more $$$ into that money-pit, but rather just use all the power we have in our local dev workstations + trust to verify something is in a shippable state, another idea DHH covers[2] in the Rails World 2025 keynote; the whole thing is worth watching IMO.

[0] - https://youtu.be/gcwzWzC7gUA?si=buSEYBvxcxNkY6I6&t=1752

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/153234/how-deep-are-your...

[2] - https://youtu.be/gcwzWzC7gUA?si=9zL-xWG4FUxYZMC5&t=1977

Veni, Vidi, Vici

I submitted an application for w24 that fits in the "Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools" category but wasn't accepted. I suspect my pitch probably needed work, and I also haven't started building at all yet and submitted as a solo-founder which it seems has less chance of being accepted.

Here's the pitch and some details, in case anyone else is interested in the idea:

> Supportal uses AI to generate internal tooling for startups that enables founders to scale customer-support without having to rely on engineering resources.

> Given some simple input context like tech-stack and a database schema, Supportal uses AI to auto-generate internal tools which allow customer-support to easily answer questions about and take action on customer-data without needing help from an engineer.

> Supportal offers founders a fully-featured self or cloud-hosted web UI.

Retool (https://retool.com), Zapier (https://zapier.com), Airtable (https://www.airtable.com), Superblocks (https://www.superblocks.com), and Google AppSheet (https://about.appsheet.com) would likely be primary competitors, although their products require heavy user interaction to build internal tools either through composition in a WYSIWYG editor, low/no-code solutions, or integrations expertise using a full programming language.

Although I'm no longer there, we actually evaluated and/or used all of these tools at Pulley, so I've had first-hand experience with their friction and where the gaps exist that Supportal would fill.

These tools are also all targeted at integrations-experts who have the technical knowledge to write code and spend time building the tool they want.

Supportal aims to generate the tooling you need intelligently via AI introspection and get you up and running with useful command and query tools to help your customer-support team take action and gain insights without help from engineering right out of the box.

My most recent experience comes building internal tools for Pulley; I built the initial version of the internal tools in ~3 weeks and added features to it within Pulley over ~2 years. Roughly ~2-3 months of full-time work spread over that time period.

Features were added as we identified gaps in our support agents ability to answer questions and take action, which often required dedicated engineering resources to help with, leading to a productivity loss for both groups.

That said, I haven't actually built out anything that would _generate_ tools like this yet, but I've done enough adjacent work in the codegen/AI space in the last couple years that I feel confident I could put the pieces together.

Merry Christmas to all my fellow hackers! :]

This may be slightly tangential but I recently discovered ncc[1] from vercel which can take a single node project and compile it and all dependencies to a single file.

As an added benefit it also collapses all contained dependencies license files into a single licenses.txt file too!

- [1] https://github.com/vercel/ncc

I have a friend who is a mail-carrier (which I think is the most accurate gender-neutral term) for Canada Post. She refers to herself often as "postie" as well, and her co-workers as "posties". :]

It comes in waves. I'm in my 22nd year of developing software and I can reflect on times when I felt incredibly confident and didn't shy away from sharing my opinions, and other times when I felt like it was better to remain silent because I had things to learn from others.

There are times for both speaking and listening in our careers; as I've progressed further in my career I have felt it is often more valuable to exercise active listening.

I’m a lifelong musician who recently started diving into the world of audio production. I like most music genres and try to experiment with producing a little from each.

Here are a few of my recent tracks that I think turned out ok:

- Rush-inspired synthwave: https://soundcloud.com/dmosher/rushing-in

- Lo-fi jazz/hip-hop: https://soundcloud.com/dmosher/the-soggy-sunday-swing

I’ve got some more experimental stuff up on Bandcamp as well: https://davemo.bandcamp.com/

haha this was epic! thanks for sharing :D

I’ve been working on my music production skills with a learn monthly class from Andrew Huang. It’s been good to push myself into production; I have many years of live music experience but haven’t spent a lot of time recording.

I’d classify my style as synth wave meets 80s arena rock for the current track I’ve been working on :)

My learning path is here [0] and I’ve also been uploading works in progress to my soundcloud [1]

[0] https://learnmonthly.com/u/dave-mosher-e2bc26/andrew-huang-m...

[1] https://m.soundcloud.com/dmosher

The author addresses this in the OP:

"We later learned that Google’s gRPC Team was working on a gRPC-Web spec internally. Their approach was eerily similar to ours, and we decided to contribute our experiences to the upstream gRPC-Web spec (currently in early access mode, still subject to change)."

I suspect anyone attempting to adopt this implementation is going to hit similar issues until a release is finalized.

The quote in context is: "Husbands and wives may allow their partners to fill the role of best friend, letting other relationships fall by the wayside (something I’ve tried to actively resist)."

It seems the author is advising against forsaking other relationships and placing the entirety of the burden to supply all of our friendship needs on our significant other. I think there's wisdom in diversifying our relationship portfolio the same way we do with investments.

If you are interested in learning more about Flow check out the docs [1] and github repo [2].

[1] - http://flowtype.org/

[2] - https://github.com/facebook/flow

If you'd like to use React + JSX + CoffeeScript I built a little workflow [1] using Gulp that works pretty nicely; it takes advantage of the backtick character in coffeescript compilation to let you do cool things [2].

[1] - https://github.com/davemo/react-battleplanner/blob/battlepla...

[2] - https://github.com/davemo/react-battleplanner/blob/battlepla...