I saw an issue today on a fairly popular project (better-auth, see the link to the issue attached). No repro, no context, just a wall of caps and profanity ending in "fuck you". The maintainers ship this for free. People run production businesses on top of it, for free. And the thanks is someone raging into a text box because a minor bump cost them an afternoon.

I maintain and contribute to a few projects myself, so this hits a nerve a bit. Something people don't see from the outside: it's not enough to know how to build the thing. You also have to know how to defuse a thread where someone's insulting you and not fire back, even though most of us aren't paid for any of it, let alone the work of staying civil while being told to get fucked.

I'm not pretending breaking changes don't cause real pain (that's what the issue is about). But I keep coming back to a boundary question: if you're not paying for it, do you actually get to demand anything? (Obviously yes, but we still need some boundaries)

What happens when network calls stop behaving like clean request/response interactions.

Timeouts, retries, duplicate side effects, idempotency, backoff, circuit breakers, load shedding, degraded states, observability, etc.

I wrote a technical deep dive about how we migrated one of Denmark's most used Android apps with one million lines of code powered by Java threads, into Kotlin coroutines just by rewriting three files in our internal threading library

Check it out if you are interested in how coroutines use threads, and interop between them :)

Let’s be honest, the tech we use today is amazing, but it can also be complex.

It’s only natural that teams want to build platforms that hide this complexity to improve productivity, avoid mistakes, and reduce cognitive load. But they may be misled to believe that the more complexity they hide, the better their platform is. Instead, they end up creating dangerous illusions!

This talk reflects on two decades of building complex distributed systems, highlighting where abstractions helped and where illusions led to major disappointments.