Jake Voytko's personal log of bits
To any afflicted CEO in my readership: I want to cure your AI psychosis. ⚠️ First, a disclaimer ⚠️ This post does not discuss legitimate medical issues; I'm not a doctor and none of this is medical advice. Talk to a real medical doctor if your mental health is in question. As a quick aside,...
Software quality is obviously getting worse. I'm not talking about LLM slop features nobody asked for. I'm not talking about services collapsing under unprecedented LLM-powered demand. Companies are obviously shipping user-visible bugs at an accelerating rate. And consequently, the software we are using is getting worse and worse. As a quick aside, I'm experimenting with...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...