Blog posts by Bryce Osterhaus
Slowing Down in the Age of AI A few months back, I found myself deep into a bunch of different tasks. The hum of productivity as I jumped between worktrees, each with its own agent, or sometimes even multiple agents, working away. My tooling setup was dialed in. On paper, I felt more productive than ever. My commit numbers and LOC were at an all-time high, and I was shipping more than ever.…
My Current Tooling Setup I have written about AI and coding a few times now. I have written about AI and tooling , AI and offloading critical thinking , why AI still struggles to refactor code , and why I still think process matters . This post is less of a argument and sort of just a checkpoint. Tooling is changing so fast because of AI and I think it will be interesting to keep track over time…
12 Years at Liferay I’ve decided to switch jobs and move to a new company. Before moving on, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my career here and look back on my journey. The average tenure at a single company for a software engineer is ~2 years. It's often recommended that you jump companies every 2-3 years so that you can maximize your salary. I've even seen some people recommend that you…
Process Still Matters It feels like the hype-cycle of AI is never going to end. If you've been online at all in the last year, especially in the twitter-sphere, it feels like its a never ending flood of AI and new world-altering claims. "Software engineering is done as we know it" "Writing 20k LOC a day now" "Clawdbot(aka moltbot aka openclaw) is now doing automating 90% of my life", On and on and…
Thought for the day... I am a big believer in tools. Like most developers, I'm willing to spend a 8 hours building a tool that solves a 5 minute annoyance. I've been thinking a bit differently about tooling lately though, particularly, who will consume and use the tool interface. For my entire career, tools have been aimed at human consumption, provide an app or a CLI and the user can interact…
The Best Advice I Ever Received "Strong Opinions Weakly Held" The best advice I ever received in my career was during my internship. I was a recent graduate and trying to learn my way into a full-time job. It was the first conversation I can remember with my boss, Nate Cavanaugh, and I had proposed using JQuery over YUI because I thought I knew what I was talking about(I didn't). Nate patiently…
A Decade with React: From v0.14 to Today I didn’t start with React because it was cool or popular. I started because I needed something that could handle a really interactive web app at work back in 2015. At the time, I’d been building interfaces with YUI and maintaining AlloyUI(layer on top of YUI). Those frameworks taught me a lot about interactivity and the UI, but they often felt heavy and…
Building @bryceo/me, a TUI for my personal website I've been really interested in finding an excuse to learn more about TUIs and specifically have been wanting to use OpenTUI . Since I have been recently revamping and working on my personal site for fun, I thought it would be interesting to create a TUI to browse information typically found on my personal website. I had previously created a simple…
The Future is Fast: Smarter Caching for Liferay DXP Sharing a talk/demo I gave with a colleague for Liferay Devcon 2025 in Madrid, Spain. Highlighted how we made Liferay DXP significantly faster with new cacheing strategies for JS and CSS resources.
Why can't AI refactor my code? Why is it that AI really struggles to refactor my code? AI has been great a generating new code, especially in green-field projects, but for existing code it has been a headache to use it for refactors. A simple example I ran into this week was trying to use AI to address some ESlint errors I had. I was merging one mono-repo into another and I needed to run lint to…
I Tried Neovim Again... This is the third or fourth time I've tried Neovim and each time I just still can't get it to stick. I wan't to like it and I wan't to be proficient with it, but it just doesn't seem to work for me. Each time I have tried, I am able to use it a bit longer. First time I probably lasted one day, second time and third time maybe two days, and lastly this time I've been able to…
AI and Offloading Critical Thinking To be up front, I lean torwards the critical side of AI. Not because I think it is worthless or because I'm afraid it'll steal my job. I'm a bit critical of it because of the cycle and noise around it. It seems like every week there is a new model that is tauted to take your job, or a new Editor that can one-shot a million dollar company. The cycle of hype is…
Rebuilding the Hatch Having a baby means you probably have a sound-machine. When that baby grows into a toddler, that means you likely also have things break pretty often and being an engineer means I am always fixing these broken things. Our Hatch, an IoT device for white noise and night light, broke a few months ago. The device wouldn't turn on at all, regardless if it was on battery or plugged…
Kindle Notes Reminders I like to read, and I enjoy marking up and highlighting the books I read. However, I almost exclusively read on Kindle over the last 5 years and the most challenging part of Kindle for me is the "discoverability" of things I have highlighted. Previously with physical books, you could pick it up and easily thumb through the pages and find the highlights that you put in there.…
Categorizing Amazon Purchases with Playwright In today's age, it feels like I use Amazon for all purchases, ranging from foaming hand soap to a new pair of shoes and my biggest headache with Amazon is that every purchase processed by my bank is just listed as "Amazon". I am a budgetting adovcate, and so when my bank syncs to my budgetting tool(YNAB), all I see are a bunch of "Amazon" transactions…
Why even bother blogging? What's the point of me starting to blog? If I'm honest, I'm not entirely sure. I likely won't have any new discoveries or profound insights. I'm not the best writer. I'm not necessarily an expert in any niche category. I'm probably not gonna make any splashes of profundity. But, maybe it'll help me be a better writer? I see this as a start to challenge myself a bit in the…