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Video content creators who are not native in English: do you record in English or your native language? Why that choice? I'm battling with myself if I should continue with my TikTok creator journey in Polish (it's been going pretty well!) or switch to English - way bigger audience, but I don't know how it'll go.

I've been nomading for 5 years now, so I thought I'll share my very biased favorites in a few categories. 🧘 Best chill and do nothing besides work & enjoying life: 🇮🇩 Ubud, Bali It's got awesome coworking spaces, Balinese people are wonderful, and if you're riding your own scooter it's super easy to be in the wild without crowds. Did I mention the overwhelming number of awesome brunch spots? 🚶‍♂️‍➡️ Best work & hike every day with good weather: 🇵🇹 Madeira That was our first nomad spot 5 years ago, and it holds a special place in my heart cause that's where we engaged! It's a small island and there's always a good weather somewhere, plenty of hikes and epic views, it's hard to count how many miles we walked in a month. 🏙️ Best cities: 🇫🇷 Paris 🇬🇧 London 🇺🇸 NYC Hard to choose between these 3 cities, but they're definitely my favorite concrete jungles. Paris for its one-and-only vibe that's nowhere else, London for being so multi-cultural and diverse that you feel like you're in the world's capital city, and I guess NYC for being the American version of how I feel about London. ⭐️ Best overall: 🇦🇺 Sydney It's most aligned with what I want in my life - city, nature and people; great breakfast and coffee, lots of beaches, diving and nature, a lot of fit people waking up early. I could move there if it wasn't so far away from all my friends and family. Australia please move closer. And an honorable mention goes to Taipei 🇹🇼 We've spent there only 2 weeks and definitely want to come back for more, I feel like it's a hidden gem nomads don't talk about. Delicious food, close to beautiful nature, and great culture. Curious about your picks, please share! 😊

Substack joined our supported channels last week and we're already seeing some great usage! Personally, I can't wait to try it out, I'm getting tired of LI alghoritms - you're almost never rewarded for long, educational content. Shitposting does a better job usually. And it's definitely not my style 😅 Substack, here I come! https://lnkd.in/e7_Cx8rV

AI loves to add helpful comments that become epic poems of its own sort: making the code much longer, and essentially duplicating what the code/function name already describes perfectly. Every time you see it as a reviewer, you should question it. Do you need to know that it's a real unlock and how things are byte for byte identical on the load bearing path? ❌️ Is it necessary to have 20 lines of comments for 2 lines of code? ❌️ Do you need comments about why the code is no longer there, while it was never there in the first place on main branch? ❌️

AI is here to stay, and I do use it daily in my software engineering job - so much that I haven't written a single line of code probably in months. If you're using AI, you probably know it's crazy fast when it comes to producing. But there's a thing that worries me which is a producer-consumer disparity. What I mean by it is the fact that it’s easier than ever to produce anything, sometimes it takes almost no time compared to a few years ago. At the same time, we consume way more of everything, so much everything gets created and thrown at us. The thing is - consuming didn’t become as easy as it did with producing. You have to try to be empathetic, and value the time that consumers of your product give you. AI should help both producers/creators and receivers/reviewers, saving time on both sides, and benefiting both sides. But now it's often that AI seems to be helping mostly producers/creators, while placing a huge load and extra time on receivers/reviewers -> only one side benefits in short-term, but ultimately both lose. We have to take a conscious effort to fight that, so that we're all able to benefit from it, and the only thing for that is giving critical feedback.

"Hardcore work ethic" in a job description followed by Meet the Team with the first person working multiple weekends in a row. Never 🚩 It's rare that a recruiter's email interests me, but it actually happened this week cause the salary was 50% higher than what I make now. After a quick research though, no way I'm replacing my stable position with wonderful team with what's attached in screenshots. It's actually barely the same hourly if you calculate my normal weekly hours compared to what's expected here! I like having life. Red flag on a red flag on a red flag 😅 We're hiring engineers at @Buffer btw if you'd like to keep your sanity in check! https://buffer.com/journey

I needed a small break from content creation, somehow I lost my drive. But I'm back now, and promise to reply to comments! In this new AI age, I think another important thing to mention is - you'll never see any AI-generated post by me here. It's important for me to train my writing habit as myself, never outsource it, and to mention it transparently. I think it deserves a re-introduction. Hi! I’m Arek. I’ve been coding for about 18 years, which officially makes me an adult programmer. Ten of those years were commercial experience, the other eight were me breaking my parents’ computers and pretending it was "for learning purposes." Right now I work at Buffer - fully remote, fully distributed, and running on a four day workweek, which is basically a cheat code for life. Thanks to that I travel quite a bit as a digital nomad, although Warsaw is still my home base (and the place where I keep the cables I don’t need but refuse to throw away). Before Buffer I worked at Facebook (Meta, technically, but it's hard to make a switch) and Lufthansa. I also freelanced for a few years with international clients, which means I’ve experienced every timezone mismatch possible. If you ever want my take on things like: 🧑‍💻 building an IT career 🧑‍💻 working remotely or surviving a four day workweek 🧑‍💻 digital nomad life 🧑‍💻 freelancing without losing your sanity 🧑‍💻 or anything about engineering in general Just drop a comment. I love sharing my experiences!

Check out my new article: Installing WordPress without opening a browser https://wp.arekpanek.com/installing-wordpress-without-opening-a-browser/ This will help you understand WordPress better! And this one syncs!

Perfect combo on the week with a hackathon!

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I hope Europe will finally start acting in AI and join the races, otherwise it gets us in a big disadvantage. Another hope is that Chinese models will get on par with frontline American models. After so many US-generated problems for Europe and the transatlantic alliance, I'm actively cheering the development of AI on the other side of the world. Distillation of American models by Chinese companies? I don't care, it's American models that were first trained on stolen data.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law. Even with AI.

I was quite tired with the amount of maintenance work I had to handle last months and started to reflect on where it's coming from (not AI!), and analyzing how it looks like across the team. I'm here at Buffer for 5 years, other engineers handling similar load are at 7 and 10+ years. The question that's forming: are we paying the tenure task? Do you think the amount of pings in different incidents, maintenance tasks, critical decisions to make is just a given with the context you accrue in so many years? Curious to hear other engineers thoughts on that, and how you're dealing with that tenure tax 💰️

This week I'll cross 5 years employed at @Buffer. Bear with me, I'll share some more interesting reflections than "If someone told me I'd stay here for so long, I'd have never believed." You realize you're an adult when you know you have to choose between things and make informed decisions that impact your whole future life. "Should I study law or computer science?", and so on. For me, 5 years ago, the choice was as follows: 👉 continue career in Big Tech, maybe swap employer (Warsaw is an awesome Big Tech hub!) and continue climbing the career ladder aiming for Staff+ roles, possibly move to Bay Area to work with the best of the best 👉 find fully remote and distributed company with a great culture, and go after my life goals of traveling a lot, working with awesome people who want the best for me, and enjoy the flexibility It wasn't an easy choice. It's still not - I get tens of recruiter messages from Big Tech and hyper growth startups. Some of them pay more than I make now ($174,600 as of writing this post). However, Buffer nailed the retention of employees (can you believe that about 50% of employees are at Buffer longer than I am with my 5 years?), because it's not only the salary that matters. I literally designed my whole life around what possibilities I have thanks to working at such a company. We work 4 days a week and I make maximum use of my 3-day weekends when I travel for 6 months each year. We're encouraged to work on our side-projects, instead of having it forbidden. The culture is genuinely amazing, and it's one of the very few companies where you don't have to stress out about interacting with anyone. I could probably be staff-level at some other company and on my way for L6+. I could work at the most recognizable companies. I could work on technically challenging problems in greenfield areas. But it's not the only thing that matters - you spend 1/3rd of your life at work, so it's better if it makes you happy and doesn't interfere with the other 2/3rds - and if it does, then only in the positive way. Would I like to be paid more? Well, who wouldn't? But money is only one type of wealth, and staying at Buffer allows me to not worry about financial future and focus on other types of wealth (physical, mental, social, and time), too. If you want to retain your employees, you don't have to pay more than everyone in the market. It's enough if you're top of the market and offer other benefits that make it stupid to leave. To another 5 (and many more) years! 🎉

Just launched #BufferAPI on Product Hunt, all votes and comments welcome! 🙏 https://lnkd.in/eKy3PpnK

Today, now, we've just launched #BufferAPI 🚀 including CLI and MCP so you can build anything you need as a creator in the AI era! Cannot wait to see all the cool things people will build with it, so many ideas everywhere. If you want to start building, visit https://lnkd.in/e9t6Sf-V

We've just launched #BufferAPI and I couldn't be more excited to see what the world builds with it. As a newbie creator I'm already using it in plenty of my personal projects, the first one being a live feed of my social content embedded into my personal website. Not everyone uses social media, so it's a gateway for these people to check my shorter thoughts and reflections I usually share on socials! And then the other, way more complex - I was wondering what could I possibly use personal agents like OpenClaw for. And then a realization came - I'm always looking for content ideas, why shouldn't I automate it? So, my bot checks all my newsletters I'm subscribing to, my past content I already published, in the future probably comments I got on my posts to distill ten ideas a week for me to post about, based on all the data. Definitely not allowing it to prepare any content itself (I like my voice!), but the topic research is a big thing! Let me know if you'd like to discuss any of those, or if you've got some cool, crazy ideas on how to use Buffer API to help you on your creator journey!

2 days to go for our biggest launch of the year! I've got to admit - I wasn't sure if it's the best thing we should focus on when we were first discussing it a long time ago, but the tech landscape changed so much across the last year that I couldn't have described it better than: right in the bulls-eye! 🎯 Also, it brings so much fun to work on all my personal side-projects using the API, I cannot wait to see what the world will build with it, starting in just 2 days! #BufferAPI

That feeling when you had a 3-month long queue of scheduled posts at @Buffer but it's running out soon and you have to find some time to refill it to keep your consistency. Please send prayers.

If you work with Node.js, have you ever wondered why enterprises don't choose it? It's an interesting thing when you reflect on it, and I've encountered an interesting take on Reddit, spicy but true! It's mostly due to the lack of official and long-term support SDK & libraries. When you take C#, it's got an official lib for pretty much everything. In Java, even for non-official (as in: not provided by Oracle, Spring or JEE) libs like Hibernate, you're sure that when you choose it, it'll be still maintained in this form or the other for the next years. On the other hand, if you develop with Node.js, think about all the times where you had to decide about a library for specific usecase like auth, which is maintained by that one guy on GitHub with a nick BreakingBad69 whose last update was 3 years ago. IMO it's the biggest Node.js (and JavaScript in general) downside, the fact the ecosystem itself chooses a shiny thing for the next few months only to forget it later for the next shiny thing. If you leave your codebase without maintenance for a few years, half of the dependencies will be outdated and your project will have more security holes than a Swiss cheese. Meanwhile in Java barely anything happens. That slow pace of change of course brings its own problems, and is a good explanation why Node is often used at startups and high-pace businesses. I'd love to find some middle-ground for this technology though. The feeling of being tired to always have to choose between thousands of different solutions for each usecase made me want to learn Go for my side-projects. It's so easy when stdlib has got pretty much everything you need! What's your take on it?

Ever thought about sharing more on Social Media and creating your presence, but there was always something holding you back? No idea what to post about, fear of not being original, everything you want to share was already said by hundreds of other people? I started my journey 3 months ago, and I had all of those problems, so I've decided I'll share my perspective, even if it helps just one person, it's a success! First thing, how did I even start? Starting is the most problematic part, whether we're talking about a work project, or social media content. There's no secret to it - I realized that if I was waiting for my perfect moment, it'd probably never come. So I was like "okay, I feel like I want to post a few thoughts so let me just create 10 content ideas so I've got something to start with, and the rest will follow". The rest actually followed 🎉 The most important thing - just do it - it's that simple. No need to fear not being original, because when you think about it - most of the stuff we're talking about was already said by someone else, there's a high probability for it. Unless you're another great philosopher, I can bet what you want to write about was already covered. But it's you, and your perspective, which is original and only yours, and maybe it's your perspective that will reasonate the most with some people, even when they already heard about the topic you want to write about. Once I decided to start and scheduled a few posts (it helps they're scheduled at @Buffer, makes it less scary to click 'Post'!), something clicked for me when I got some likes and engagement and this moment I started thinking of myself as a creator. I like what I do in my work, and read a lot about work-related stuff after-hours, so now whatever I do, like reading a book, article, listening to a podcast - I think "how could I post about it"? It keeps ideas infinite, as long as you've got a growth mindset for your chosen content topic. Good luck, creator!