London used to be the tech hub of Europe before Brexit (VC investment, # of tech positions, big tech presence etc). I lived/worked there for 5 years and it was great.
Still a good place... but Brexit is making EU engineers explore options outside the UK like this, one at a time:
As someone who has seen London tech at its prime, I think one of the biggest misses of the current UK government is not doing more to "retain" the London tech hub.
Dublin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin and other EU "hubs" are slowly, but surely pulling London EU folks away.
My response to "what is your take on choosing the next city?" was this:
"What will the next EU* tech hub be?"
*taking the UK out of EU.
My take: it should have been Paris... if they capitalized on it, and changed a bunch of policies (which they don't and won't).
Amsterdam & Dublin are the biggest winners, and plenty other gainers).
And here's an inbound DM on why Paris (sadly) is a place that will struggle to attract tech talent. Even though it has all many characteristics in location, size, population, transport to be a tech hub.
The language for tech is English, and in Paris you *need* to learn French.
A person weighing in (over a DM that I edited to remove personal details) on Barcelona.
And on how you should expect to (eventually) learn the local language either way. Which I agree with - I'm slowly improving my Dutch as well in Amsterdam.
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The more I use GenAI coding tools, the more I am convinced keeping to "traditional" software engineering practices is what works most productive here. As in 10x more productive. E.g.
- Small changes
- Test that the change works before moving on
- (unit) tests wherever you can
Amusing how error-prone all of these models are
I catch how often it generates buggy code thanks to testing and adding unit tests (I have it usually generate tests and then I tweak for my test cases)
Don't know how people are productive who let it run loose tbh
All those non-devs parroting how GenAI is the end of software development don't do actual development. And esp not wit these tools.
I am pretty confident Meta will have no "AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code" beyond being a companion like today
One interesting I’m seeing with GenAI coding tools:
The MASSIVELY help technical founders at small and mid-sized startups prototype, challenge dev team, and ship products faster.
A recent example I’ve seen (cont’d):
Founder: “here’s a product idea we should do.”
Dev team: “Ok. We’ll build a prototype. It will be ~2 weeks.” 1 month later there’s a prototype. Another 2 months to ship to customers.
Now: founder builds prototype in ~4 hours, shows to dev team. Team builds a more prod ready one in a week and ships to customers!
I have only seen this work with *technical* founders. Ones who used to live and breathe code and built the first version of product themselves. But as team grew to 10-50+ ppl this was no longer an option.
GenAI is revitalising them - and the product iteration shows it!!
Meta created React Native. It’s used (with components at least) in their flagship apps: Facebook (iOS, Android), Instagram (Meta Quest), Messenger (desktop).
Google created Flutter. And yet none of their flagship apps use it (Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Calendar).
The only flagship Meta app not using React Native is WhatsApp.
Google does build a lot of smaller apps with Flutter.
Just odd that Flutter can be used as modules (for a few screens) but Google, for some reason, doesn’t do with major apps.
Food for thought.
Flutter powers more apps than React Native: but more iOS apps are RN than Flutter.
Large-scale case studies published are mostly RN. Flutter case studies are usually smaller apps.
More details on each technology, and other Flutter and RN alternatives:
This is how Copilot Workspace works. Covered 8 months ago in @Pragmatic_Eng at
I personally think it's a clever workflow that aims to make devs more productive (and not replace them, like tools like Devin advertise themselves to the business) newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-92
My first impression is that this workflow is pretty good. It hallucinates / doesn't do what it needs to do, but I can correct it early enough.
For experienced enough devs who know what they are doing: this workflow could work pretty well: better than the "give a prompt and the AI does the magic" stuff