TWIL April 17th 2026

• When working across teams, be very clear about timelines and progress
  • Or you'll end up in a meeting saying you've been blocked by their lack of progress for weeks while they look like a shocked Pikachu
• I still don't think raising specific exceptions then catching them is a good way of handling errors
  • But it's definitely an improvement over throwing and rescuing a single exception for everything which just shows an error screen anyway after being caught
• Stopping to drink water during your talk adds a surprising amount of time; ~30 seconds per sip
• There's a lot of code at Moneytree which is needlessly complicated by dealing with two possible countries, when we only operate in Japan now
• Doing a talk, even at a local meetup, even without needing to memorise it, is a lot of work
  • Definitely worth it though
  • I probably could have explained things better/cut some unnecessary stuff, but felt great to do it and get questions which indicated people were actually listening/thinking about it
• Setting min-height on elements where the contents can be a loading spinner stops ridiculous layout shift when the spinner is there
  • Also absolutely positioning your spinner is not ideal if it's gonna be used in a card offset to the right of the screen...
• CI is great at all times except when a remote repository it depends on is having issues

Links

• The AI Great Leap Forward - Lee Han Chung

I'm just as sick of hearing about AI as everyone else, but this is an entertaining read which makes some good points. Love the name of the author's blog.

• Deplhitools - Delphi

A handy collection of tools including a palette generator, SVG optimiser, QR code generator (mad I didn't think of that before my talk), image converters and more.

• I don't want a screenshot of your Claude conversation - Dave Rupert

A (senior!) dev at Moneytree did this to me recently and while I get that he might not have had time to reply at all without the chatbot, I wholeheartedly agree with what Dave's saying here. The LLM response had a bunch of info about unrelated changes that I had made and explained them poorly, seeming to think they were related to the issue I was asking about. I replied explaining to the senior that Claude had just gone off on a tangent and that was the end of it. Basically used up some of my time responding for no benefit at all.