Ty Smith

At KotlinConf’25, @tysmith.me discussed the strategies and tooling implemented by his team at Uber to migrate millions of lines of Java code to Kotlin. Join us at KotlinConf’26 for even more insights, best practices, and deep dives! 👉 https://kotlinconf.com/ 👈

🎙️New episode alert! Hear @tysmith.me, Principal Engineer at Uber, talk his career path, the coming validation/observability crunch, and the rise of AI-driven development. Check it out here, or wherever you get your podcasts👇 bitdrift.io/podcast/beyo...

GREAT example by Yuan Games is actually a fantastic example of what happens when you remove the obstacle that everyone thought was the biggest hurdle in building a game: needing to build a game engine Easier to build games… still very hard to build great games!

Gen Z with their hip email signatures like "Would you like a slightly more persuasive version or one that sounds even more casual?"

The video for using Agents, LLMs, and LSC techniques to migrate Java to Kotlin for Uber's Android apps from @kotlinconf.com is now public. www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PN... #Kotlinconf

🚀 The Kotlin Foundation Annual Report 2024 is here! 🔹 2.5M+ developers coding in Kotlin 🔹 $182K+ invested in ecosystem growth 🔹 Student contests, grants and open-source contributions Check out the full report to learn more and see what’s next! 👇 📖 kotlinfoundation.org/news/annual-...

@tysmith.me had some fantastic predictions. He has a front seat view at how engineering is changing in real time, given his influential role at Uber. You'll find his thoughts here - jetpackcomposeapp.beehiiv.com/p/dispatch-i... Not available in the main site yet so use this link in the meantime

Thanks for including my insights on the future of Android in the latest issue of Dispatch, @vinaygaba.bsky.social ! www.jetpackcompose.app/newsletter

Some great opportunities to push the Kotlin ecosystem forward in this year's Google Summer of Code with Kotlin. Several will have you working closely with my team. kotlinlang.org/docs/gsoc-20...

I was at @evernote.bsky.social when they started migrating to React Native in 2018. Against all advice from tech leads the SVP of engineering (coming from Amazon) pushed through. The quality of the Android app went downhill over the years not only performance wise.

*sniff* i cry every time youtu.be/Nuz6iNjTkjo?...

** It's happening!! ** We managed to convince Google to open source PebbleOS. Took a while, but they just did it today! github.com/google/pebble With that, we're bringing Pebble back! I blogged about it - ericmigi.com/blog/why-wer...

Calling for Kotlin for Server-Side Content Creators blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/... #KotlinServerSide

New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote theonion.com/new-squ...

adrian dittman is elon musk confirmed

There are 21 million Black people in the US. Fewer than 6% of us earn over $100K a year. The median net worth of Black households fluctuates between about $20K and $40K, depending on how much scamming happens that year (eg crypto, asset forfeiture). Black. People. Are. The. Working. Class.

More to say on burnout and I'm probably going to boost it a few times because folks need to hear it: Burnout is a form of brain damage. It happens when stress conditions persist until they damage our brains. It's an injury that needs to heal, not a weakness that needs to be pushed through.

Benchmarking can be tricky! In this blog post, I show an example of how easy it is to get the wrong results and how to fix it: www.romainguy.dev/posts/2024/y...

Will I understand Luigi's Manifesto if I haven't played Luigi's Mansion?

Of course archive.org has it and the worse offender is … United Healthcare. archive.is/czb76

I’m building out Uber's first dedicated Kotlin Language platform team in our Amsterdam office to make Kotlin first class across Bazel, IDE, LSPs, Android, KMP, AI language migrations, backend services, and to help in our Kotlin Foundation particiption. Apply here: www.uber.com/careers/list...

Traveling in Japan and still incredibly annoyed that Google doesn’t enable FeliCa for Pixel phones sold outside of Japan, even though the hardware exists and can be used under root. Brought my test iPhone just for easy Suica cards in Apple Pay. github.com/jjyao88/unlo...

This is so on point. So many use cases are barely working reliably (if that) with state of the art models and non-deterministic operations makes testing a beast. I cannot begin to imagine trying to build apps on anything that's not top of the line.

It's not wrong. blueskyroast.com/roast/tysmit...

@danabra.mov the Bluesky language translate experience isn't super great right now. I assume you're trying to avoid Google translate api costs by forcing a web link. Consider the MLKit translate SDKs (free and on device translations) and then do web fallback. developers.google.com/ml-kit/langu...

Optimist: the cup is half full Pessimist: the cup is half empty Red Team: We replaced it with decaf.

The video recording from my DPE Summit talk is now out and covers some of the cool AI Developer Productivity work we're doing. dpe.org/sessions/ty-...

Not true—no data ever showed Twitter’s character limit had any impact on literacy. We analyzed this deeply in 2015. Despite having a 1k limit, the average Facebook post was far shorter than 140 chars :) The limit increase was for use-case expansion, not fixing something broken most users.

Had a friend explain their political stance following the election as going from vocal liberal to American Nihilist. "They voted for this, time to let them see how bad it'll get. I'm too exhausted from fighting against the tide for so long." I wouldn't be surprised if that's a new normal.

I said this a year ago elsewhere, but I’ll say it again here: It's impossible to overstate how much the big tech CEOs & VCs are being radicalized within their bubble. The level of paranoia & contrived victimization is off the charts, and they increasingly only consume media that they have funded.

Reddit has started suspending the accounts of moderators from subreddits that are still on strike. Never thought I’d see a social media CEO screw the pooch harder than Elon but here we are.

What's the state of the world for Reddit alternatives? I've seen a few like Lemmy and Kbin. Any of them decent?

Apple’s Secret Weapon to Getting PC Games on Mac https://www.inverse.com/tech/mac-directx-12-game-porting-toolkit-pc-games

Wow. Uber's Android app has more than 10M lines of code today. Uber v1 on launch had ~10K. Via @tsmith on his Mobile Developer Productivity at Uber Scale talk at Droidcon 2022. There's so much business logic, features, edge cases, and additional products behind the scene...

The #GoogleIO presentation I co-presented about “What’s new in Kotlin for Android” is live! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGtB--ABiNM

Besides the one year in Covid when they canceled, this is my first year not attending a Google I/O since 2012. Definitely feeling the FOMO.

After joining Bluesky I obviously had to figure out a custom handle, and after brainstorming with @tysmith.me I landed on @p-y.wtf ...but now I had bought a domain name so I HAD TO ship a personal website: https://p-y.wtf After years of procrastinating on this, bsky was the push I needed! 🙏🙏

Long tenure's effect on a team's productivity & ability to recruit isn't rewarded enough. Ex: I have several peers I've worked with daily for 5-10 years. Many have left the team and returned. That built trust reduces friction, allows high velocity, and is very attractive in recruiting.

Watching Auto-gpt run around in circles and googling things trying to debug a dumb linux folder permission issue so it can actually get to doing some real work I assigned, and I've never been more confident it's a real developer.

It was a massive oversight on the part of humanity to not begin the domestication of raccoons thousands of years ago. We could all be chilling with our little bandit friends right now.

the anti echo chamber argument is always "you need to hear viewpoints that are different than your own" but then the viewpoint presented to me is "hey guys what if we sent doctors to prison for helping women not be pregnant anymore"

I guess folks are doing intros. 👋 I've been working on Android since the beginning and have built many apps you've probably used. Currently, I do open source, developer productivity eng, and mobile frameworks at Uber. I enjoy building communities of awesome people and teaching/mentoring folks.