Forem: Brandon

The Only Developer Skill That Scales in 2026

Brandon — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 01:14:08 +0000

Technical stacks shift. Hiring markets mutate. Tooling obsoletes itself every quarter. The only durable advantage is the ability to convert ambiguity into working systems faster than your peers. That isn’t creativity or talent. It’s process.

Define the problem in one sentence. Strip every requirement that doesn't change the outcome. Identify the single constraint that governs the system. Build the minimum artifact that validates your assumption. Iterate only on what breaks. Eliminate everything else.

This workflow outperforms brilliance, years of experience, and encyclopedic framework knowledge. It produces momentum anywhere: new jobs, new stacks, new domains. It reduces burnout by removing self-inflicted complexity. It turns pressure into throughput.

Developers who internalize this stop chasing hype and stop fearing disruption. They become the stabilizing force teams rely on because they execute predictably in volatile conditions. That’s the multiplier. That’s the leverage.

The Developer Extinction Line: Why 2026 Will Delete Half the Industry Without Warning

Brandon — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 02:49:12 +0000

The fear isn’t abstract. It’s statistical. The market is oversupplied with engineers whose output is indistinguishable from an autocomplete model. The 2025 economy measures developers by throughput per dollar, and most can’t survive that math.

The collapse is already visible:
Companies are rewriting job scopes to remove everything slow, manual, or opinion-driven. AI-first workflows aren’t boosting productivity; they’re compressing entire tiers of developer competence into a single button. Entire backlogs are dissolving into promptable tasks. Teams are discovering that six engineers of average velocity can be replaced by one engineer with aggressive automation habits and no emotional friction.

The fear comes from watching career moats evaporate:

• Tool familiarity is worthless when interfaces abstract the tool.
• “Experience” collapses when models surface edge cases faster than memory.
• Code quality becomes a non-metric when scaffolding is autogenerated.
• Architecture becomes a commodity when reasoning engines expose patterns instantly.
• Hiring pipelines prefer operators who ship artifacts, not specialists who protect niches.

The panic spikes when developers realize the new selection pressure:
If your work doesn’t generate compounding leverage, you’re not just underperforming, you’re redundant. The market is rewarding engineers who behave like force multipliers, not function implementers. Anything that can be templated, documented, or recomposed by a model becomes valueless.

2025 forces a binary outcome:
Either your output creates more output, or your role shrinks until it disappears.
Title:
The Developer Extinction Line: Why 2025 Will Delete Half the Industry Without Warning

Post:
The fear isn’t abstract. It’s statistical. The market is oversupplied with engineers whose output is indistinguishable from an autocomplete model. The 2025 economy measures developers by throughput per dollar, and most can’t survive that math.

The fear comes from watching career moats evaporate:

Either your output creates more output, or your role shrinks until it disappears.

The 2025 Tech Layoff Cycle Isn’t the Real Threat, It’s What Comes After

Brandon — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 01:31:54 +0000

Everyone keeps staring at layoff numbers, but that’s not what’s putting devs out of work. The real danger is simpler: hiring managers no longer believe most candidates can produce value without supervision. That single assumption is wiping out entire tiers of applicants overnight.

This is why rejection feels instantaneous now. Recruiters aren’t hunting for promise. They’re hunting for proof you won’t drain time, context, or senior bandwidth. Anything that hints at uncertainty gets discarded. Side projects with no defined outcome. Resumes padded with tools instead of impact. Vague claims about collaboration. All auto-rejected.

The fear you’re feeling is earned. The market has no patience left for “I can learn fast.” It wants evidence you’ve already solved something difficult without being told how. That’s the filter.

If you’re unemployed in 2025, stop trying to impress. Start removing doubt.
Cut your portfolio to one or two projects that demonstrate a clear constraint you identified, the exact intervention you made, and the measurable result. Rebuild your resume around operational clarity, not potential. Strip anything that reads like guesswork or aspiration.

The market isn’t punishing lack of experience. It’s punishing lack of certainty.
Title: The 2025 Tech Layoff Cycle Isn’t the Real Threat — It’s What Comes After

Devs Who Get Hired First Do One Thing Differently

Brandon — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 23:03:00 +0000

Hiring managers operate under load. They scan for the smallest number of signals that predict whether you’ll remove friction instead of adding it. Everything else is noise.

Rebuild your materials around that reality.
Strip your portfolio to three projects maximum. For each one, document the constraint, the intervention, and the delta. No narratives. No tooling inventories. State the bottleneck, state the modification, state the measurable outcome. This re-frames you from “someone who built features” to “someone who resolves blockers.”

Expose your reasoning process. Most candidates describe tasks; the ones who get hired describe tradeoffs. Show how you selected one approach while discarding alternatives. Show what you optimized for. Show what you intentionally ignored. This proves decision-making under scarcity, which is the actual job.

Remove ambiguous claims. Replace “improved performance” with the exact metric. Replace “worked on APIs” with the exact failure point you corrected. Ambiguity signals inexperience. Specificity signals operational maturity.

Consolidate everything into a single through-line: you compress time-to-output. That’s the trait that stands out in a stack of interchangeable resumes.

[Boost]

Brandon — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 03:23:13 +0000

Why Juniors Aren’t Getting Hired in 2026 and the One Strategy That Flips Your Odds Overnight

Brandon ・ Nov 23

#webdev #productivity #career #beginners

Why Juniors Aren’t Getting Hired in 2026 and the One Strategy That Flips Your Odds Overnight

Brandon — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:22:07 +0000

Most junior candidates drown in noise because they follow outdated advice. Cut the fluff. Align to what hiring pipelines actually value now.

Strip your portfolio to three pieces: one production-style service, one front-end build with clean UI discipline, one system-level or infra-touching project. Each must have a README that explains architecture, tradeoffs, and constraints. No tutorials. No clones. Demonstrate judgment, not syntax.

Rewrite your Git history on each project until it resembles a disciplined engineer. Recruiters skim commit logs for signal. Chaotic diffs get discarded instantly.

Publish implementation notes weekly. Not “learning logs.” Post breakdowns of decisions, failures, constraints you hit, and what you cut to ship. It frames you as an operator, not a student.

Optimize for verifiable competence. Run all work through automated checks: formatting, static analysis, containerized local dev, reproducible builds. This mirrors how real teams operate and removes doubt about your baseline.

Make your presence legible. LinkedIn headline: tech stack + role target + proof in one line. Pin repositories that match job descriptions. Hide everything else.

Treat every application as an engineering task: gather requirements, ship artifacts that address them, cut non-essentials. Consistency beats volume.

Stop waiting for permission. Produce evidence. Publish it. Reduce ambiguity. That’s the 2025–2026 hiring filter.
Title: Stop Getting Ignored: The 2025–2026 Junior Dev Playbook That Actually Gets You Hired

Most junior candidates drown in noise because they follow outdated advice. Cut the fluff. Align to what hiring pipelines actually value now.

Rewrite your Git history on each project until it resembles a disciplined engineer. Recruiters skim commit logs for signal. Chaotic diffs get discarded instantly.

Publish implementation notes weekly. Not “learning logs.” Post breakdowns of decisions, failures, constraints you hit, and what you cut to ship. It frames you as an operator, not a student.

Make your presence legible. LinkedIn headline: tech stack + role target + proof in one line. Pin repositories that match job descriptions. Hide everything else.

Treat every application as an engineering task: gather requirements, ship artifacts that address them, cut non-essentials. Consistency beats volume.

Stop waiting for permission. Produce evidence. Publish it. Reduce ambiguity. That’s the 2026 hiring filter.

[Boost]

Brandon — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:35:50 +0000

Stop Building Indie SaaS the Hard Way

Brandon ・ Nov 23

#webdev #javascript #saas #productivity

Stop Building Indie SaaS the Hard Way

Brandon — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 01:32:10 +0000

In my experience, developers burn months writing boilerplate, chasing config drift, and IaC before a single user arrives. The market rewards velocity, not heroics. Ship slower than your competitors and your idea dies, even if it's better.

Here’s what I'm doing: Use a production-grade monorepo starter that forces discipline, standardization, and speed. TurboRepo plus a unified stack. Next.js for web, NestJS for backend and Expo for native. This delivers predictable builds, consistent types, shared UI libraries, and zero-friction DX. The result: one mental model, one dependency graph, one build pipeline.

This structure eliminates 80% of early-stage chaos: mismatched TypeScript configs, duplicated components, fragmented API contracts, and slow local iterations. Shared packages consolidate types, UI primitives, and business logic. You stop gluing pieces together and start building business solutions.

Most developers still opt for scattered repos, mismatched stacks, and brittle hand-rolled infra. That choice kills momentum. The fastest teams centralize everything, standardize aggressively, and automate the boring work out of existence.

If you want leverage, the formula is: one repo, one toolchain, one source of truth. The devs who adopt this pattern dominate velocity metrics and out-ship teams twice their size.

Zero to SaaS - Bookmarksy.io Working around Twitter API Limitations

Brandon — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 00:37:21 +0000

One of the most important features of bookmarksy.io is it’s ability to reach out to Twitters API and retrieve a given users bookmarks.

Getting a list of users bookmarks is the easy bit. You can make a call to

https://api.twitter.com/2/users/:id/bookmarks

and what is returned is a list that looks something like this:

{
    "data": [
        {
            "created_at": "2022-11-11T18:18:36.000Z",
            "edit_controls": {
                "edits_remaining": 5,
                "is_edit_eligible": false,
                "editable_until": "2022-11-11T18:48:36.000Z"
            },
            "text": "Build a $50 info-product in one day using this process:\n\n(Probably shouldn't give this away for free bc later I'm going to sell a guide to this same process for ~$50.)",
            "public_metrics": {
                "retweet_count": 242,
                "reply_count": 85,
                "like_count": 1171,
                "quote_count": 29
            },
            "source": "Tweet Hunter Pro",
            "conversation_id": "1591133306069843979",
            "lang": "en",
            "id": "1591133306069843979",
            "reply_settings": "everyone",
            "possibly_sensitive": false,
            "edit_history_tweet_ids": [
                "1591133306069843979"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "includes": {
        "users": [
            {
                "name": "Rob Lennon 🗯 | Audience Growth",
                "username": "thatroblennon"
            }
        ],
        "tweets": [
            {
                "created_at": "2022-11-11T18:18:36.000Z",
                "edit_controls": {
                    "edits_remaining": 5,
                    "is_edit_eligible": false,
                    "editable_until": "2022-11-11T18:48:36.000Z"
                },
                "text": "Build a $50 info-product in one day using this process:\n\n(Probably shouldn't give this away for free bc later I'm going to sell a guide to this same process for ~$50.)",
                "public_metrics": {
                    "retweet_count": 242,
                    "reply_count": 85,
                    "like_count": 1171,
                    "quote_count": 29
                },
                "source": "Tweet Hunter Pro",
                "conversation_id": "1591133306069843979",
                "lang": "en",
                "id": "1591133306069843979",
                "reply_settings": "everyone",
                "possibly_sensitive": false,
                "edit_history_tweet_ids": [
                    "1591133306069843979"
                ]
            }
        ]
    },
    "meta": {
        "result_count": 1,
        "next_token": "zldjwdz3w6sba13nbs0z2lzml73coscn3mc18c0avxs"
    }
}

And that’s all fine and well. But if I’m dealing with a thread, which most bookmarks tend to be, how do I retrieve all the related tweets?

The twitter documentation speaks of use of recent search or archive search for tweets. This isn’t viable for two reasons:

recent search only works on tweets less than seven days old
archive search is enrollment based and EXPENSIVE!.

So what’s the solution? Here’s what I’ve implemented to work around this:

assumptions:

A bookmark is either a single tweet, or a collection (conversation: twitter language) of tweets.
If a bookmark is a collection of tweets, it can be assumed that this bookmark is a thread.
Thread tweets are typically created around the same time (roughly < 10 seconds between tweets).

Solution:

Leverage the

https://api.twitter.com/2/users/:id/tweets

endpoint with a request body as such:

{
    since_id: <ID OF BOOKMARKED TWEET>,
    end_time: <CREATED_AT OF BOOKMARKED TWEET + 5 MINS>,
    limit: 100
}

this will retrieve the first 100 tweets published within the first five minutes after the initial tweet.

Then we can filter on those tweets by conversation_id to retrieve the ones associated with our bookmark!

With this solution, we work around the 7 day and archive restrictions. Is it ideal? of course not, but it’s been reliable so far! And unless your bookmark is a thread of over one hundred tweets, there doesn’t appear to be any data loss.

The only drawback is that I will likely end up querying redundant tweets which would eat into my monthly query limit, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it!

https://bookmarksy.io is coming along nicely so far. Hit a couple of snag’s but I will be looking for beta testers soon!

Follow the journey on twitter bookmarksy_io or brandonkpbailey and join the waitlist! https://brandonkpbailey.substack.com/

Zero to SaaS - Bookmarksy.io Initial Data Model approach

Brandon — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 02:52:22 +0000

I haven't talked about the data model for bookmarksy.io yet but I spent yesterday evening building out the core data model for bookmarks/categories.

Here's the approach.

First, the definitions:

Bookmark - a twitter bookmark.
Category - a group of bookmarks that share a domain.

The flow:

User registers
Categories service seeds their account with a default category "Uncategorized" (all bookmarks will initially exist as part of this category)
Then, when a user reads their dashboard (these things happen asynchronously):
- categories are loaded
- bookmarks are loaded
- bookmarks are hydrated (reach out to twitter to capture any new bookmarks)
- hydrated bookmarks are loaded into "uncategorized"

So far, this flow exists and is stable, with the exception of bookmark hydration. I have yet to come up with a non blocking, performant solution but am working on it!

I think, given the potential variety of categories, having them account scoped makes the most sense. This will likely lead to some de-normalization but it's an acceptable trade off

If you're like me and have a tonne of bookmarks you never read, check
https://bookmarksy.io
out and join the waitlist!

Zero to SaaS - Bookmarksy.io Sign in with Twitter

Brandon — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 22:54:16 +0000

So at the end of week 2 of https://bookmarksy.io ‘s development, I now have a (semi) functioning frontend and backend!

I’ll do a technical breakdown of each component in a future post but would like to spend some time talking about the challenges I faced integration twitter authentication.

Initially, I spent some time familiarizing myself with the authorization and authentication flows twitter exposes for app clients.

The type of app client I’m working with means my best option for authorization is OAuth2.0 with PKCE.

Q. What is OAuth 2 with PKCE?

A. OAuth 2.0 is the industry-standard protocol for authorization. Paired with PKCE (Proof key for code exchange), it helps prevent CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) and authorization code injection attacks.

Here’s a diagram of the flow:

A typical user story would look something like this:

User clicks sign in with twitter
User is redirected to https://twitter.com/i/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id={SOME CLIENT ID}&redirect_uri={SOME CALLBACK URL}&scope={SOME LIST OF SCOPES TO AUTHORIZE}&state={SOME STATE CODE}&code_challenge={SOME CODE CHALLENGE}&code_challenge_method={SOME CODE CHALLENGE METHOD}
user accepts authorization request
user is redirected to {SOME CALLBACK URL} containing code and state in query string. e.g:
- https://example.com?code={SOME AUTHORIZATION CODE}&state={SOME AUTHORIZATION STATE}

Web app then requests an access token on behalf of the user using the code returned. E.g:

curl --location --request POST 'https://api.twitter.com/2/oauth2/token' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
--header 'Authorization: Basic {SOME AUTH TOKEN FOR YOUR APP}'\
--data-urlencode 'code={YOUR CODE RETURNED FROM CALLBACK}' \
--data-urlencode 'grant_type=authorization_code' \
--data-urlencode 'redirect_uri=https://www.example.com' \
--data-urlencode 'code_verifier=challenge'

Access token is stored and used to make API requests.

The web app can revoke an access token like so:

curl --location --request POST 'https://api.twitter.com/2/oauth2/revoke' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
--header 'Authorization: Basic {SOME AUTH TOKEN FOR YOUR APP}'\
--data-urlencode 'token={SOME ACCESS TOKEN TO REVOKE}'

Initially, I tried to implement this by hand with the physical endpoints, which worked fine after some time, but after stumbling upon the twitter API SDK, I found a much more elegant solution https://github.com/twitterdev/twitter-api-typescript-sdk.

So now the code looks something like this:

// create an oauth2 client
const authClient = new auth.OAuth2User({
  client_id: process.env.CLIENT_ID,
  client_secret: process.env.CLIENT_SECRET,
  callback: "http://127.0.0.1:3000/callback",
  scopes: ["tweet.read", "users.read", "offline.access"],
});

const client = new Client(authClient);

// redirect client to this url
const authUrl = authClient.generateAuthURL({
  code_challenge_method: "s256",
});

// after authorization, retrieve code from query param
await authClient.requestAccessToken(code);

// revoke token
const response = await authClient.revokeAccessToken();

Which works wonderfully!

My only concern at the moment is that the revokeAccessToken doesn’t use a parsed access token, so I’m unsure as to how exactly it knows which token to revoke access to and whether this will impact multiple users.

But otherwise, https://twitter.com/bookmarksy_io (https://bookmarksy.io) is coming along well!

Follow the journey on twitter bookmarksy_io or brandonkpbailey and join the waitlist! https://brandonkpbailey.substack.com/

Zero to SaaS - Product #1 Bookmarksy.io the solution

Brandon — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 13:00:00 +0000

The idea for Bookmarksy.io started with a simple statement:

“I wish I could get an email of my twitter bookmarks every week so I didn’t stop forgetting them. Something like The Morning Brew”

So I went on the internet searching for a solution that might already exist that solves my problem. It didn’t. So I went to work.

Setting up a domain name, email list, landing page, social media, The whole nine yards. But having spoken to some people about this problem, I realize there’s something more here.

It isn’t just difficult to remember to re-visit your twitter bookmarks, the entire concept of bookmarks in twitter is broken! A single stream of un-contextualized tweets or threads, sorted in order of most recently added to least recently added.

A feed that would allow you to categorize, tag and sort these bookmarks more effectively would be much more useful.

After some brainstorming, here’s the feature list I’d like to go to launch with:

Bookmark aggregation/consolidation
- Threads condensed to a single, blog post like display with likes, retweets and replies information
Contextualization
- Adding categorization and tagging to bookmarks for storage and retrieval
Bookmark habits/ Analytics
- Am I actually using my bookmarks in a meaningful way?
Daily/ Weekly roundup emails
- The Morning Brew style emails of my bookmarks for low-effort consumption.
Bookmark cleanup
- Once I’ve processed my bookmarks in Bookmarksy.io, I can clean them up from my twitter feed.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Is this something you would use?

As always, if you’d like to be the first to receive updates, sign up to our waitlist https://bookmarksy.io !