Blog

Tag: Internal Tools

Understanding the Value of Dev Tools

Making the business case for building dev tools

I’m largely approaching this from the perspective of building an internal dev tool (since this is mostly where my personal experiences are coming from), especially if you’re someone who wants to build an internal tool but is having trouble framing it in a way where its value can be understood by the decision makers. I’m also excluding situations where you “have to” build certain tools to track certain information in order to comply with a legal requirement, since I don’t think that would be controversial to comply with. I’d imagine the framework for using an external dev tool, while similar, also poses extra complexity on paying vs building. ...

July 18, 2025

Internal Tooling Ideas

When and what to build for internal tools?

For years, I built and maintained the only logged-out accessible dev tool set / platform at Meta. That earned me some reputation (in a certain circle) of being “the idea guy on internal tools”. Whenever I’m asked about how I keep coming up with good ideas for valuable tools to build, my go-to answer has been “I build tools when I get annoyed while doing my job”. I’ll try to expand that into more details below. ...

July 11, 2025

Early takes on vibe-coding

Is it a mid-level engineer yet?

I keep hearing about vibe-coding and I’ve always written the majority of code myself. While at Meta, I got a chance to try out CodeCompose. It worked really well as an autocomplete but when it tried to do anything more than 5 lines at a time, it would - on many occasions - commit bugs that aren’t immediately obvious at first sight. Generally, I’ve caught them by looking at the generated code and wondering “huh this isn’t how I’d do this, why?”. That said, it definitely helped me code and ship faster especially on mundane tasks. Vibe-coding though, seems like taking it to a whole new level (using even less supervision and care on the code being committed). ...

July 3, 2025