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Aaron Boodman
@aboodman
CEO @rocicorp. Building @zero__ms, raising two great kids, trying to be a better person. Past: @replicache, @nomsdb, @googlechrome.
Hawaii, USA
aaronboodman.com
Joined June 2008
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  • Pinned
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Oct 29, 2025
    Sync engines enable instantly responsive UI. But the tradeoff is usually slow startup because all data must be pre-loaded. Zero's query-driven sync enables precise control over when data syncs. To demonstrate, we scaled our "zbugs" demo up to 2.5M rows. Introducing Gigabugs:
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  • user avatar
    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all. The team came in at 9 and left at 5 (figuratively, people actually kept their own ~8h schedules) every workday for a couple years like clockwork. No drama. No broken marriages, no broken families.
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    Hadi Partovi
    @hadip
    Aug 14, 2021
    Replying to @hadip
    Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Jan 31, 2022
    I am a professional software engineer that has been writing JavaScript for 25 years. I am incapable of setting up a modern JavaScript stack from scratch. If I cannot find a start repo with the set of tools I want to build already configured, I'm just stuck.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    I hear you asking, dear reader, how this miracle came to pass. How did chrome-team manage to deliver high quality software without death marches? Funny you ask... Turns out that software projects actually benefit strongly from having senior technical leadership deeply involved.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    By "senior" I mean, as a crude approximation, "old enough to have school aged children at home". By "involved" I mean "typing code" and "reviewing code". I know! In our industry it has been more common for such folks to age out to management and leave the typing to the kids.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    Having strong technical leadership has lots of advantages, but one of them is it naturally leads to a healthier cadence. These folks typically have to be home for dinner, and they're old enough to know that death marches don't work.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Sep 30, 2023
    There is no magic. It’s just variables, if statements, and loops, arranged cleverly. Every time - every single time - I’ve looked inside a web server, database, browser, or whatever my reaction has been the same. Not awe or grandeur, but a kind of bland “oh, well, that makes
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    neural oscillator of uncertain significance
    @mycoliza
    Sep 30, 2023
    Replying to @mycoliza
    this isn’t to say that every application should have its own totally bespoke database. most of them probably shouldn’t. but these things are not magical and we should remember that they’re just code, too. code we can understand and debug and modify as needed.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    May 8, 2024
    I was a band geek and majored in music. It won't make sense unless you did too, but the opening shot of the trumpet getting bent causes an immediate visceral feeling of disgust. As a brass musician, you spent a good junk of your life trying to protect this awkward, fragile metal
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    Tim Cook
    Apple
    @tim_cook
    May 7, 2024
    Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    May 16, 2023
    The interactions people spontaneously have on reflect.net are so cute. I think my favorite is the little mouse celebration every 5 minutes when a puzzle is solved.
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  • user avatar
    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    Software engineering is engineering. Like other kinds of engineering, it's a skill you develop over a lifetime, not a decade. When I joined chrome-team I was in my early 30s. And I was on the junior side. Most of the core team had already worked on one or two browsers before!
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    We would never accept this in other fields. Would you live in a house built entirely by junior carpenters in their late 20s who built one or two houses that barely stood up? Would you drive cars designed and built by junior engineers?
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    ... and if you're on the younger side, also don't cheat yourself. Find you a team with experienced leaders to learn from.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Aug 16, 2021
    Replying to @aboodman
    It was one of the most formative experiences of my career.
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    Aaron Boodman
    @aboodman
    Jul 11, 2024
    Long ago I did an interview for eng manager at Stripe and I didn't get the job. I think about this interview sometimes – wondering what I did wrong. Years later, I feel like I have a guess. The interview involved a mock scenario where two engineers disagreed on how to handle
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