jonmagic.com

I just released a new version of Tri-State Relay Service with a few small improvements that have made it even more helpful for my day-to-day usage.

tl;dr Trust should not be a blank check.

When I finished writing I stopped watching my agents work and started listening, I still had one problem.

I shipped the first version of Tri-State Relay Service (TSRS) because I needed agents to stop interrupting me.

I was talking with friends recently about what changes when agents become a normal part of building software.

A few weeks ago I was in a Copilot CLI conversation with my Brain folder in scope, trying to make a small version of Andrej Karpathy’s LLM wiki approach fit into my day.

This last weekend I was doing my best to live in the moment and my daughter asked me if we could play Minecraft.

I updated this post on August 9, 2026.

Update (Feb 28, 2026): This post got a lot of discussion on Hacker News and Lobsters.

I use AI in my writing all the time.

I spent the weekend making my home network more secure, and the whole thing was just a conversation.

I turned 44 recently, which means I’ve now spent exactly half my professional life as an entrepreneur and half as an employee.

Over the holiday break I decided to rebuild a slice of an internal web app from my day job as a webview experience inside VS Code.

I took this week off to reflect and spend some time closer to the mountains as I start my forty-fourth year on this planet.

Earlier today I saw a friend post about layoffs.

In my last post, The Uncertain Future of Coding Careers (and Why I’m Still Hopeful), I wrote about something I’ve always found exciting as a developer: working myself out of a job so I can work myself into the next one.

I was drowning in meetings, losing track of decisions, and manually typing notes I never revisited.

2006, Chicago.

I recently rebuilt jonmagic.com from the ground up with help from GitHub Copilot, transforming it from a boring about page into a real blog and migrating over 100 posts from my old blog.

A friend of mine, bright, driven, and relatively new to programming, asked me a heavy question the other day.

It’s that time of year again and I’m asking for peer feedback and writing feedback for teammates and realized I’ve learned a few things about this process over the years that I think are worth sharing. # Asking for peer feedback A close teammate and friend

This year flew by with a couple life changing family events, several projects shipped at work, and a lot of learning. # Family We took two family trips to Florida this year to visit Natalie’s parents.

Ten years ago I started programming professionally and now I’m a Senior Engineer at GitHub.

It is interesting to study the gap between the intention of communication and the perception of communication in the context of leadership.

In college I learned how to do a SWOT analysis and I’ve been using it in one form or another at work and in my personal life ever since.

I’ve never been good at New Years resolutions but this year has been different.

GitHub launched the Atom beta this week and the response has been great.

Almost two years ago a friend and my wife saved my life.

The past few months I have been building a new team at GitHub focused on solving problems for our business teams.

Hi, my name is Jon.

We just finished shipping a six month long milestone on one of our support tools at GitHub.

In the past month I’ve had the opportunity to present this talk twice, first in London England and then in Verona Italy.

As my plane broke through the clouds, descending into Verona, my eyes were met with seemingly endless farm land, a patchwork quilt, broken up by small patches of trees and wandering erratic roads. # Day 1 We landed at the small airport and for the first t…

I’m really excited to let you know that we’ve added full-screen support to presentations on Speaker Deck.

Ever since Hubot was released I’ve been regular expressing myself.

While working on an internal app at GitHub I had to write a cucumber scenario that ran expectations against a new tab that was opened.

It has been a month since Ordered List was acquired by GitHub and our team of 5 joined their team of 50, and it hasn’t sucked at all.

This year I authored several RubyGems and just this week finally learned how to work with a contributor.

Today I hacked together an easy to use gem for accessing the Gauges API.

Today the whole crew from Ordered List joins GitHub!

While I initially had issues with the concept of Finish Weekend, I’m really glad I participated and believe everyone involved is better off for it. # The Who My friends at Collective Idea have apparently been talking about doing a Finish Weekend for a few…

How you can give Siri her very own robot brother with some help from Heroku and HipChat.

Ok, so now you’ve got your shiny new hubot up and ready to listen to your every command.

We need more mentors.

Building a career as a programmer requires a lot of hard work, determination, and in my opinion a lot of writing.

Looking back at the last two weeks since launching Speaker Deck. # Launching Knowing when to launch a product is a painstaking task and ultimately you are never sure if it’s the right time, but at some point you have to pull the trigger.

We recently ran into issues with certain versions of GhostScript not being able to convert PDFs into images.

When did you start using a Mac?

I struggle with remembering great ideas, not so great ideas, things I want to accomplish, and so much more.

How a product was born, from inception to implementation, and distractions to launch. # Inception Speaker Deck was born in a little Irish bar right around the corner from our offices in South Bend Indiana in May of I was meeting Steve and John for lunch a…