Alex McRoberts
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alex.mcroberts.me
Alex McRoberts
@alex.mcroberts.me
Director, AI Engineering at Hootsuite. Previously Damon Motorcycles, Intel, Recon Instruments.

Living in Vancouver. From Belfast

http://alex.mcroberts.me/
Pinned
A while ago I put together a Google Sheet for helping leaders reflect on their strengths and weaknesses.

It uses heuristics from The Complete Leader, and Google’s Project Oxygen.

Ratings are from 1 (low) to 10 (high) and the result is a nice pair of diagrams to identify things to improve.
Optimistic me would hope it’s this. But that’s too soon, surely?!

bsky.app/profile/alex...
November 11, 2025 at 7:55 AM
One thing I’ve noticed lately on Bluesky and I absolutely love.

The amount of people who are instinctively part of the “we can just do things” movement.

Instant follow right here.
November 11, 2025 at 6:38 AM
Currently reading: @sebastianraschka.com’s book on building an LLM from scratch!

Back to Appendix A for me to brush up on PyTorch!

I didn’t take Calculus in High School, so I’ll have some background learning to do there too.
November 10, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Saw this newspaper open in the local coffee shop on the weekend, and it sparked an idea…

@bmann.ca how about a Wild Goose Chase (aka Treasure Hunt) around UBC during #ATmosphereConf
November 10, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Parliamentary/ House / Senate issues could be posted in the same manner as @smokesignal.events

Elected members could have their vote placed on record as Yes, No, Present, Absent.

The platform hosting the votes could attest to the account belonging to the elected member, and attest each vote too.
We should figure out government operated on #atprotocol

#SeaMoThoughts
November 9, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
I LEARNED THE ANSWER TO THIS

Chris's Steakhouse was a New Orleans landmark

Chris Matulich periodically got bored, sold it, waited for the new owner to fail, and bought it back cheap

The sale conditions: Can't move it, can't change the name

He did this six times

Then he sold it to Ruth Fertel
what did ruth mean when she said her steakhouse was "chris"
November 7, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Now with a Bluesky XRPC example too!

tangled.org/@alex.mcrobe...
@alex.mcroberts.me/gocapnweb
Based on https://github.com/nnevatie/capnwebcpp
tangled.org
November 7, 2025 at 12:40 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
This is a joyful thread.
welcome to Yamaha. do you want a piano or a motorcycle?
November 6, 2025 at 11:43 PM
I'm surprised the Lexicon is marked as Uncertain, rather than Maybe Later.

It seems to me to be one of the most valuable parts of the AT ecosystem.
A breakdown of what parts of ATProto the team wants to bring to the IETF #ietf124
November 5, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Easter Egg Alert!

Google Maps and Ford Bronco teamed up to map the TransAmerica Trail – all 5,900 miles of it.

When you visit the 4 Street View scenes link in the article...there's a person dressed in camouflage in frame in 2 of them!

blog.google/products/map...
November 5, 2025 at 5:29 PM
@chartyios.app 👋 do you happen to have a list of the Custom Formats for dates? I just bought the Premium in-app purchase and I can’t find the one I’d like (just the day of the month, but D and DD don’t seem to work)
November 4, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Pushed my first @tangled.org repo this evening: Go Cap' Web.

It's written in Go (and freshly migrated to Svelte – hat tip @mackuba.eu for your Svelte posts lately).

Based on the work of @cloudflare.social and their Cap'n Web RPC protocol.

tangled.org/@alex.mcrobe...
timeline · tangled
tightly-knit social coding
tangled.sh
November 4, 2025 at 6:48 AM
I'd learned about the `-p` flag before mkdir.

TIL: you can provide multiple args for multiple directories, *and* multiple child directories!

Examples

1. mkdir -p dir1 dir2
2. mkdir -p dir1 dir2 dir3/{child1,child2,child3}
November 3, 2025 at 9:21 PM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
Did not expect one of the best paragraphs I’d read about baseball would come from an Irish newspaper

www.irishexaminer.com/sport-column...
November 2, 2025 at 2:22 PM
For a while I’ve been using Cursor to help find Accessibility issues in frontend codebases.

It’s been great for identifying issues, and then remediating them too, for the most part.

Of course, no ARIA labels are better than bad ARIA labels, so it’s worth investing in learning about what works too.
October 31, 2025 at 5:26 PM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
We just crossed it. Yay! Congrats everyone and Happy Halloween!
October 31, 2025 at 8:35 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
40 million strong! Congrats to @bsky.app!
October 31, 2025 at 8:44 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
Just like web performance work, accessibility winds up being less expensive the earlier you implement it. Build accessibility in from the start, rather than bolting it on - make it part of the process.

@marcysutton.com #webperf #PerfNow #a11y
October 30, 2025 at 11:18 AM
On vacation recently a person told me they’ve all in on AI for ages.

However, they meant *All Inclusive*, and being in tech it didn’t quite make sense to me until they explained!
Back in my day, AI used to stand for Adobe Illustrator! And we hated that, too!
October 30, 2025 at 3:25 AM
Well that’s the first half of tonight’s game over. When does the second half start?

Go Jays Go!
October 29, 2025 at 3:07 AM
This umpire is loud

STRIKE
October 29, 2025 at 2:42 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
i'm hiring a 'growth engineer' to work side-by-side with me at val.town in brooklyn

we're a small team on a mission to spread the joy of programming

we're looking for someone self-directed, loves talking to users, write english & typescript, and own projects end-to-end

if this is you, reach out!!
October 28, 2025 at 2:48 PM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
genius plan by the blue jays to run the game so long ohtani is tired tomorrow. four dimensional chess.
October 28, 2025 at 6:57 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
When this game started, this was Vlad Jr.
October 28, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Reposted by Alex McRoberts
Fun fact the time between now and the beginning of this game is the same as between the beginning of this game and the construction of the pyramids
October 28, 2025 at 4:47 AM