Ty Smith
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Ty Smith
@tysmith.me
Principal Engineer at Uber - AI, Dev Productivity, Mobile, & Open Source

Advisor, Investor, Founder, GDE, Public Speaker & Open Source Foundations

Formerly at Twitter (Fabric), Evernote.

@tsmith from Twitter
tysmith.me
Reposted by Ty Smith
GREAT example by Yuan

Games is actually a fantastic example of what happens when you remove the obstacle that everyone thought was the biggest hurdle in building a game: needing to build a game engine

Easier to build games… still very hard to build great games!
June 27, 2025 at 12:57 AM
Gen Z with their hip email signatures like "Would you like a slightly more persuasive version or one that sounds even more casual?"
June 27, 2025 at 12:58 AM
The video for using Agents, LLMs, and LSC techniques to migrate Java to Kotlin for Uber's Android apps from @kotlinconf.com is now public.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PN...

#Kotlinconf
Large Scale Changes with AI – Migrating millions of lines of Java to Kotlin at Uber | Ty Smith
YouTube video by Kotlin by JetBrains
www.youtube.com
June 22, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
🚀 The Kotlin Foundation Annual Report 2024 is here!

🔹 2.5M+ developers coding in Kotlin
🔹 $182K+ invested in ecosystem growth
🔹 Student contests, grants and open-source contributions

Check out the full report to learn more and see what’s next! 👇
📖 kotlinfoundation.org/news/annual-...
The Kotlin Foundation Annual Report 2024
Kotlin Foundation – protect, promote and advance the development of the Kotlin programming language.
kotlinfoundation.org
February 18, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
@tysmith.me had some fantastic predictions. He has a front seat view at how engineering is changing in real time, given his influential role at Uber.

You'll find his thoughts here - jetpackcomposeapp.beehiiv.com/p/dispatch-i...

Not available in the main site yet so use this link in the meantime
February 12, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Thanks for including my insights on the future of Android in the latest issue of Dispatch, @vinaygaba.bsky.social !

www.jetpackcompose.app/newsletter
JetpackCompose.app's Dispatch: Get Smart About Android & Jetpack Compose
Keeping up with the Android Development landscape can be hard. Dispatch makes it easy, entertaining and rewarding. It's a newsletter that delivers just the bytes that matter.
www.jetpackcompose.app
February 12, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Some great opportunities to push the Kotlin ecosystem forward in this year's Google Summer of Code with Kotlin. Several will have you working closely with my team. kotlinlang.org/docs/gsoc-20...
Google Summer of Code with Kotlin 2025 | Kotlin
kotlinlang.org
February 11, 2025 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
I was at @evernote.bsky.social when they started migrating to React Native in 2018. Against all advice from tech leads the SVP of engineering (coming from Amazon) pushed through. The quality of the Android app went downhill over the years not only performance wise.
February 7, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
*sniff* i cry every time

youtu.be/Nuz6iNjTkjo?...
Hallelujah (but it's Baby Got Back) - FULL SONG
YouTube video by There I Ruined It
youtu.be
January 30, 2025 at 2:53 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
** It's happening!! **

We managed to convince Google to open source PebbleOS. Took a while, but they just did it today! github.com/google/pebble

With that, we're bringing Pebble back! I blogged about it - ericmigi.com/blog/why-wer...
Why We’re Bringing Pebble Back
Eight years later, you still can’t beat a Pebble
ericmigi.com
January 28, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote
theonion.com/new-squ...
January 26, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
adrian dittman is elon musk confirmed
January 3, 2025 at 12:20 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
There are 21 million Black people in the US.

Fewer than 6% of us earn over $100K a year.

The median net worth of Black households fluctuates between about $20K and $40K, depending on how much scamming happens that year (eg crypto, asset forfeiture).

Black. People. Are. The. Working. Class.
December 29, 2024 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
More to say on burnout and I'm probably going to boost it a few times because folks need to hear it:

Burnout is a form of brain damage. It happens when stress conditions persist until they damage our brains.

It's an injury that needs to heal, not a weakness that needs to be pushed through.
Man burnout can mess you up for a very long time.

And it can sneak up on you: things can seem stressful but mostly manageable until suddenly they're not manageable.

Self care and vacation are great, but they're guardrails: they don't help when you've already fallen in.
December 13, 2024 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
Benchmarking can be tricky! In this blog post, I show an example of how easy it is to get the wrong results and how to fix it: www.romainguy.dev/posts/2024/y...
You Are Going to Need It
Optimizing code can be a difficult task because there are so many traps you need to avoid at every step of the way. Today I want to focus on one of the (numerous) benchmarking traps, which you may hav...
www.romainguy.dev
December 13, 2024 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Ty Smith
Will I understand Luigi's Manifesto if I haven't played Luigi's Mansion?
December 11, 2024 at 2:08 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
Of course archive.org has it and the worse offender is … United Healthcare.

archive.is/czb76
archive.is
December 9, 2024 at 4:18 AM
I’m building out Uber's first dedicated Kotlin Language platform team in our Amsterdam office to make Kotlin first class across Bazel, IDE, LSPs, Android, KMP, AI language migrations, backend services, and to help in our Kotlin Foundation particiption.

Apply here: www.uber.com/careers/list...
Staff Software Engineer, Kotlin - Amsterdam, Netherlands | Uber Careers
Apply to the Staff Software Engineer, Kotlin position on the Uber Engineering team, based out of the Uber Amsterdam, Netherlands office.
www.uber.com
December 4, 2024 at 9:34 PM
Traveling in Japan and still incredibly annoyed that Google doesn’t enable FeliCa for Pixel phones sold outside of Japan, even though the hardware exists and can be used under root.

Brought my test iPhone just for easy Suica cards in Apple Pay.

github.com/jjyao88/unlo...
GitHub - jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel: Unlock Felica on non-Japanese Pixel devices that you can use Felica cards in Japan!
Unlock Felica on non-Japanese Pixel devices that you can use Felica cards in Japan! - jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel
github.com
December 4, 2024 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
This is so on point. So many use cases are barely working reliably (if that) with state of the art models and non-deterministic operations makes testing a beast.

I cannot begin to imagine trying to build apps on anything that's not top of the line.
The first bullet point is "it's cheaper." That only matters once you've built something successfully and need to scale it. First, you need to figure out whether a thing is even possible, THEN you figure out how to optimize the economics, generally speaking.
December 4, 2024 at 12:34 AM
December 2, 2024 at 10:06 AM
@danabra.mov the Bluesky language translate experience isn't super great right now. I assume you're trying to avoid Google translate api costs by forcing a web link.

Consider the MLKit translate SDKs (free and on device translations) and then do web fallback.

developers.google.com/ml-kit/langu...
Translation  |  ML Kit  |  Google for Developers
developers.google.com
December 2, 2024 at 12:37 AM
Reposted by Ty Smith
Optimist: the cup is half full

Pessimist: the cup is half empty

Red Team: We replaced it with decaf.
optimist: the cup is half full

pessimist: the cup is half empty

me: which one of you bastards drank half my coffee
November 25, 2024 at 3:37 AM
Personally, 2024 was finally the year of Linux on the desktop. After years of dual booting (mostly for gaming), I've been running Universal Blue images (atomic distro based on Fedora Silverblue) all year without issue. Modern game tech, enthusiast hardware, & game compat on launch are pretty good.
Universal Blue - Powered by the future, delivered today
Universal Blue is a diverse set of images using Fedora Atomic's OCI support as a delivery mechanism. That's nerdspeak for the ultimate Linux client!
universal-blue.org
November 23, 2024 at 4:33 PM