DEV Community: Peter Witham

I did my part and answered the Dev.to survey I got. Now it's up to anyone else that gets one :) Keep rocking Dev.to!

Peter Witham — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:30:53 +0000

Right app for the right task

Peter Witham — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:30:15 +0000

Yes, you can write with IDE’s. But should you?

I have many apps for many different things and as expected many of those apps can perform many different cross-over tasks.

For example

I can write blog posts in a code editor
I can edit code in a text editor
But the question becomes, does that make the most sense and best use of my time when it comes to working the desired task.

I chose those two examples because they are by far the one that applies to me the most.

I’ll be working away in Zed my code editor of choice over the past couple of years and once that is done, I start working on a post and do it right there.

But, it is a perfectly good text editor that lacks the ability to tune my brain into righting and thinking about the post as I create it. I cannot explain it, that is how it works with me.

On the flip side, when I’m in a text editor (I use a few) my brain locks into content creation mode and not seeing that code file off to the left that I know I need to do work on.

I go into focus mode and see a blank screen with the text I am working on, that is all.

The other advantage to using a dedicated text editor is it helps with my grammar more than a code editor. Which, is a big plus for me and the readers.

As I have said before, spend a while finding the right tools and embrace them. But, try hard to settle and not use more than one for each task.

Must be Friday, I have a sense of hope and freedom from the calendar in my very near future for two days :)

Peter Witham — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:44:24 +0000

Another game dev focused week. Need to ship updates and hope that somebody plays my games to justify the hours spent sweating the small stuff.

Peter Witham — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:43:06 +0000

This weekend is all about performance tuning (or attempting to) my new game before pushing to mobile platforms. Runs great on desktop but I know I can do better on mid to low mobile devices, especially Android.

Peter Witham — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:48:30 +0000

I sat back this week and did no work on my personal projects in favor of hanging out a little more in online communities and it felt great and guilt free.

Peter Witham — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:42:29 +0000

Ah the joy of shipping, my new game MooFO is out on the Web thanks to itch.io and now to complete the standalone. Then, on to the next project! Play for free at https://peterwitham.com/moofo

Peter Witham — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:41:37 +0000

pwitham.itch.io

The curse of learning and discovery has bitten me this week. I watched some great videos for advice on better Godot game architecture and now my about to ship app feels like it needs reworking to "be better". I'm resisting so far and will ship 1.0 as is.

Peter Witham — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:38:11 +0000

Job Finder Tracker iOS Updates

Peter Witham — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:00:15 +0000

I recently released a new update to my Job Finder Tracker for iOS app. This release has the most requested feature by users.

Easy Job creation using ShareSheet!

Watch on YouTube

It’s OK, you can stop cheering now. I know this one has been a while coming, it was more complicated than you might think. Read on!

The Problem

Users have long requested a quick and easy way to add jobs to the app without needing to manually enter all the details.

For example, using any Job app or Website like LinkedIn you find a job that interests you.

It can be time-consuming and often error-prone to copy and paste from the source to the application.

The Solution

I wanted to make sure the solution was as robust as I could make it. That meant not only trying to capture the right data, but also making it work in as many locations as possible.

So I set to work creating a system that avoids scraping the data directly where often it will fail as soon as the site or app is updated. Or in the case of LinkedIn, they have a system that actively tries to prevent scraping most of the time.

Once I had a system that works with as many popular job listing sites as I could find, I also wanted a fallback that worked with the remaining sources. A random URL from the Internet for example.

With the source data taken care of, the next question was how to easily get the data into Job Finder Tracker.

Thankfully this was easy to answer on iOS. Use the Share Sheet and also Shortcuts availability to expose a way for seeing the data the user is about to add.

This gives the user a way to edit or append anything they want before adding the job to their list.

As a bonus, the URL field in a listed job contains the original source location should the user want to refer back to it.

The update is live now in the App Store free for existing and new users can purchase and install.

As a developer, I'm always working on the wrong project according to my brain :). I need to timebox my personal projects, which is something I hoped I would never have to do. Side projects are my freedom from organized chaos.

Peter Witham — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:27:21 +0000

As I near completion of my latest game. I now have to do the hard part and think about the business model: should it go free, should it be paid, should it be an advertising model? This is always the part I try to avoid for as long as possible.

Peter Witham — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:46:28 +0000

The death of future engineering intelligence

Peter Witham — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:35:35 +0000

OK so maybe that is an attention grabber headline, and if it is then great, it should be.

As someone working in technology and responsible for making decisions that affect both consumers and engineering teams, I take my responsibilities seriously.

And that is why I’m concerned about the future of good reliable skilled workers in all industries. But particularly the tech industry.

Warning, this is not a rant against A.I. nor a love letter, it is a reality check for the future

As we have seen if you read any tech news related headlines, videos or podcasts. Engineers are being laid off across the industry. Affecting both seniors and juniors.

Companies are scrambling to adopt A.I. for many reasons including a falsely percieved saving in staff overhead. Think of it as saving a penny today to cost a dollar further down the road.

Not only does this affect peoples lives but it also affects the future skilled work force and project/product deliverables. We are already seeing signs of A.I. built tools taking longer and costing more to maintain and refactor compared to convential development.

There is no question in my mind having used and continuing to use these tools to help me with my work that they are beneficial in the right hands. But when things go wrong it often takes longer to diagnose the problem and fix it. And requires human intervention and understanding, not machines.

As companies reduce the head count of experienced engineers this presents a problem that they have yet to recognise.

If A.I. creates a problem, it does not always know how to solve it. This is where human thinking still wins out, at this time at least.

And if you have no experienced engineers that know the technology,products or systems, how can you expect the problem to be solved? This is a context that goes way beyond well crafted prompts.

Engineers often think outside the box to find solutions or debug a problem, they break the rules to find the problem. Machines only know to follow the rules defined for them.

Even worse, if you allow models to feed themselves on the work they produce then you are slowly building a technical debt of inaccuracy that will eventually destroy it’s self.

We are also seeing companies hire juniors to essentially be button pushers that craft prompts for A.I. to do the real work. On the surface this probably seems like a great idea because it costs less and you can replace people as needed (which is entirely the wrong ethical way to think about this anyway).

This also means juniors will be more expendable than ever, this presents the problem of them improving based on long term experience and learning through failure.

In my view, at least for the forseable future. A.I. tools should be used to continue education and abilities and not viewed as a replacement. I can only hope that sensible argument and discussion wins out over the budget watchers and speed to market company decisions.