Showing My Code: An Open Response to Elon

If you’re a hardcore software engineer and want to build the everything app, please join us by sending your best work to code@x.com.

We don’t care where you went to school or even whether you went to school or what “big name” company you worked at.

Just show us your code.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2025

That was Elon Musk’s call to arms on X about 6 weeks ago. I threw my hat into the ring the moment I saw it.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone! Haven’t heard back yet, which I arrogantly suppose means Elon just hasn’t dug my email out of the pile yet.

So… let’s think like a software engineer. Assuming my email is actually worth reading, how could I increase its visibility?

An Open Response to Elon

Hi there!

I’m responding to Elon’s call for coders on X.

I am an OLD coder. Been writing software more or less continuously since 1984 (over 4 decades, if you’re counting), with a break here & there to accommodate military service. My degree (I know you don’t care, but I think it’s cool) is in Weapons & Systems Engineering.

My first programming language was FORTH, and I would have to count on my fingers to tell you how many I’ve learned. Dozens, for sure, if you count config & markup. Picking up a new one at this point is meh.

These days I am a full-stack developer. I prefer Node.js on the back end, Next.js on the front end, and Typescript on both. I’m flexible, but I will admit that I have NSFW feelings about type safety.

The last several years of my GitHub profile look like this because I am VERY good at writing DevOps automation:

GitHub contributions in the past year.

Building tools that empower developers (including myself) is my truly happy place.

I’m a big believer in sound engineering principles, design on purpose, and Agile as a living process. I’m obsessive about documentation. I write unit tests because this forces me to write testable code, and testable code is BETTER code.

I know what GOOD looks like.

Here are some of my recent public projects:

• controlled-proxy is a very lightweight, universal dependency injector implemented in Typescript.

• entity-manager implements rational indexing & cross-shard querying at scale in your NoSQL database so you can focus on your application logic. Still a work in progress, tons of documentation here.

• jsonmap is a hyper-generic JSON mapping library.

• metastructure is a config-driven, enterprise-grade, open-source application infrastructure generator that keeps your Terraform DRY as a bone. Documentation wiki here.

• mock-db mocks DynamoDB-style query & scan behavior with local JSON data.

• serify-deserify reversibly transforms unserializable values into serializable ones. Includes Redux middleware.

• serverless-lodash-plugin enables variable expressions in serverless.yml using the full Lodash feature set, plus some extra goodies!

These are mostly back-end stuff. My most significant recent full-stack project is live at VeteranCrowd, but you’ll have to ignore the ugly public home page and create an account to have the full experience! This is a VERY involved FinTech application that integrates a ton of third-party functionality, happy to do a walkthrough if we get that far.

Karmic Rules for Writing Pretty Good Code #3: If you want to get a complex process right, template it. I maintain this highly functional Typescript NPM Package Template, which some have found useful.

If you still haven’t seen enough, visit my blog which is unabashedly technical. Jenkins, if it matters.

I think what you guys are doing is great and I’d love to be a part of it.

Regards,

Jason Williscroft