Jacob Thornton
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Jacob Thornton
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Right now, Jacob Thornton is "building a new git platform" over at Pierre, where he's both founder and CEO. The idea is to have everything engineers might need to service an idea, from conception to live preview, in one package. But Jacob has been doing software development in the Bay Area for a decade.
"In a past life" he adds, "I was an early employee at the likes of Twitter, Medium, and Coinbase." Thornton also contributed to several large open source projects like Mootools and most notably Bootstrap, where he was also a co-creator— the Twitter client helped users digest information in a way that was less of an assault on the senses, provisioning for dark color tables, varied typography, adjusted navigation, and other quality of life improvements. Much of Thornton's career has been geared toward scalable solutions that better enact the desires of the user— Pierre itself isn't open-source, but the engineering platform boasts everything a product team could need. "It's simple, fast, and integrates well with everything else I use," Jacob says.
With all he has going on, we're grateful that Jacob took some time to share the 10 things he can't live without. The first two, obviously, are coffee and his laptop.
"I'm obsessed with Ain't Normal— this coffee shop in Oakland. I don't even like coffee," Jacob says. "But I have a toddler and a startup and this is the best place I have found to drink it!"
As for his work station, well, there isn't one, at least not in the traditional sense— "I love talking about desktop setups, but sadly, I hate working from a desk." While some devs may opt for a curated suite of gadgets or a chair with the perfect ergonomics, Jacob prefers his laptop and the freedom of rolling around on the ground or "sitting in some horrid position for hours" as he wrestles with a hard problem.
Jacob is still chewing over his relationship to Twitter, but it's the best way to both doom scroll and feel like he's working— "the dev community is fragmented across Twitter, TikTok, and 10 different Twitter clones." He adds that "[Twitter] is a good place to track hype cycles but the more you engage with it, the more it shows you the same thing." Hacker News is less gamified, but can be its own kind of "toxic dumping ground," according to Jacob. "It's like an even meaner version of Twitter, which is unfathomable to me. Despite this, I keep coming back."
Jacob admits that his organization is "...chaotic neutral," and notes that his team uses Notion as a bit of a "scratch pad or dumping ground" where people write stuff. What stuff? "Anything, really. I honestly feel like I'm always using Notion wrong, but I love the emojis."
His workflow, however, is rather streamlined: the Pierre team would have their Monday meeting on Discord where they plan for the week; Linear is where they'd chunk out and prioritize work; and Figma is where the design happens. Jacob adds that the "real time nature" of Discord helps Pierre interact with its community on a consistent basis, helping work through bugs and discussing ideas before they're developed.
While Pierre ties all of his tools together, it's perhaps Vercel that's the most notable of Jacob's essentials: "we're building with Next.js so Vercel is an inevitability in a lot of ways. For us it's a hosting platform that makes deployments super trivial. It has baked in previews. And it's built to work with the bleeding edge of web development."