Sam Rose (@samwhoo) / X

Sam Rose

19.4K posts

Sam Rose

@samwhoo

That guy who writes visual essays about software at samwho.dev. Developer Educator @ngrokHQ.

Joined August 2009

Pinned
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Dec 26, 2025
Hi 👋 I’m Sam, I create visual essays about programming. My posts from 2025: - samwho.dev/reservoir-samp… - samwho.dev/big-o/ - ngrok.com/blog/prompt-ca… I also appeared on other folks’ websites: - simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/19/sa… - writethatblog.substack.com/p/sam-rose-on-…
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Dec 24, 2024
Hi 👋 I'm Sam, I create interactive visualisations about programming. My posts from 2024: - samwho.dev/bloom-filters - encore.dev/blog/queueing - samwho.dev/turing-machines I also appeared on 2 podcasts : - hanselminutes.com/953/computer-s… - youtube.com/watch?v=ur9clT…
34K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Jan 4, 2024
There are only 2 types of good software. 1. Software made by a company with a clear direction and enough investment to hire great people (Tailscale, Vercel, Linear). 2. Software made by 1 person in 1995 that looks like ass but runs instantly and does exactly what you need.
235K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Jul 22, 2024
If you’ve ever asked “do I need to know math to be a programmer?” I present you: me, 15 years of experience, 4 years as an SRE at Google, relearning what the fuck a polynomial is.
827K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Oct 20, 2025
Strongly dislike when companies do this. Especially companies providing technical infrastructure. You’re not down today, but one day you will be. You work under the same constraints everyone else does. You know how stressful it is when it happens to you. Be better.
Hetzner
@Hetzner_Online
Oct 20, 2025
Guess who’s not down 👀
GIF
234K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Apr 17, 2024
Made a dumb website so I wouldn't have to Google "tm symbol" ever again.
symbol.wtf
symbol.wtf
A dumb website for copying symbols.
100K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Aug 29, 2024
If you really want to be safe doing this stuff I’ve got two words for you: BEGIN TRANSACTION; Everything you do after this won’t take affect until you run COMMIT; Even if you lose the connection, your changes will get rolled back. It’s the ultimate safety net.
Povilas Korop | Laravel Courses Creator & Youtuber
@PovilasKorop
Aug 28, 2024
Friendly reminder. No.1 rule when working with DELETE/UPDATE queries directly in SQL client.
107K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Dec 20, 2024
What does it mean for something to be Turing complete? I answer this question with a series of interactive Turing machine simulations! Play, pause, step forwards and backwards, and even write your own Turing machine programs in my latest blog post. samwho.dev/turing-machine…
00:00
67K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Nov 8, 2025
This is ridiculously well done.
Dithering - Part 1
From visualrambling.space
134K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Jul 24, 2024
List of more stuff I don’t know: - what a virtual DOM is - how a TLS handshake works - what a stub resolver is - how tree shaking works - what it means for something to be “Turing complete” - how CSS stacking contexts work
123K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Oct 22, 2022
Me: “I wonder how Rust is doing as a web frontend language…”
$pub fn main() -> Result<(), JsValue> { let canvas: HtmlCanvasElement = window() .unwrap() .document() .unwrap() .query_selector("canvas") .unwrap() .unwrap() .dyn_into() .unwrap(); let app_state = AppState::default();$
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Jun 15, 2024
I don’t know what tldraw is anymore and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
Adam Janiš
@adam_janis
Jun 14, 2024
It is always DNS... now it's at least pretty aka infrastructure as a @tldraw
00:00
55K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Aug 23, 2025
✨ Big O ✨ Let me take you on a visual introduction to what big O notation is in my new blog post: samwho.dev/big-o. With big O notation you can better understand how algorithms will perform, finding orders of magnitude improvements with very simple changes to your code
00:00
79K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
Jul 12, 2024
This tweet literally changed my life. The last 18 months hinge directly on this tweet.
You’re unable to view this Post because this account owner limits who can view their Posts. Learn more
88K
Sam Rose
@samwhoo
May 22, 2024
✨ I spent 3 months writing the best interactive introduction to queueing I could, and it's live now! I started this on March 1st, and in total have sunk over 70 hours into refining and perfecting it. It starts off showing what happens without queues...
00:00
83K