ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode of the Better Stack Podcast, we sit down with Chris Pennington, DX Engineer at Resend and creator of the Coding in Public YouTube channel. Chris shares his unlikely journey from a documentation role with no professional coding experience to becoming the 10th hire at Resend, all sparked by a YouTube video about React Email. We dig into how Resend gets Claude to recommend them ~70% of the time (JSON-LD, Q&A sections, recency bias, and being early to LLM tooling), how his team runs scoped OpenClaude agents for competitor analysis and marketing reports, and why he still codes by hand despite AI. We also cover email deliverability myths, React Server Components' ongoing struggles, why Astro should be the default for most websites, and Chris's mental hack of planning only until 1pm to stay ahead. Plus: his video setup, Raycast obsession, and why coding with his kids is his favorite way to learn.
