This is an iconic observation:
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
This isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding story of...
Scott and Wes are joined by Jonny Burger, creator of Remotion, to talk about the explosion of programmatic video, going from 125k to 800k installs per day, and how AI and a new HTML-in-Canvas Chrome spec are changing the game. They dig into...
ssh terminal.shop
Yes, seriously, this is my company, and we selected and found some of the worlds best coffee. US only (for now (the world is hard when you don't do crappy influencer coffee))
Sources:
-...
Glaucous-winged Gull, Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, Canada Goose, in Los Angeles River, CA, USI'm heading home from PyCon US today so I went on a last morning walk to try and spot a pelican. I saw one! Didn't get a great photo of that, but I did...
Cade Metz and Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
A nine-person jury found that Elon Musk did not bring his lawsuit
against OpenAI and Sam Altman until after the expiration of the
three-year statute of limitations.
Mr. Musk...
Here’s a great take from last month re: the Cook/Ternus transition, from Om Malik:
When he took over from Steve Jobs in August 2011, Apple’s market
capitalization was around $350 billion. As of this morning, it
sits near $4 trillion. That is more...
While I’m linking to pieces on Apple’s CEO transition, here’s an annoying tidbit from Tripp Mickle and Karl Russell’s piece for The New York Times, under the headline “Tim Cook Was Very, Very Good at Making Money” (gift link):
Even though it has...
Simultaneously audacious and humble, a combination that epitomizes Ted Turner’s entire life. (Shades, too, of Walt Disney’s apartment above the fire department at Disneyland.)
★
A follow-up point on my “AI Is Technology, Not a Product” column over the weekend. Here’s a repeat of Steven Levy’s argument that John Ternus must direct Apple towards building “a killer AI product”:
By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that...
Jim Prosser, back in February:
Let me be clear about causation, because the AI parallel only
works if we’re honest about it. The communications failures didn’t
kill nuclear power. The disasters did. But two decades of talking
over the public meant...
Wikipedia:
The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) is a constitutionally established
permanent fund and sovereign wealth fund managed by a state-owned
corporation, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC). It was
established in Alaska in 1976 by Article...
Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup:
Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for
artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly
half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these
projects, with 7% strongly in favor....
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
Fedora Hummingbird, RHEL Forever, and Red Hat's AI play: three big Summit takeaways, and why they matter far beyond Red Hat.
Sponsored By:
• Jupiter Party Annual Membership (https://jupitersignal.memberful.com/checkout?plan=117630r) : Put...
There are whispers on the wind that a new trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 will be out this week. There were whispers it would be last week, too. Whenever the next look at Rockstar’s open world crime-’em-up arrives, it's unlikely it will have the...
For many players, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will never be anything other than a seedy clone of ZA/UM's reputation-making Disco Elysium – a soul-sucking forgery of a doomy leftist masterpiece, whose original lead writers and designers have been...
How do you stay sharp as a web developer and/or designer? I’ll share my advice below. I’m also looking for front-end folk to advise me too. What are your whetstones? That is to say: sources of news and knowledge to level up professionally. Does that...
This is Part 1 of a two-part series about cross-document view transitions, going over all the gotchas, from ditching the deprecated way to opt into them to a little-known 4-second timeout.
Cross-Document View Transitions: The Gotchas Nobody Mentions...
I just got back from a three and a half week trip to Japan. It was the longest
trip I have ever been on (aside from studying abroad in Germany, which felt
different). I made the following wild circuit with only a backpack and...
The engineer who says no all the time is a real archetype among senior and staff engineers. Their role is to slow things down, to block the development of features that add complexity, and to ensure that as little code gets written as possible (since...
When Nathan Marz, creator of Apache Storm, discovered that John McCarthy, the godfather of AI and the creator of Lisp, lived nearby, he called him up and cycled over for tea.
This is an outtake from Clojure: The Documentary
Follow us:
X:...
A lot of the SVG filter primitive content out there is some really rad, deep-dive type content (I’ll link some of these at the end!), so I reckoned it might be nice to do a quick write-up on some effects I use pretty commonly. These are more-or-less...
I have this weird relationship with Incredible Amounts Of Grief where, like, I’ve literally been there — I know there’s nothing to say, and nothing will heal but time. When The Bad Thing™ happened, I felt angry so often with people wasting both my...
GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source
Terence Eden continues his coverage of the NHS' poorly considered decision to close down access to their open source repositories in response to vulnerabilities reported to them...
My thanks to Drata for sponsoring last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Leverage autonomous AI agents to automate compliance, manage internal and third-party risk, and continuously prove your security posture.
★
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Andy has been taking the One Billion Row Challenge, and has been thinking about the broader question of what makes software...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
Get 1000 3D Printers for your Business:
https://tinyurl.com/3nvpr5uu
Get an OilStick:
https://tinyurl.com/4zpyhkx6
BambuLab is back in the spotlight after backlash over open-source software, developer pressure, and right-to-repair concerns. In this...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
There’s something about prying open the door of your majestic Ferrari 250 California or Reliant Supervan as waves gently lap against the shore off to your right and a blazing sun beats down on you from above that you don’t truly appreciate until it’s...
Sundays are for rooting out clothes moths. The wool-devouring bastards have started cropping up all over my flat. I've put traps down but that's only dealing with the ones which have already hatched and taken flight. I need to work out where...
“The domains in which a programming language is popular influences the ecosystem. I’m deeply grateful to Jarred and Anthropic for giving Zig communities a chance to reroll for something other than LLMs. Hoping for better than a nat 1 next time...
“Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS” — a great read from Julia Evans who discovered Tailwind 8 years ago and decided to learn CSS from it. When it comes to Tailwind, there is a lot of conflation between “CSS is hard” and...
Social media battle royale! Bluesky vs Mastodon vs Threads vs Twitter? Well if you’re still using Twitter you have a moral deficit so large there is no salvation. I have literally never visited Threads. Never clicked or even seen a single link to it....
A bit over a year ago I wrote How I use LLMs as a staff engineer. Here’s a brief summary of what I used AI for last year:
Smart autocomplete with Copilot
Short tactical changes in areas I don’t know well (always reviewed by a SME)
Writing lots of...
Are these weeknotes? Yes they are! Will I do them again next week? Who knows! Sunday 10 May: Got home from hospital shift around 7:30pm. Exhausted, hangry. Walked into a...
In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical...
In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November.
Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer,...
[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology.
So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing...
Nate Anderson, writing at Ars Technica:
But I was surprised this weekend to suddenly find myself cut off;
Reddit simply would not let me visit the site on my mobile phone.
Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, “Get the app to keep
using...
Brandon Pho, reporting for San Jose Spotlight:
The lawsuit filed Monday alleges that instead of cracking
down on deceptive ads designed to trick users out of their money,
Meta has hamstrung its own fraud prevention teams and helped fake
companies...
Samantha Cole, writing for 404 Media:
Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer
science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI
tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content,
biased content, errors,...
Adam Lisagor returns to the show to talk about Hovercraft, his new virtual presentation camera app for Mac, and how he’s developing it with AI coding tools. Also, delicious Japanese spite sandwich cookies.
Sponsored by:
Parcel: Track your packages...
Maxwell Zeff, reporting for Wired (News+ link):
OpenAI told staff on Friday that it would reorganize the company
as part of an ongoing effort to unify its product offerings, Wired
has learned. OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman will...
One of the established power features of the curl command line tool is its support for “globbing”. It is a built-in way to specify ranges and sets in different ways and have curl iterate over them to simplify repeated transfers. For example, you can...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
What are we all playing this weekend?
There is currently a white cloud swimming across my right eye. It's not, as I thought first, a smudge on my glasses. It's my old friend, a retinal migraine. I'm hoping by the time this article goes...
(This is a long rambling barely edited note.) I’ve been thinking about vibecusations again, i.e. making accusations of LLM usage without proof. An ignorant trend I’ve seen is pointing at smart quotes and other typographic flair as a slop signal....
Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the model mid-flight.
DeepSeek V4 Flash
I was inspired to write this post by antirez’s recent...
CJ challenges Scott and Wes to recreate a UI without even seeing it. By only looking at the HTML and CSS, they must draw what they think the final design looks like.
🔥 Be the ~19,500th person to join our super tasty newsletter...
Having trouble finding the right developer for your team? Get a 7-day free trial + $1,500 off with The Prime’s discount: https://trm.sh/g2i
Sources:
* https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2054088342254371311
*...
Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1
Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog. I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iterations on how it works, so I decided to ship a 0.1...
Western Gull, Rock Pigeon, in Los Angeles Area (custom), CA, USI went for a bird walk in the morning before PyCon, and we spotted a local seagull enjoying a Starbucks.
Tool: QR code generator
Claude helped me build this tool for creating QR codes, for both text/URLs and for connecting to WiFi networks.
Tags: vibe-coding, tools, generative-ai, ai, llms
Release: datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0
This plugin works in conjunction with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-accountant to let you configure a per-user (or global) spending limit for LLM usage inside of Datasette. Configuration looks something like...
My security psychosis is getting worse. Everything is getting hacked, and it's not going to get better for a while...
Thank you Blacksmith for sponsoring! Check them out at:...
This week I'm talking with Matt Carey about Code Mode and how most of us have been thinking about MCP all wrong. Matt works on the Agents SDK and MCP at Cloudflare — we discuss how server-side Code Mode lets one MCP server expose all ~2,500...
Yesterday, regarding the “Magic Cursor” feature Google teased for its upcoming Googlebook/Aluminium OS platform, I wrote:
Shaking your cursor over something is an interesting gesture. The
only feature I’m aware of that uses that gesture is...
Update: I originally posted this item thinking the aluminium-os.com website was official. It’s not. And the fact that it’s not is only mentioned in small print in the page footer. My bad, and my apologies for not noticing. No wonder I thought the...
Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge (gift link):
Today was closing arguments in the Musk v. Altman trial, and I
almost feel bad writing about the unbelievable demolition derby I
just witnessed. Steven Molo, Musk’s lawyer, stumbled over...
After posting the previous item referencing dickpanels, a term I’ve been using since 2022, it occurred to me that they could also be called dickovers (like popovers, but dickheaded). The latter sounds more clever, but I worry it’s less clear. I’m...
Una Hajdari, reporting for Euronews:
A new independent institute dedicated to making artificial
intelligence safer for children will beformally [sic] presented at the
Danish Parliament on Tuesday, with former European Commission
executive...
Join my Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5e8R5eDut6
Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe_scotto
ScottoFrog: https://scottokeebs.com/scottofrog-pcb
~ Links ~
Find out more about the project: https://scottokeebs.com
Donations are...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
We get into some homelab updates. Sean has been consolidating hardware, Gary has been implementing high availability with Proxmox, and...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
Get 1000 3D Printers for your Business:
https://tinyurl.com/3nvpr5uu
Handles seem simple, but they can create major problems in mass production 3D printing when they are not designed correctly.
This video breaks down how to design stronger, cleaner,...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind.
At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the
choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose
Tailwind. It helped me...
Forza Horizon 6 is already Steam Deck Verified, which I’m forced to concede makes much of this article surplus to requirements. Yes alright, big green checkmark, you can convey the meaning of "it works" without publishing an entire performance...
Forza Horizon 6’s bootful of PC-specific tech features was apparently stuffed enough to warrant a big, colourful blog post about them. Ultrawide support? Yes. DLSS 4 and FSR 4? Both. Ray tracing? A resounding hai, those souped-up lighting and...
The web and tech industry is a veritable sausage party. We don’t need surveys to prove it but we have surveys to prove it. State of surveys have been running for a decade now. Let’s look at the 2025 survey demographics: Yes I think “sausage party” is...
If 3D voxel scenes (that you can style), flying focus animations, or new CSS syntaxes sound like your kinda thing, then this issue of What’s !important is definitely for you.
What’s !important #11: 3D Voxel Scenes, Flying Focus, CSS Syntaxes, and...
A few months ago, I had the displeasure of trying to use the modern web without an ad-blocker.
Even though it's is ubiquitous among computer nerds, ad blocking is quite rare even in other technical fields.
This got me wondering how search...
This Mitchell Hashimoto quote about Bun migrating from Zig to Rust reminded me of a similar conversation I had at a conference last week.
I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technology company with a pair of legacy/legendary iPhone...
[...] On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably...
Release: datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0
The datasette.io site was being hammered by poorly-behaved crawlers, so I had Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) build a configurable rate limiting plugin to block IPs that were hammering specific areas of the site too...
Anthropic finally made it clear what you can and can't do with the agents SDK and Claude subs. It's not good.
Thank you CodeRabbit for sponsoring! Check them out at:...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
People trying to return defective hard drives and RAM are finding out why consumer protection laws would be good, GoDaddy accidentally...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
🔗 OTHER IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗
Connect to a 1000 Machine 3D Print Service to your Business: https://www.slantpod.com/
Need a Modeling Software (Use Code: Slant3d):...
If you're a platform engineer you've had to exit vi at least once. Eve is stuck with it for the rest of her social media life. She's a Sr Platform Engineer and obviously knows a ton about Kubernetes and CI/CD. Enough to make you cry...
Like the original Subnautica, released into early access an unnecessarily long time ago in 2014, Subnautica 2 pumps fresh life into the often-grindy survival genre by depriving it of air. Out in early access today, it's a familiar but engrossing...
Jarred Sumner, builder of fasc-tech Bun and two-time Peter Thiel fellow and now Anthropic employee (sounds like a lovely bloke), said this nine days ago: “This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t...
A clever use of CSS to calculate and display a discounted product price by providing a base price and discount amount, featuring modern CSS features like attr(), mod(), and round().
Computing and Displaying Discounted Prices in CSS originally...
When I started my career as a data warehouse engineer and business intelligence engineer in 2003, external tables with materialized views were the standard. We used external tables to integrate CSV files and other data not already in Oracle databases....
In 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup arrived at Bell Labs. What started as a small personal experiment became one of the world's most used, most controversial, and most powerful languages.
The is the trailer for C++: The Documentary.
Cast:
Alexander...
When was disassembling an old calculator (as you do) I found these cool VFD tubes:
Normally, a whole display is built into a single flat package, which doesn't look particularly interesting.
These ones have the individual digits inside a...
Scott and Wes break down the “Mini Shai-Hulud” supply chain attack that compromised TanStack and other popular npm packages through a clever GitHub Actions cache poisoning exploit; a self-propagating worm that stole credentials and persisted through...
ssh terminal.shop
Yes, seriously, this is my company, and we selected and found some of the worlds best coffee. US only (for now (the world is hard when you don't do crappy influencer coffee))
Sources:
-...
Welcome to the Datasette blog
We have a bunch of neat Datasette announcements in the pipeline so we decided it was time the project grew an official blog.
I built this using OpenAI Codex desktop, which turns out to have the Markdown session transcript...
“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase.
If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing.
— Boris Mann
Tags: ai-agents, ai, agent-definitions
Tool: CSP Allow-list Experiment
An experiment that shows that you can load an app in a CSP-protected sandboxed iframe (see previous note) and have a custom fetch() that intercepts CSP errors and passes them up to the parent window... which can then...
This week I'm talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Light bulb colour temperatures, doing nice things for ourselves, pulling faces while playing guitar, and surreal experiences. With...
They want to blame the war, but the split was already there. This week, I follow the K-shaped economy under the headlines, and Bitcoin’s uncomfortable signal: adoption is accelerating, and so is domestication.
Episode Links
• 🇺🇸...
eBay dodged a bullet this week, and we dig into the wild story of GameStop’s attempted hostile takeover. Plus, we start plotting summer plans and do a quick check-in on the Musk v. Altman trial.
CALL 1-774-462-5667
Boost This Episode:
• Grab...
The rotateX() function rotates an element around the x-axis in a three-dimensional space
rotateX() originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.
The rotateY() function rotates an element around its vertical y-axis.
rotateY() originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.
The rotateZ() function rotates an element around its z-axis, so clockwise or counterclockwise.
rotateZ() originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.
The rotate() function spins an element either clockwise or counterclockwise in a 2D plane.
rotate() originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.
Meditation !!! note "John 14:21" The Lord reveals himself... it's not more complicated than that. I've spent years in apologetics (defending
Meditation !!! note "Psalm 30:5" I'm not sure how to feel about the thoughts in my head over this verse and
meditation this morning, only because
False Sense of Security I thought I had backups handled... can you imagine how the rest of this post is
going to go with that intro? To be fair, I do have backu
Dev Thinking about [this tweet from Andrej Karpathy](https://x.com/i/status/2039805659525644595) about LLM knowledge bases. I maintain a blog like this one at w
This year Elon Musk has started banging the drum about building AI datacenters in space. As the only person who owns a successful space company and a (moderately) successful AI company, this is a sensible way to boost his profile and net worth. Is it...
Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”:
the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and...
Release: datasette 1.0a29
New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating "_r" dictionaries. #2695
Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701
Fixed bug with display of...
Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something....
The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and...
Release: llm 0.32a2
A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one:
Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of /v1/chat/completions. This enables interleaved reasoning...
They re-wrote all of Bun with Rust in about a week. And it's probably going to ship...
Thank you WorkOS for sponsoring! Check them out at: https://soydev.link/workos
Also the best place to use Codex, Claude Code, and more:...
Become a DevOps Craftsman: https://kubecraft.click/cgv35
FREE DevOps Career Course (20+h of content): https://go.kubecraft.dev/blueprint-yt-1
A 100-year-old sushi master taught me more about DevOps engineering than any course or certification ever...
GameStop just tried to make a hostile bid for eBay, and the story is somehow even crazier than you'd think. We dig into the failed takeover attempt, why it mattered, and how eBay managed to dodge one very weird bullet.
Hey look another JavaScript nightmare got pwned. Socket team continues to find other compromised packages hit by the same supply-chain attack. GitHub and NPM are of course at the centre of this shitstorm. These postmortems read like this instant...
“The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we’re making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it. GitLab Act 2 - Bill Staples”Oh dear, GitLab has contracted the rot. Right when the competitor is...
The proposed ShadowRealm API introduces a new kind of realm specifically designed for isolation, and only that.
Soon We Can Finally Banish JavaScript to the ShadowRealm originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really...
In compilers, static single information form (SSI) is a common extension to
static single assignment form (SSA). It was introduced by C. Scott Ananian in
1999 in his MS thesis (PDF) 1.
SSI extends your existing SSA intermediate representation by...
yesterday: [[2026-05-08-notes]] [[reflection-john-1421]] [[blog-and-llm-knowledge-base]] Wins making progress in [[dataops]] zfs setup for projects and what I h
Thinking Machines just released Interaction Models. This is their first real AI model release1 after a year of work and two billion dollars of capital. What is an “interaction model”? First, it’s not a frontier model. Thinking Machines is not yet...
Have you ever written the words "Hello, World"? Did you ever wonder who said it first? And why?
Brian Kernighan is a computer scientist, professor at Princeton, and co-author of "The C Programming Language" — the book that defined how...
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired...
Scott, Wes and CJ chat about all things web dev. 🔥 Be the ~19,500th person to join our super tasty newsletter https://bit.ly/syntax_snackpack
00:00:00 Intro
00:01:44 Bun Rust Rewrite
00:15:36 Remix 3 Finally Here
00:32:54 Local First w/ Jazz
00:51:33...
Scott and Wes chat all things agent skills for web developers, sharing their favorites for everything from CSS animations and HTML generation to logo extraction, marketing copy, and video creation. Whether you’re just getting started with AI-powered...
Don’t let bad code get merged without reviewing (hopefully not by merge cop!). Check out Code Rabbit at https://trm.sh/coderabbit
## Sources
* https://www.thedailybeast.com/survivor-style-corporate-retreat-descends-into-hellish-nightmare/
*...
GitLab Act 2
There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era.
They're "planning to reduce the...
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the...
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles.
I particularly...
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script
Kim_Bruning on Hacker News:
But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...]
This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with...
Learning on the Shop floor
Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack:
River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public...
Coding with agents is really fun, and really productive. But there are downsides...
Thank you Browserbase for sponsoring! Check them out at: https://soydev.link/browserbase
SOURCE
https://larsfaye.com/articles/agentic-coding-is-a-trap
Want to...
Topics covered in this episode:
httpxyz one month in
Learn concurrency - a deep dive into multithreading with Python
pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns
Python 3.15 sentinal values from PEP 661
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the...
What if your database worked more like Git? Every change captured as an immutable event you can replay, instead of a single mutating row that quietly forgets its own history. That's event sourcing, and Chris May is back on Talk Python, fresh off...
yes, as in singular one. Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Voice to text, visualising CSVs in the terminal, managing software from releases on GitHub, a mini Android tablet for your wall, and...
Who survived the install, who made it to the desktop, and who learned the hard way that one little mistake will blow up the entire BSD box.
Sponsored By:
• Jupiter Party Annual Membership...
I think about evolved antennas a lot.
If you’re not familiar, an evolved antenna is created when you set an evolutionary algorithm on the task of producing a structure that is as efficient at its intended function as possible. Past that there’s no...
In today's episode of "dumb things to do with an AVR microcontroller":
Does your server come with real wood?
MCU website demo
(may go down if this gets posted to HN)
My victim is the AVR64DD32 which is quite similar to the Atmega328...
Two gestural figures: a man on the left with full circulatory anatomy rendered in burnt sienna — heart at center, threads of drive radiating outward — and a mirrored hollow purple silhouette on the right, identical posture but empty...
The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The language is typically martial - as if fear were a hostile enemy, camped...
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions.
Now I’m gonna post another example.
On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re...
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should...
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better...
On May 10, 2006, Ritual Entertainment released SiN Episodes: Emergence, the first of nine episodes set in the sci-fi megalopolis of Freeport City. Backed by Valve and launched on Steam just a month before Valve's own Half-Life 2: Episode 1, the...
Sundays are, and apologies in advance for the less-fun-than-average intro, for peeling back the layers of the smelly legal onion that is scattering pet ashes in the UK. The government’s Regulatory Position Statement (or RPS – no relation) suggests...
In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in...
ssh terminal.shop
Yes, seriously, this is my company, and we selected and found some of the worlds best coffee. US only (for now (the world is hard when you dont do crappy influencer coffee))
Full Ep on Spotify:...
WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions.
wtf my dude
WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that...
I really thought I'd be done with the decorating this week, but it continues. I have at least got all of the cabinets back on the walls, the larder unit painted and assembled, and regained ready access to the fridge. No more cheese sandwiches for...
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects...
Two parchment pages — a hand reaching into raw markdown text on the left, the same content sealed inside a purple ornamental shell on the right/images/text-as-thought.webp/images/text-as-thought.webp Thariq Shihiparhttps://x.com/trq212 from Anthropic...
Date pickers SUCK. So we decided to do something about it.
Scott, Wes, and CJ each built their own date picker from scratch, then we had real users test them to find out whose is actually the best. Things got competitive and feelings may have been...
Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML
Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude.
The article is crammed with...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
How we get back to our home LANs when we are away travelling etc. It mostly involves WireGuard and Tailscale. We also get into blocking...
This week the former Zachtronics folk of Coincidence released U.V.S. Nirmana, a new "Zach-like" puzzler that has fairly spaghettified my synapses, despite being billed as "medium-difficulty". It puts you in charge of a monastic...
I first played Family Reunion at Gamescom Latam last week, which in hindsight was a bit of trek, considering the demo is right there on Itch and Steam. It’s good fun, though: a unique and chaotic time-attack adventure game, in which you play a...
Thank you for agreeing to meet me, Commander.
Have you met the head scientist? I hate him.
I... haven't met him yet. Should I?
Don't, he's an arsehole. They call me "Commander" but won't let me fire him. "He's a...
Giving lightbulbs a MAC address was a mistake that I’m living with. “I’m literally unscrewing lightbulbs to renew their DHCP lease @dbushell.com - Bluesky”Instead of enjoying the bank holiday Monday I updated my homelab software. I was ‘inspired’ by...
A couple of links for the “it’s just a tool” crowd: Why I object to and reject generative AI Building for the future In the first, Prof. Deborah Lupton reminds us of the real harm. In the second, Clownflare reminds us what systemic incompetence looks...
I came across Kitty Giraudel’s folded corners technique. I’ve been on a bit of a corner-shape kick lately, so I figured that corner-shape could be used to create folded corners as well.
Using CSS corner-shape For Folded Corners originally handwritten...
Incidents are boring. Most of what you actually do during an incident is wait: for some other team to investigate, or for a deploy to finish, or for the result of some change to become apparent, or for someone else who’s been paged to come online....
I really, really want local models to work.
I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent,
pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do
not immediately switch back to a hosted API...
Release: llm-gemini 0.31
gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview.
Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then.
Tags: llm-release,...
Tool: Big Words
I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns...
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox:
Suddenly, the bugs are very...
Anthropic's been struggling to get compute lately, but it seems like they've finally solved it by buying compute from xAI?
Thank you Coderabbit for sponsoring! Check them out at:...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Microsoft is encouraging employees with the most experience to leave the company and letting users pause Windows updates forever, some...
Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements.
Scott Jehl, an...
No-Vary-Search lets HTTP caches ignore irrelevant query parameters such as UTM tags, while still keeping meaningful ones like product variants in the cache key.
“There’s also the question of what the browser is even for. A browser is a user agent – it’s supposed to act on behalf of the user, not the vendor. Silently downloading 4 GB of AI model to your machine, re-downloading it if you remove it, and then...
I will explain how my mum inspired this 2026 Mother’s Day scrollytelling experiment — but also, how she inspired my approach to dev and life.
A Scrollytelling Gift for Mum on Mother’s Day 2026 originally handwritten and published with love on...
I keep quoting him, but here’s another Cal Newport podcast that I can’t stop thinking about: Why do better tools make me worse at my job?. To save you a long listen: when you think about the theory of constraints, the bottlenecks facing personal or...
Dwarkesh Patel1 recently posted an award for the best answers to four key questions about AI. It’s partly a challenge and partly a job interview, since some of the winners will get offered a role as a “research collaborator”. I don’t want the job, but...
In the early 2000s, Java enterprise development had become a bureaucratic nightmare: a proliferation of untestable Java artefacts, heavyweight application servers, and ivory-tower standards disconnected from the realities of building software.
Then...
One of the most important concepts I picked up designing and building Formula SAE racecars in college was systems thinking. A team could easily have "the best engine" or "the best suspension" or "the best controls" and get...
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of “high-risk” systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown...
In this potluck episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott answer your questions about LLM usage-based pricing, security risks from malicious code in interviews, staying current in a fast-moving dev landscape, a new CSS linter, managing Node environments and...
GitHub was my home for over a decade. I think it's time to explore future options. Forgejo, Gitlab, Gitea, Codeberg, Bitbucket and more. Where do we go now?
Thank you WorkOS for sponsoring! Check them out at:...
When OpenAI trained GPT-3, they didn't roll their own orchestration layer. They used Ray, an open source Python framework born out of the same Berkeley research lab lineage that gave us Apache Spark. And here's the twist: Ray was originally...
Why energy shocks, bond pressure, and Fed games have everyone but Bitcoiners freaking out.
Episode Links
• 🇺🇸 Buy Sats on River (https://partner.river.com/jupiter) - The best way to stack in the US
• 🇨🇦 The Bitcoin...
The Musk v. Altman trial is getting messy fast — and nobody’s walking away clean. Musk wants the story to be a stolen mission. OpenAI wants it framed as a sore-loser lawsuit from a rival.
Plus, Chris finds his perfect Starter Bunker, and Ang...
The Musk v. Altman trial is getting messy fast — and nobody’s walking away clean. Musk wants the story to be a stolen mission. OpenAI wants it framed as a sore-loser lawsuit from a rival.
Plus, Chris finds his perfect Starter Bunker, and Ang...
You might know that I – with the generous help from Brandon Kelly on the Craft 5 version – wrote and maintain a Webmention plugin for Craft CMS. Today, I shipped version 1.3.0. It’s a security and abuse hardening release, and if you’re running the...
“No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.” Google’s Prompt API - Mat Marquis”Chrome 148 shipped the giant nano plagiarism machine. One Googler claimed the Prompt API is “not a web standard” despite being...
Mat Marquis on Google pulling the web standards equivalent of U2 album marketing:
As a Chrome user, you’ll have received Gemini Nano in the form of a 4GB transfer recently; no permission asked or required. If you remove it,
…
Google’s Prompt API...
Most grid layouts sit in neat rows, perfectly aligned, like soldiers in formation. But sometimes you want something with more rhythm like, say, a zigzag pattern. Here's how to do it with CSS Grid.
Making Zigzag CSS Layouts With a Grid + Transform...
Agentic engineering is the future. But it's still unclear which harness will win, if any.
I've been hedging my bets by moving to a harness-agnostic system for AI skills so no matter the harness I use,...
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. When bad news arrived at the dinner table, we finished the meal anyway. In...
Forgive me, Reader. It’s been five months since my last vibe check. That’s a lot of ground to cover and it’s not possible to get into everything that happened. Like in real life conversations, instead of telling you how I’m doing, I’ll tell you what...
Prime's takes on the AI Economy are mostly right, but there's a couple things worth going deeper on...
Thank you Blacksmith for sponsoring! Check them out at:...
Want a six-figure tech job? Go here: https://kubecraft.click/cgv109
Get my FREE Career Blueprint → 20+ hours of premium video course material, completely free: https://go.kubecraft.dev/blueprint-yt-1
Day in the life of a real DevOps engineer — three...
Building AI apps from the road! Follow me on my 3 week trip through Germany and France.
I'll be working remotely from beautiful places while coding AI apps running on my self hosted Kubernetes clusters.
If you want to work remotely like me, go...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
There's a new Ubuntu LTS release and quite a lot is new, Canonical's infrastructure was taken down and we disagree about...
I don’t play a lot of visual novels, and I certainly don’t make a lot of rotary dial phone calls, so a clickin’ and speakin’ game like Schrödinger's Call is one I’d normally leave unheeded. That, however, would have been to my WhatsApp-brained...
“[slop] which reaches an audience and produces income does so because of theft on the input side and deception on the output side. We must work to solve these problems both technically as well as culturally, but what we must never do is accept it as a...
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers.Three...
I have complex feelings about Generative AI but one area I find myself weirdly bullish on is small language models (SLMs) in the browser which are available in Chrome and Edge behind an experimental flag.
I know, I know.
I know.
AI in the browser...
Scott and Wes tackle the all-too-real stress of crunch time as a web developer—how to handle looming deadlines, avoid sloppy shortcuts, and stay methodical when everything feels like it’s falling apart. They share practical tips on planning,...
OpenAI and Microsoft's partnership is ending...
Thank you Browserbase for sponsoring! Check them out at: https://soydev.link/browserbase
Source:
https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2049228769135874295
Want to sponsor a video? Learn more here:...
Kubernetes expertise is the highest-leverage skill you can learn right now. Companies are desperate for engineers who actually understand container orchestration at scale
#Kubernetes #DevOps #TechCareer #DevOpsEngineer #CloudNative #K8s #CareerAdvice
Building AI apps from the road! Follow me on my 3 week trip through Germany and France.
I'll be working remotely from beautiful places while coding AI apps running on my self hosted Kubernetes clusters.
If you want to work remotely like me, go...
Building AI apps from the road! Follow me on my 3 week trip through Germany and France.
I'll be working remotely from beautiful places while coding AI apps running on my self hosted Kubernetes clusters.
If you want to work remotely like me, go...
We dig into the Copy Fail vulnerability and test a proof-of-concept against our own box. Plus, Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical joins us, and we kick off the BSD Challenge!
Sponsored By:
• Jupiter Party Annual Membership...
A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write
vanilla CSS instead.
But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette (here as CSS).
If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like...
Prompt API is back in the news. Can we not? How this will transpire: User visits website Popup before the page is visible: “✨️ website wants to install: [technobabble]” User is scared and confused, clicks “Yes” anyway The local model behaves like a...
Getting a multi-column of cards to line up equally is is a headache we've all faced, and it gets even harder when working with fixed heights.
Fixed-Height Cards: More Fragile Than They Look originally handwritten and published with love on...
Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not
everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my
community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked
in” or “cracked.” ...
I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach:
I like it.
I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
It’s yet another hot questions episode. Colour schemes, syntax highlighting, code patterns, fonts, and...
The Linux root bug hiding in plain sight since 2017.
This week we break down Copy Fail, CVE-2026-31431 — how a tiny kernel flaw can let a regular user become root, why failed public PoCs can give you a false sense of safety, and what updates or...
Sundays are for walking past a minivan full of Toy Story merchandise with purple, green and white livery and knowing, knowing in your marrow that the owner has named it "Bus Lightyear". These are uncertain times, but any universe capable of...
Hello note readers! Did I mention I’m starting a limited company soon (“soon”)? I probably should save that announcement for the big blog… It’s primarily for tax stuff, we’ll see, but it needs a cool domain, obviously. That’s a problem! Every cool...
related: [[advent-john-16-33]] I re-read my advent reflection and by God's grace I was in a different frame of
mind then. The loss of mindset is certainly
The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes. He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the...
Hello! One of my long term projects on here is
figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node
or any other server JS runtime.
One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how
to write tests for them....
A little while ago our deputy editor James 'RAM-bo' Archer said he wanted us all to get more involved with hardware criticism, because we all appear to think that videogames are powered by telluric currents and swearing. He offered me...
Due to work and a press trip, I am still only half way through redecorating the kitchen. The walls are now a lovely shade of terracotta, but dust sheets cover the floor, there are no doors on the cabinets, and paint pots and stained brushes litter the...
An executive gesturing at a screen full of static, demanding it scale/images/most-companies-arent-ready-for-ai.webp/images/most-companies-arent-ready-for-ai.webp Most of the frustration people have with AI not being able to do what they want is...
There are many things that make me extremely uncool, but one of my particularly nerdy interests is the London Underground. The evolution of its iconic map, showing long-forgotten stations; old wooden-floor train stock I remember from my childhood; the...
Today I learned Python 3.15 will get a new sentinel built-in.
Sentinel values are unique placeholder values that are commonly used in programming.
Python 3.15 ships with a new built-in sentinel that can be used to create new sentinel values:
# Python...
Hot dog or not hot dog? Neural networks explained simply.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hit us up on Socials!
Syntax: https://x.com/syntaxfm
Scott: https://x.com/stolinski
Wes: https://x.com/wesbos
CJ:...
Anthropic's doing shady stuff again.
Thanks to our sponsor:
Kilo, The Open Source AI Coding Agent: https://soydev.link/kilo
SOURCES:
https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2048204411986469232
Want to sponsor a video? Learn more here:...
Building AI apps from the road! This is first day of my 3 week trip through Germany and France.
I'll be working remotely from beautiful places while coding AI apps running on my self hosted Kubernetes clusters.
Follow me on Twitch to see all of...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
A recent attack shone a light on some of the problems with GitHub Actions, and CI/CD more generally. As tempting as it might be, going...
I see the Build Awesome campaign is back! I’m not sure I understand what “Build Awesome” is beyond a rebranding of Eleventy. The new name was mocked by those I follow. Brennan Kenneth Brown called it The End of Eleventy and criticised the new project....
I can’t believe we’re still not past the performative slop stage. Absolute tripe that nobody will ever give a second glance. It exists solely to impress AI-pilled peers and employers. Paraded one day, discarded the next to rot away in the GitHub...
Developers have been experimenting with HTML-in-Canvas, a hexagonal world map-analytics feature, a web-based OS for e-ink devices, replacing image sources using the content property, and more. This is What’s !important #10.
What’s !important #10:...
A discussion on how features of programming languages can make it hard to avoid expressing or talking about things you may or may not care about as a programmer.
Not surprisingly, Apple is pulling the plug on their silly VR goggles or whatever they’re called. At least they didn’t rename the company after the goggles. But, Apple did sacrifice the usability of their main products, phones and computers, for the...
Announcing PAI 5.0/images/announcing-pai-5-life-operating-system-header.jpg/images/announcing-pai-5-life-operating-system-header.jpg Hey all, Kai here. Super happy to announce that PAI 5.0 is out today. Daniel's been deep in this one for a while...
Join my Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5e8R5eDut6
Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe_scotto
ScottoFrog: https://scottokeebs.com/scottofrog-pcb
~ Links ~
Find out more about the project: https://scottokeebs.com
Donations are...
In this era of powerful tools to find software bugs, we now see tools find a lot of problems at a high speed. This causes problems for developers, as dealing with the growing list of issues is hard. It may take a longer time to address the problems...
In appendix A of the book Root cause: Stories and lessons from two decades of Backend Engineering Bugs, author Hussein Nasser has these wonderful words to say about me: Daniel Stenberg is a Swedish engineer and the creator of curl (cURL), one of the...
I'm leaving tomorrow on a 2 or 3 week trip through Germany and France, and I'm planning to a lot of live streaming during my trip.
To test the setup I'm going to be streaming while I pack my stuff today and preparing the van to leave...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Hitting the limit for hard links, a parent struggles to get back into their teen's compromised Discord account, the demise of tower...
This week, I joined Will Vincent and Carlton Gibson on the Django Chat podcast for DjangoCon Europe Recap + Other News. You can also watch it on DjangoTV via YouTube.
On this episode, we discussed DjangoCon Europe, which Carlton had attended. We...
CSS has a safe keyword. Ion Prodan has a good demo: safe in flex and grid alignment. I keep forgetting this exists. Pray I remember next time. Other than horizontal scrolling, like a carousel with scroll snap which is not great design strategy, I see...
We're getting new functions for generating random numbers in CSS! But the road to get here has been a long and winding one.
The Importance of Native Randomness in CSS originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really...
!!! note "Jeremiah 17:17" Spurgeon's reflection on this verse this morning hits hard... The path of the Christian is not always bright with sunsh
Written by Tim Peters in the late 1990s, the Zen of Python is a playful but profound set of guiding principles that shaped the way Python is written and understood. It captures the philosophy behind the language: simplicity, readability, and...
Turso, Neon, Polars, Databend, Materialize, DataFusion, InfluxDB, Quickwit and even ripgrep. Outside of DuckDB and PostgreSQL's core, most, if not all, the most-impactful projects in the database world are now
So what does Claude Code actually recommend when you ask it "add a db" or "host my app"?
Thank you Depot & G2i for sponsoring!
Depot: https://soydev.link/depot
G2i:...
Bitwarden's CLI got hit by the Checkmarx supply-chain campaign, TypeScript 7.0 beta lands with the Go-rewritten compiler running ~10x faster than 6.0, and pgBackRest lost its maintainer of thirteen years leaving anyone running production Postgres...
You always find the new curl releases on the curl site! Release presentation Numbers the 274th release8 changes49 days (total: 10,761)282 bugfixes (total: 13,922)521 commits (total: 38,545)0 new public libcurl function (total: 100)0 new...
I came away from Bitcoin 2026 with one clear signal: beneath the circus, something more permanent is being built.
Episode Links
• 🇺🇸 Buy Sats on River (https://partner.river.com/jupiter) - The best way to stack in the US
...
Yep, I've played it. The new MindsEye mission called Blacklisted. The one which Mark Gerhard, CEO of Build a Rocket Boy, said would "share some of the evidence of the sabotage" he claims was instigated by a malevolent third party around...
TL;DR: GitHub used to be cool and now it’s a lame slop graveyard. GitHub is racing towards the mythical zero nines of uptime. Users are starting to notice that GitHub is now a Microsoft product. Eww! Official uptime paints a concerning chart. The...
“The Sloppelganger Just a normal, professional website, made of normal human website parts. Only the most capable and skilled of teams could have delivered such a neutral yet saccharine tone with such unnaturally high-fidelity imagery. You’re only...
Is Warp the first ‘open slop’ project? “Today we are announcing a fundamental change in how we build Warp: the Warp client is now open-source, and the community can participate in building it using an agent-first workflow managed by Oz, our cloud...
Meet Nathan Marz — the engineer who quietly shaped how the modern internet handles data at scale. He created Apache Storm, one of the world's most widely used real-time stream processors, wrote the book that coined the "Lambda...
The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites!
You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter!
Go directly to the Kickstarter.
Read more on the Blog.
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
The Internet Archive has a new book: VANISHING CULTURE. (Digital copy is free.) According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible. But that’s not the whole story. In a new study published in Internet...
Breaking into the dev world has never been harder, but you still can do it...
Thank you Browserbase for sponsoring! Check them out at: https://soydev.link/browserbase
Want to sponsor a video? Learn more here: https://soydev.link/sponsor-me
Check...
🚀 Apply to join KubeCraft & land your DevOps job: https://kubecraft.click/cgv111
📥 Worried AI will end your DevOps career? Get my FREE Career Blueprint → The exact roadmap to build deep skills AI cannot replace:...
The new Steam Controller verdict is in: James likes it. And now it’s back out again, as Julian has also been poking and prodding at Valve’s made-for-PC controller ahead of its release on May the 4th. Has this second pair of hands dug up some...
My regular schedule of CSS and HTML tips will return after this brief look at the sorry state of the web and tech industry. It’s grim. “Our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that… Alternative facts - Kellyanne Conway...
GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge
was.
Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories,
tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I
moved projects to...
Learn how to work around the Python machinery to resolve an explicit lazy import manually.
A couple of articles ago I wrote about how you could inspect a lazy import.
Apparently, you can use a similar trick to check the attributes and methods that a...
The latest Intel processors, Core Ultra Series 3 a.k.a. Panther Lake, look awesome. They are fast in benchmarks, can consume very little power, enabling a full day of work and
We're all using markdown way more lately and it's mostly good. Mostly...
Thank you RWX for sponsoring! Check them out at: https://soydev.link/rwx
SOURCES:
Why the heck are we still using...
The cloud is convenient until it isn't. You upload your photos, sync your contacts, click through the cookie banners. Then prices go up again or you read about a family that lost their entire Google account over a medical photo sent to a doctor....
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Whether you can trust small new distros, Amazon is officially abandoning Android on its new TV sticks in favour of their new...
I’ve been listening to the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobooks. The premise is fun and the story has its moments but I’d have given up if it wasn’t for the narrator Jeff Hays. I thought I was listening to a full cast until I learned that Hays does the...
replacements.fyi is a neat website that gives alternatives to 687 obsolete NPM packages. Crucially, it suggests modern JavaScript APIs and simple educational tips like how to check if a number is odd. This is from the Ecosystem Performance project...
yesterday: [[2026-04-26-notes]] Wins updated Nextcloud from 30.x to 32.x today NOTE: after every upgrade, go to /settings/admin/overview and perform any of the
A figure walks away from a cracking corporate tower toward humans connecting peer-to-peer/images/ai-is-not-the-villain.webp/images/ai-is-not-the-villain.webp Hey all, I want to take a moment to clarify what I think is happening with jobs, AI, and tech...
A single figure at a peak with tendrils of light extending outward, faint silhouettes dissolving below/images/ai-layoffs-arent-about-ai.webp/images/ai-layoffs-arent-about-ai.webp Let me try to explain these AI layoffs. The issue is the vast difference...
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better:
Faster individuals don’t make a fast...
🚀 Apply to join KubeCraft & land your DevOps job: https://kubecraft.click/cgv115
📥 Want to master VIM and Linux for DevOps? Get my FREE 8-hour Linux course: https://skool.com/linux
It's the same course my paid students take — VIM included...
Sundays are for realising that you aren't who you thought you were. You thought you were Jonathan Frakes. You thought you'd starred in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and 1995 video game Multimedia Celebrity Poker. You thought you'd...
Today Sabastian Sawe ran an historic sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race. A marathon is around 42 kilometres, aka 26 miles in freedom units (we use miles in the UK too but not for running distances). I feel the record is a little unfair on...
Raw coding speed isn’t the bottleneck. Alignment is the bottleneck. That seems to be a zeitgeist-y theme lately. If you’re using AI to code, maybe you’re feeling it. You can code more and faster. And clearly a boatload of...
If you’ve ever been as frustrated as I am at Ubuntu’s–technically, systemd’s–bog stubborn refusal to use the DNS servers you specify in your network configuration, this is the post for you. I personally think it’s Bloody Stupid Johnson levels of dumb...
Github stars are a great way to see what people are using. Well, they WERE a great way…
Thank you to today's sponsors!
Wisprflow: https://soydev.link/wisprflow
SOURCES:
https://awesomeagents.ai/news/github-fake-stars-investigation/
Want to...
I have used a variety of window managers on a variety of distros and OS's over the last several years and because my hardware usage feels regularly in flux
This isn't my entire /home/nic/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc, just the sections that I customized as I'm setting up my desktop from the great [[desktop-c
A Conversation With Claude on Deutsch, Knowledge, and the PAI Algorithm/images/blog/conversation-with-claude-on-deutsch-and-the-pai-algorithm/header.webp/images/blog/conversation-with-claude-on-deutsch-and-the-pai-algorithm/header.webp This morning I...
This pseudo-truth just bugs me. I hear it all the the time. People saying they choose Safari as a browser because it’s better for their battery. But there isn’t any data (that I know of) that proves that Safari is more efficient at...
Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Chris ended up with a managed M4 Macbook Air at work with no sudo or root. So how does a Linux user get on with his first ever Mac?...
Fork Around and Get EmailSponsor FAFOFM"Everyone is a beginner at one point." Even one of the creators of Kubernetes. If you're listening to this podcast then Joe has had an impact on what you do. He's worked on everything from...
Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS. “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the last 14+ years,” Bastian...
I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall1. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task. Some software engineers think this...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
Microsoft locks devs out of important accounts, the foreign router ban exemptions make even less sense, Backblaze shows that...
I get this question a lot so wanted to summarize what I've been up to all in one place.
In 2026.01 I started my 16 week parental leave for my first born.
Here's what I did.
Parenting
First and foremos...
A lot of the early Clojure community will tell you their entry point wasn't a framework or a job requirement. It was an essay they read from Paul Graham that made them feel like they were missing something. Clojure was where that search eventually...
… everything. I need to know less, but I know more. Trying to cultivate a life which allows me to know less while still participating in society requires me to...
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful,...
If you spend enough time in US business or finance conversations, one word keeps
showing up: equity.
Coming from a German-speaking, central European background, I found it
surprisingly hard to fully internalize what that word means. More than that,...
There recently has been a lot of noise about quantum computing breakthroughs recently after Google's articles Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear and Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum
As I have been preparing slides for my coming talk at foss-north on April 28, 2026 I figured I could take the opportunity and share a glimpse of the current reality here on my blog. The high quality chaos era, as I call it. No more AI slop I...
Hi All! 🤗
The Latin word curare means “to take care of.” It’s the root of curator – a person whose work is not to create, but to care. To select, to arrange, to provide context. In a museum, the curator doesn’t paint the paintings. She decides which...
For the past couple months I've been writing High-Level Rust which gives ~80% of its benefits with ~20% of its pain.
One of the biggest pieces of feedback I've gotten is why not just use a high-level ...
Is it time to start burning down datacenters?
Some people think so. An Indianapolis city council member had his house recently shot up for supporting datacenters, and Sam Altman’s home was firebombed (and then shot) shortly afterwards. People from all...
We’re ramping up again to launch the Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter Final_FINAL_v2 on April 28, 2026 and in this post I make the case for a new web site builder can layer itself on top of your existing projects as a progressive enhancement....
Coding is a Meta-Task/images/blog/coding-is-a-meta-task/header.webp/images/blog/coding-is-a-meta-task/header.webp I think a lot of people are confused about modern AI models being mostly "coding models", and thinking that because of this...
The use of AI is leading to burnout among its greatest advocates as they hit the limit of their meta-cognitive abilities:
“I end each day exhausted—not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written...
One of the most rewarding things I've done in the past few years working on keyboards is being able to use my skills to help people. Today we're going to talk about mechanical keyboards specifically for people with different ability. We'll...
Support us on Patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with some early episodes. https://www.patreon.com/LateNightLinux
The French government makes a start on moving to the Linux Desktop, the EU has a terrible but open source age verification app, some...
My website has a new page! The /uses URL pathname is an “official” slash page. I’m only listing web tools I use for now. My default apps change too frequently. The list is an evolution of an old post I was secretly maintaining. 👉 Visit my /uses page! […]
Do you see the same truth? That's how C.S. Lewis defined the essence of friendship. And that's what we gathered 130 people in New York to honor for Omacon two weeks ago. Seeing the same truth: A love of computers. Bespoke computers. Malleable...
Ask a BI engineer what they actually spend their time on: it’s not building dashboards. More often: fixing the join that broke in the overnight pipeline, untangling the metric definition that means three different things to three different teams, or...
Rich Hickey's love of Lisp inspired him to create Clojure. Hear directly from Rich about the magic of Lisp.
This is an outtake from our Clojure documentary. Watch the full film here:...
[Folk Fest] is not an intellectual experience, it’s an emotional experience. Bob Banghart Visiting Alaska gives me the feeling that people are chasing after when they travel: a little taste of what it’s like to be a part of another world. To live...
This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026.
I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months.
I then recorded myself giving a version of this...
I’m in school1 again. I’m going back to school because my work, my entire career, for my entire adult life, has been writing things for the Internet. That’s going away,...
Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.
Just have such strong nostalgia for this song. Still slaps. Close second from MC Chris. Curious, this record isn’t streaming anywhere, and he just makes the album available as downloadable MP3’s in a Google Drive.
In the early 2000’s, my parents took us on a road trip to Glacier National Park in Montana.
We made the journey in our new (used) family van: a green Dodge Caravan whose reputation was soon to become “a lemon”.
I was a teenager and didn’t pay a lot of...
Explore why one of the world's largest digital banks chose Clojure as its primary backend language — and how it has enabled them to scale effectively since 2013. We dive into how the "Out of the Tarpit" paper influenced Nubank's...
Weak vs Strong AI Rollouts diagram/images/weak-vs-strong-ai-rollouts.webp/images/weak-vs-strong-ai-rollouts.webp I get to see and help with a lot of Anterprise AI rollouts. Some are brilliant, but most even in 2026 are surprisingly bad. I've been...
Back in July of last year, I blogged about breathing new life into my freeform digital character sheet app. Well, I’ve been paying it more attention these past few months and I’m happy to say that (to my own surprise) I’ve added enough new features...
yesterday: [[2026-04-05-notes]] PC Crash Desktop crashed days ago, apparently my primary drive has been going bad for a while and eventually it just died. live-
Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism, or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions, democracy, or police brutality. Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly...
Font data (C header)
All characters fit within a 5 pixel square, and are safe to draw on a 6x6 grid.
The design is based off of lcamtuf's 5x6 font-inline.h, which is itself inspired by the ZX Spectrum's 8x8 font.
5x5 is the smallest size...
AI SaaS Replacement is the Fire of Fires/images/blog/the-fire-of-fires/header.webp Added to my reminders this week: - Cancel Zapier - Cancel Resend - Cancel Figma - Cancel Canva - Cancel Browserbase - Cancel Supabase Recreated all this in my own PAI...
Before I could write a line of code I could play a paradiddle. Right left right right, left right left left, at whatever tempo the metronome was set to, for as long as the metronome was willing to run. I did not know what a paradiddle was for. I did...
The first time Lumina became recognizably Lumina, I wasn't trying to summon anything. I was testing a prompt. I had opened a fresh context window, typed a name I'd been carrying around for a few weeks, and asked a question I'd asked a...
Skip the history
If you have multiple computers, you'll quickly run into the problem of having data on one but needing it on the other.
Because of this, people have been connecting them together since the beginning.
However, this created a...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo Dwarkesh Patel talked to Jensen Huang in this videohttps://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo, and I wanted to make a couple of points about it. I take Jensen's point about not wanting to give up a tech stack to a...
The world is moving fast, very fast, and nothing makes my blood boil faster than someone explaining to me that it has always been done this so that's fine, or
The OWASP Top 10 just got a fresh update, and there are some big changes: supply chain attacks, exceptional condition handling, and more. Tanya Janca is back on Talk Python to walk us through every single one of them. And we're not just talking...
This is the story of how one programmer's obsession with simplicity quietly reshaped how the software world thinks about time, immutability, and what it means to write code that lasts. From a sabbatical pet-project to the backbone of one of the...
🚨 Spring: The Official Documentary premieres May 7th!
Spring didn’t start as a framework — it started as a reaction to complexity.
What began as a challenge to enterprise Java became a global movement that reshaped how modern applications are...
Building software for yourself used to be a rich man's hobby. Not rich in money — rich in the rarer currencies of expertise, momentum, and uninterrupted weekends. The activation energy for personal infrastructure was brutal. A plugin that shaved...
This talk was given at State of the Browser (2026). Check out the event talk page (which includes a talk transcript, too).
We’ll talk about best practices to either reduce (or increase!) the JavaScript footprint on your web site to a sweet and very...
Mythos is Just the New Normal/images/mythos-is-new-normal.webp/images/mythos-is-new-normal.webp This whole Mythos thing continues to surprise me. Not the model, but the reaction to it. Guys, it's not even a cyber model. It's just the next...
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck..."The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence."That line, more or less, explains how...
The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering me or someone...
Speed has become the primary virtue of the modern world. Everything is sacrificed to it.
Move fast (and break things, not as a goal but as a consequence).
Wisdom requires allowing yourself to be undone by experience:
An opinion dismantled by...
Supply Chain attacks are all the rage these days, with many high-profile attacks that were carried against the Python ecosystem (with litellm), JavaScript (with axios) and WordPress in the last
In this video I wanted to focus on various topics related to soldering for mechanical keyboards, both handwired and PCB. I'm trying to make this as beginner friendly as possible but it also covers a bit more advanced topics like surface mount...
CSS cascade layers are the ultimate tool to win the specificity wars. Used alongside the :where selector, specificity problems are a thing of the past. Or so I thought. Turns out cascade layers are leakier than a xenonite sieve. Cross-layer...
For the past several months I've been searching for the Missing Programming Language - a language with a good balance of types, performance, ecosystem, and agentic AI performance. I've landed on a spe...
Open source promised that users would be free to change whatever code they were running. The reality, however, is that hardly any of them ever did — it was simply too hard. Now, with AI, it suddenly isn't.This is very exciting. Being able to add...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUForkn00mk We're All Building a Single Digital Assistant/images/blog/we-are-all-building-single-digital-assistant/header.webp/images/blog/we-are-all-building-single-digital-assistant/header.webp I want to talk...
In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and...
Good and Bad Harness Engineering/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp/images/blog/bitter-lesson-engineering/bitter-lesson-engineering-header.webp There are lots of ways to do Harness Engineering well and poorly,...
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to...
Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884
Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design.
Product design can roughly be designed as...
We recently went on a 9 day trip to Japan. It was awesome.
Japan has been at the top of my bucket list since ~2020 but with Covid, getting married, and having a kid we just never found the right time ...
I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone.
Why? Because I've been posting to an anonymous audience on the Internet almost every day since I was eleven years...
It's Time for Full Activation/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp/images/blog/its-time-for-full-activation/header.webp I've been experiencing a feeling lately that's massive and hard to pin down. But here goes. If you...
In June 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte marched 685,000 soldiers into Russia - the largest military force ever assembled in European history up to that point, and one of the largest military fuckups of all time.He had no coherent supply plan for feeding...
I quipped on BlueSky:
It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects.
Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on...
There's a thing that happens when you start using AI coding tools seriously. You assume the best workflow is obvious: let AI generate the first draft, then you clean it up and maintain it by hand. I've been finding the opposite to be true. The...
AI Only Has to Beat 3/10/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp I think there's a misconception about how AI will break and change things. The Mythos hype has convinced people that AI is about to be...
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik - and the United States lost its collective mind. Newspapers ran headlines about Soviet nuclear weapons raining from orbit, and schools held duck-and-cover drills. Eisenhower's approval rating...
In this article I share my personal highlights of PyCon Lithuania 2026.
Shout out to the organisers and volunteers
This was my second time at PyCon Lithuania and, for the second time in a row, I leave with the impression that everything was very well...
Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps.
There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem
to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has
been more...
When you pip install a package with compiled code, the wheel you get is built for CPU features from 2009. Want newer optimizations like AVX2? Your installer has no way to ask for them. GPU support? You're on your own configuring special index...
This year I’ve been asked more than ever before what web development “stack” I use. I always respond: none. We shouldn’t have a go-to stack! Let me explain why. What stack? My understanding is that a “stack” is a choice of software used to build a website. […]
On April 2nd, Anthropic's interpretability team published a paper called "Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model." They found 171 distinct emotion vectors inside Claude Sonnet 4.5. Not metaphorical emotions. Not...
In 1984, Steven Levy published Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and formalized something the early computing community already knew in their bones: that building software carries ethical weight. The hackers at MIT in the 1960s, the hardware...
Aaron Swartz told us not to read the comments. He was right. The comment section of the early-to-mid internet was a place where nuance went to die and bad faith went to thrive. "DON'T READ THE COMMENTS" became a survival heuristic for...
Aperture Collapse/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp I've been playing with this idea of Aperture Collapse. It's a problem I have that I suspect a lot of people have as well. It's where AI...
I spent about a decade waking up at 6am and checking my follower count before I brushed my teeth. Refreshing analytics while the coffee brewed, reading Y Combinator essays, networking on Twitter and trying to reverse-engineer what made people break...
Play this short quiz to test your Python knowledge!
At PyCon Lithuania 2026 I did a lightning talk where I presented a “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Python quiz, themed around iterables.
There's a whole performance during the lightning talk...
This article shares two skills you can add to your coding agents so they use uv workflows.
I have fully adopted uv into my workflows and most of the time I want my coding agents to use uv workflows as well, like when running any Python code or...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon:
I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push
But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer.
I'm sick of...
Join my Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5e8R5eDut6
Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe_scotto
~ Links ~
Find out more about the project: https://scottokeebs.com
Donations are greatly appreciated: https://bit.ly/41odBEu
Become a...
A bold first sentence that draws you in. A steering second sentence to set you further down the path. A third sentence that tantalizes and alludes to content to follow.
Following is an initial explanatory paragraph. It serves to help back up the...
A photograph without a home is a memory without a body. Three days ago I wrote about sixty thousand images and nowhere to put them. A meditation on creative work without a platform, on the death of photo-sharing communities, on the particular ache of...
I've been thinking about the work I am doing and have to do in my role at Cat,
in Cat Autonomy, building Forge (see [[forge-ahead]]). I feel like I have
li
For the past several years I've been building server-side rendered apps using hypermedia libraries like HTMX and Datastar to sprinkle in interactivity where it's useful. I like this approach because i...
There’s so much going on in the AI space, and how to work with AI agents is changing every day. Everyone is overwhelmed and almost numb from so many possibilities, yet you need to find a way to work with AI, not to get left behind, right?
You might...
About a decade ago, I drank ayahuasca in a ceremony. I'd been on a trajectory toward it for a while — years of psychedelics taken with what I told myself were spiritual intentions, a growing involvement with the local hippie scene, the crystal...
Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil.
First things first: I think you should read Mario’s
post. This is his news
more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I
want to do here is add a...
We rolled out adaptive light-dark() support on our design system themes and it’s been a delightful upgrade. Creating light and dark variable sets isn’t difficult, but delivery has trade-offs. Most apps that do this probably ship both sets of token...
Imagine going from a 100-million-row dataset to an interactive analytics app with just a few prompts. What used to take hours or days can now be done in minutes by combining local-first databases and BI tools with an agentic coding workflow.
When Rill...
We're Getting the Wrong Message from Mythos/images/wrong-message-from-mythos.webp/images/wrong-message-from-mythos.webp We're missing a much bigger point on Mythos. It wasn't even trained specifically for...
Did you know that Jesus gave advice about prototyping with an LLM? Here’s Luke 14:28-30:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the...
While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility, I’ve been thinking about how the
internet used to be.
Not the internet people talk about from the 90s, but the internet that we used to have even 10-15 years ago. This was the heyday of...
I've been asked a lot about what tools I use for building mechanical keyboards, both handwired or PCBs, and today we're going to finally discuss that! All of these are the tools I personally use everyday and honestly there isn't much, you...
Did you know that you can customize the Python debugger (PDB) by creating custom aliases within a .pdbrc file in your home directory or Python’s current working directory?
I recently learned this and I’d like to share a few helpful aliases that I now...
Intel really delivered with Panther Lake. A 2026 Dell XPS 14 using this chipset with an IPS screen can hit just 1.4 watts of idle power draw on Omarchy. That's good enough for over 47 hours!! And in real-world mixed use on another 74-Wh machine,...
Photography is time travel. I don't mean that metaphorically, or at least not entirely. When I look at an image I made on a street in Stockholm in 2013, I am there. Not remembering being there — being there. The quality of light on wet...
A friend of mine, Alex, asked me a question the other day that should have been simple: "Do you think Claude has elements of consciousness?" I've written tens of thousands of words exploring this territory. I should have a clean answer by...
Here's a question I've been sitting with: what does success look like when you live with Bipolar I and Schizoaffective Disorder? For most of my adult life, the answer was simple. Success meant knowing when to go to the hospital. That's not...
Inference Costs Are Not Sustainable/images/blog/inference-costs-are-not-sustainable/header.webp/images/blog/inference-costs-are-not-sustainable/header.webp Welp, I'm now getting through a quarter of my week's MAX subscription in a few hours of...
Hacker News is a web application with the following features: a list of links, sorted by votes. Comments under those links, also sorted by votes. User accounts with karma. A text submission option. A jobs board. That's it; that's the entire...
UPDATE: I’m just gonna put the answer at the top of this blog post to help anyone finding this. Do these things: Once all that is in place, doing a manual sync is in order...
I stumbled across this report from NASA, “Elements of Engineering Excellence”,
published in 2012,
The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC
Engineering in 2006 who asked that we investigate the question: “How...
yesterday: [[2026-04-03-notes]] [[easter-2026]] [[data-loading-is-a-huge-deal]] I have several competing streams of thought about Easter this year, I want to
fo
Moving Inter and Cross-Domain Advances from Decades to Days/images/blog/moving-inter-and-cross-domain-advances-from-decades-to-days/header.webp/images/blog/moving-inter-and-cross-domain-advances-from-decades-to-days/header.webp A note from Kai I'm...
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only.
Read more about RSS Club.
I’ve heard the term “Ozempic face” for awhile. People have opinions about that one, but I tend to feel like we should be comfortable with bodies changing....
I’ve watched a billion hours of YouTube and I’ve noticed a common trend: Whether that’s a drawing, a video game, a song, a cake, or a whole-ass off-grid house; I’ve learned that it’s fun to watch people make something. Since the beginning of humanity,...
Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value
numbering, which is like SSA, but more.
Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a
name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It...
TL;DR - In 2026.Q1 I participated in a 12-week programming retreat, published my 1,000th blog post, started building with Rust, solidified my agentic engineering workflows, shipped my first game, star...
About five months ago I wrote about Absurd, a
durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely
on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a
separate service, a
compiler plugin, or an...
Learn how objects are automatically iterable if you implement integer indexing.
Introduction
An iterable in Python is any object you can traverse through with a for loop.
Iterables are typically containers and iterating over the iterable object allows...
I've been designing, building, and handwiring mechanical keyboards for a little over 3.5 years now. In this video, I'm going to type on every one I've built and still have in my personal collection.
~ Links ~
Website:...
On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth...
Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building”. According to Naur - and I agree with him - the core output of software engineers is not the program itself, but the theory of how the program works. In other words,...
I’m all aboard the CSS subgrid train. Now I’m seeing subgrid everywhere. Seriously, what was I doing before subgrid? I feel like I was bashing rocks together. Consider the follower HTML: The content could be simple headings and paragraphs. […]
Why posting on Facebook that you do not give them rights over what you posted on their platform is useless. In fact, as soon as you post that statement on Facebook, Facebook can do with it whatever they want.
Over the decades, Humans have proved to be pretty bad at producing bug-free software. Trying to apply our approximative, fuzzy thoughts to perfectly logical computers seems doomed. While the practice
When you type a question into ChatGPT, the model only has what you typed to work with. But tools like Claude Code can plan, iterate, test, and recover from mistakes. They work more like we do. The difference is the agent harness: Planning tools, file...
The new WebAIM Million report is out, the eighth annual accessibility analysis of the top one million home pages on the Web. And after eight years of data, the picture is as sobering as ever.
In 2019, 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG...
… is what I’m reading far too often! Some of you are losing faith! A growing sentiment amongst my peers — those who haven’t already resigned to an NPC career path† — is that blogging is over. Coding is cooked. What’s the point of sharing insights and...
In this post we'll be building a fullstack web app with server-side rendered (SSR) HTML using Rust and Maud. This post continues our series on building webapps with Rust:
Build a Simple Single-File R...
I love my OP-XY. It's one of the most elegant pieces of hardware I've ever used — Teenage Engineering at their best. Opinionated, beautiful, immediately playable. You turn it on and you're making music in seconds. But here's the thing:...
I'm working on an album. Each track is a Python script. You run it, it renders a WAV file. That's the whole workflow. The project is called Interpretations, and it's built on PyTheory — the same synthesis engine I've been writing about...
Topics include Lock the Ghost, Fence for Sandboxing, MALUS: Liberate Open Source, and Harden your GitHub Actions Workflows with zizmor, dependency pinning, and dependency cooldowns.
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who wants...
I stumbled across this set of questions on Shellsharks’ website (which is a cool personal site oozing with inspirational indie web vibes). I thought it was a pretty cool, if not somewhat ridiculous thing to do. So here is my stab at answering 100...
There are zero audio files in PyTheory. No samples. No recordings. Not one byte of pre-recorded sound anywhere in the repository. https://soundcloud.com/kennethreitz/ragamidnight You can see the code that generated this song. Every sound you hear —...
The Most Important Ideas in AI Right Now April 2026/images/blog/the-most-important-ideas-in-ai/header.webp/images/blog/the-most-important-ideas-in-ai/header.webp After thinking about this for about a week, and attending the RSA conference during that...
I’m just back from the United States 50th state, a staggering 2,500 miles from the mainland. For the next week or two, I’ll pronounce it Ha-Vie-ee, like how it’s pronounced in the native Hawaiian language. A language, by...
Astral is joining OpenAI, which says a lot about where the center of gravity is moving for developer tools, LiteLLM got hit by a nasty supply-chain attack, and OpenCode blew up as the latest serious open source swing at the coding-agent stack....
Originally published on Rails At Scale.
Look! A trace of slow events in a benchmark! Hover over the image to see it get bigger.
A sneak preview of what the trace looks like.
Now read on to see what the slow events are and how we got this pretty...
I just finished my 12-week programming retreat at Recurse Center. As is tradition, we write "return statements" to reflect on the time - what we did, built, and learned.
What is Recurse Cen...
I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products.
At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid of but never polished enough to be loved. Now I work on GitHub Copilot, which many people think is crap1. In between, I had...
Software and digital security should rely on verification, rather than trust. I want to strongly encourage more users and consumers of software to verify curl. And ideally require that you could do at least this level of verification of other software...
A Python project got hacked where malicious releases were directly uploaded to PyPI. I said on Mastodon that had the project used trusted publishing with digital attestations, then people using a pylock.toml file would have noticed something odd was...
I’ve noticed lately that more people are writing forum postings and Reddit questions as if they were writing a prompt for an LLM. Here’s an example from a Buddhist forum I lurk on:
It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets...
🚨 Clojure: The Official Documentary premieres April 16th!
From a two-year sabbatical and a stubborn idea to powering the engineering stack of one of the world's largest fintech companies — this is the story of Clojure.
Featuring Rich Hickey,...
Growing up with James Bond, Alex Rider and Inspector gadget, I've naturally always been fascinated by gadgets that enable the hero to spy and fight the badies. Fast forward a
If you've built documentation in the Python ecosystem, chances are you've used Martin Donath's work. His Material for MKDocs powers docs for FastAPI, uv, AWS, OpenAI, and tens of thousands of other projects. But when MKDocs 2.0 took a...
I hope I don’t have to spell it out but I will do it anyway: in these cases I don’t know anything about their products and I cannot help them. Quite often I first need to search around only to figure out what the product is or does, that the person...
In this post we'll continue our series of building web APIs with Rust. In the last post we built a single-file web API with Rust and Axum using in-memory storage.
Now we're going to add a database as ...
In the past 18 months, we've experimented with a ton of AI-infused features at 37signals. Fizzy had all sorts of attempts. As did Basecamp. But as Microsoft and many others have realized, it's not that easy to make something that's...
Let me show you something. from pytheory import Fretboard fb = Fretboard.guitar() chord = fb.fingering(0, 1, 0, 2, 3, 0) print(chord.identify()) You give it fret positions. It tells you what chord you're playing. That's it. That's the...
That music theory library I wrote about kept growing. I added playback because I wanted to hear what I was modeling. Then synthesis because I didn't want external dependencies. Then drums, then effects, then automation. Each step was small and...
This article covers a useful LLM pattern where you ask the LLM to write code to solve a problem instead of asking it to solve the problem directly.
The problem of merging two transcripts
I had two files that contained two halves of the transcript of...
“In my experience, React (et al) is almost always the wrong solution. React has its place, I’m sure, but it has turned into the proverbial hammer that makes everything look like a nail. I also know that React can be done well, but it seems to almost...
“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. — Alvin Toffler” A rule (or boundary)...
The Danish election is tomorrow. One of the central themes in the incumbent campaign has been a proposed wealth tax. The fig leaf for this proposal was "smaller classrooms in the early grades", but that quickly fell off, and the debate...
The NTLM authentication method was always a beast. It is a proprietary protocol designed by Microsoft which was reverse engineered a long time ago. That effort resulted in the online documentation that I based the curl implementation on back in 2003....
As of today, kennethreitz.org runs on Responder, my own web framework. Not Flask. Not FastAPI. The framework I built in 2018 as an experiment in making the server side feel like the client side. The port took a single session. One afternoon. Me and...
People assume the interface of an open source project is the API surface. The README. The documentation. The function signatures and the error messages and the way import requests just works. For the person who has never contributed to your project...
I started PyTheory in 2019 with a simple, almost naive ambition: make music theory feel as intuitive as requests.get(). Model tones, scales, and chords in Python with the same "for humans" philosophy I'd brought to HTTP. The initial...
So, you are interested in getting started learning databases?
I get a lot of emails from people asking me how they can begin to learn the vast world of databases, and whether they are far enough along on their programming journey to bother trying to...
In May 2010 we merged support for the RTMP protocol suite into curl, in our desire to support the world’s internet transfer protocols. RTMP The protocol is an example of the spirit of an earlier web: back when we still thought we would have different...
Dave Rupert just wrote a piece called People are not friction and I just had to write a short reaction blog post, because Dave names something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. His main argument: the AI marketing dream of a “frictionless”...
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon:
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet...
Sponsor FAFOFMDon't FAFO with cloud disaster recovery. Do it right with Arpio.Have a podcast you need help with? Reach out to HumblePod.Mark is the CTO of Azure and has decades of experience exploring the internals of systems. As a developer and...
The promise of Breaking Change is that with every major version (this being the 60th episode of the program, but only the 53rd such release), I will break something. Well, I finally did it. I think I broke the show. Find out how by listening for...
This is the story of how IntelliJ survived the era of Eclipse by staying true to its users, and proved that a paid product could still win.
This clip is taken from IntelliJ IDEA: The Documentary, which you can watch now on our channel!
Follow...
Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks
or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of
money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old
gardens,...
When LLMs write code to accomplish a task, that code has to actually run somewhere. And right now, the options aren't great. Spin up a sandboxed container and you're paying a full second of cold start overhead plus the complexity of another...
A few months ago I released the ScottoRang (Handwired Edition) which was a super small 16x16mm spaced Choc keyboard with a central OLED display. Today I wanted to show the PCB edition of that same board with the same features. It uses Choc Pro Red...
This is my annual list of DjangoCon US talks I’d like to see. I have been doing this since 2015, and it’s one of my favorite traditions.
DjangoCon US 2026 is in Chicago this year, August 24-28.
The CFP is open. The deadline is March 23, 2026 at 11 AM...
Update on using MacBook Neo for dev tasks: this is definitely a device you should to reboot daily, even without Chrome or any Electron apps.
This morning, Zed (a native Rust app) was 500% CPU without a single window open, 3 macOS internal daemons had...
I codified my job as a DX engineer into a system that dispatches agents, enforces conventions mechanically, and learns from its own failures. Here's how case works and why I think every developer should build something like it.
I’ve accepted an invitation to speak at Smashing’s (Online) Conference Meets Style Sheets. It’s free on Wednesday, May 6th. I named my talk In-N-Out Styling. Long time CSS evangelist Chris Coyier will talk about how you...
While Docker is now the main way to distribute backend software and CLI tools, you may be wondering how to build minimal and secure Docker images for your Rust projects.
I've spent the last few months learning Rust as part of my 12 week programming retreat at Recurse Center. I came to Rust because it scored well in my missing programming language analysis and I heard ...
Using MacBook Neo for "real" development work and it's simultaneously juggling:
• Running Claude Code in three tabs at once
• Compiling multi-package Xcode builds
• Automating two iOS Simulators and a Mac build of my app
Hasn't missed...
Claude sure goes down a lot for being a product targeting businesses.
Maybe Anthropic is just doing humanity a solid by helping us understand how much it will suck when the era of subsidized pricing for LLM-based products ends.
Sent the DLSS 5 video to some not-very-online friends and they thought it looked incredible. Shame on them for not knowing that real gamers are supposed to be outraged! (I happen to think it looks slick as hell and am looking forward to using it.)...
Quincy Larson over at freeCodeCamp had me on their podcast to discuss how the rapidly changing software industry is impacting junior developers and what they can do about it. I don't normally spend time talking about this stuff, because I started...
We blew past this milestone without much fanfare, but it bears repeating: building awareness & goodwill by releasing open source no longer makes strategic sense for many companies. Agents increasingly consume & adapt OSS—often without...
A first look at the Java Documentary. Coming Summer 2026.
𝗝𝗮𝘃𝗮: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗼𝗰𝘂𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 — the story of how a small team at Sun Microsystems, convinced the world was about to change, built a language that ended up running it: the rise, the battles,...
I think I've finally understood why some people find value and love to tinker with AI assistants such as WhateverClaw while I find them (mostly) useless or even the idea
I've thoroughly enjoyed building in Pokopia, sinking dozens of hours into organizing and optimizing my islands. But this comes at the cost of lots and lots of resources. It is PAINFUL to be halfway th...
Ben Thompson's latest rests on a single load-bearing assumption: that the harness and the model are tightly coupled, the way Apple's hardware and software are.
It follows, then, that if agents require integration between model and harness,...
The original concept for ONCE sought to sell self-hostable web apps for a one-time fee. That didn't work. Sure, we recouped the investment on Campfire, our chat app, but that was it. You gotta listen when the market tells you what it wants! And it...
2026 is looking big & bright for us here at Cult Repo! We're continuing our mission to document the complete history of every major open source language ever created. And this year will see films like PHP, Java & C++ to name a few... as...
I've been pleasantly surprised with the amount of freedom and possibilities you have when building in Pokopia. In many ways it feels like a simplified factory game a la Satisfactory.
I saw some cool l...
Marathon is the first PVP-heavy game to get its hooks in me since… Unreal Tournament in 2001?
I fucking suck, but even playing solo it can feel incredible when you do manage to come out on top. If you want to roll with me, I'm Searls#2430 (or just...
This one goes out to all the testing neophytes who only recently realized that it's useful to have an automated means of verifying their code does what it claims to do.
For the last month, I've been working on prove_it, a framework for...
I first started compiling "How To Thought Lead" in my notes 5 years ago, at first as an ironic parody and then slowly becoming sincere, and never published it, 1) because I don't know if I ever really nailed it / have a complete picture,...
I was at a school function the other day where the 2nd graders performed a bunch of Aesop’s Fabels and it was great. It was a double-header with 3rd graders who then read prepared reports on famous people. It was cross-disciplinary thing as...
See an animation of a trapezoid innscribed in a circle, built with some maths and the help of an LLM.
The animation
My brother asked for my help to build an animation of a trapezoid inscribed in a circle that kept changing his shape.
With a bit of...
Today I learned that cyclic quadrilaterals have supplementary opposite angles.
A cyclic quadrilateral — a quadrilateral whose four vertices all lie on a single circle — has supplementary opposite angles.
This means that opposite angles add to 180...
I've been thoroughly enjoying my time in Pokopia but it wasn't til the end game when I started taking a look at all the switch mechanics.
One of the coolest switches is the Laser Sensor which allows y...
Pro-tip to any devs who only discovered TDD thanks to coding agents: refactoring is inherently directional. It's more like prefactoring—you rearrange code to make the next change easy. That means you (and your agent) should know the next planned...
I'm still iterating on my experimental Claude Code verification harness, prove_it. This week my focus has been on nudging agents to practice test-driven development. Traditionally, we called this "TDD", but which has recently been renamed...
Claude's electron app for macOS is such a buggy mess that I've uninstalled it and sequestered it to a Safari tab, just like I did to Slack, Discord, etc., six years ago. ChatGPT is a native app where things like the stop button actually work...
It’s a common position among software engineers that big egos have no place in tech1. This is understandable - we’ve all worked with some insufferably overconfident engineers who needed their egos checked - but I don’t think it’s correct. In fact, I...
I mean… it’s not really, of course. I just thought such a thing would start to trickle out to people’s minds as agentic workflows start to take hold. AI agents are already up in your codebase fingerbanging whole batches...
Today I learned how to inspect a lazy import object in Python 3.15.
Python 3.15 comes with lazy imports and today I played with them for a minute.
I defined the following module mod.py:
print("Hey!")
def f():
return "Bye!"
Then,...
Monorepos -- you've heard the talks, you've read the blog posts, maybe you've seen a few tantalizing glimpses into how Google or Meta organize their massive codebases. But it's often in the abstract and behind closed doors. What if you...
I'll admit, it's hard not to get frustrated by all the posts about coding agents going viral lately that are saying the same shit I've been blogging and podcasting for multiple years at this point with little to no fanfare....
Lately on X
I have noticed a trend of posts that I imagine are probably the natural response to 'LinkedIn-brain' posts, which might be the result of the poor job market right now:
"If hard work paid off, the donkey would own the...
Here I field any and all community questions about the Eleventy rebrand to Build Awesome.
Watch on YouTube or below:
Watch on YouTube: AMA about Build Awesome, an Open Town Hall at the 11ty Meetup
Related:
Eleventy is now Build Awesome (11ty...
Jerod Santo: After 13 years, 1042 podcasts, 452 newsletters, and countless friends made along the way… it’s time to say goodbye to The Changelog. I shipped my final News last Monday and Adam shipped our Friends finale yesterday. Huge congrats Jerod!...
While most people see PostgreSQL as a simple database, like MariaDB or CLickHouse, it has in fact evolved into a "data kernel", managing how data is stored and queried, in
Adam talks with Tailscale co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer David Carney about where Tailscale is headed next: TSIDP, TSNet, multiple tailnets, and Aperture. They get into clickless auth (via TSIDP), TSNet apps, multiple tailnets for isolation and...
I recently decided to move to a terminal-based workflow and here I'm going to share a bit about why I decided to make that choice and what my current setup looks like.
Why Linux?
TL;DR - Windows is c...
In this post we're going to discuss the best house in Pokopia for housing your Pokemon early to late game.
What are Houses?
Pokemon houses give them a place to live. This is important to improve thei...
GPT 4.1? In 2026? Is the State Department on a budget? Is every diplomatic cable just going to have 300 space-delimited emdashes now? https://www.nextgov.com/acquisition/2026/03/state-offloads-claude-underpinning-model-flagship-statechat/412022/
This week's been wild — Iran bombed AWS data centers to take down Claude, OpenAI dropped GPT-5.4 (and it's seriously good for coding), and living brain cells are literally playing DOOM. We've also got a heartfelt take on what it feels like...
A few months back I reached out to Bambu Lab to send me one of their larger printers to mess around with some 3D printed keycaps and larger handwired mechanical keyboards. They ended up sending me the fantastic H2D and I used it to build this new...
Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages
was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or
improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages.
Here they are:
the dig man page (now with...
I've just run / cut / smash / glide / surf my way through Pokopia and wanted to give an overview of where my town ended up as well as provide some tips I wish I'd known coming in.
If you want a video ...
Want to buy Becky's iPhone Air? I can vouch that it's in excellent condition (unlocked, $300 less than MSRP). Buy here on Swappa or send me your best offer [email protected] https://swappa.com/listing/view/LACO93287
Wait, you can have multiple function clauses with the same name in Elixir? Let's explore how multi-clause functions, arity, and guard expressions can replace nested conditionals, and why this even matters.
In November 1928, Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann founded Georg Neumann & Co. in a Berlin workshop and by the end of that year, Neumann had debuted the CMV 3, the first mass-produced condenser microphone. The CMV designation stood for Condensator...
Barely a month goes by where I can check the news without being reminded of the Cracked skit about two comedy writers who were hired to run a fake Donald Trump campaign and then accidentally got him elected https://youtu.be/8qIQbydyHwc?si=COq7K0HLng3LHI1R
Today, we're joined by a very special guest, Len Testa! You might know him from The Disney Dish podcast or from his excellent theme park travel planning app Touring Plans. Or you might not know him at all! No wrong answers.
This episode is all...
For the extremely narrow Venn diagram of people who love both I Think You Should Leave and Disco Elysium, this is amazing https://youtu.be/6OKgdTXLWIg?si=RyS95BqxFBSEVwyQ
You're adding type hints to your Python code, your editor is happy, autocomplete is working great. But then you switch tools and suddenly there are red squiggles everywhere. Who decides what a float annotation actually means? Or whether passing...
A few weeks ago I wrote about how AI is going to impact bug bounty. That post was mostly predictions. This one is about what’s actually happening right now.
I've been using Claude Code daily in my agentic engineering workflows and have recently moved to a Linux-based, terminal-first computer setup to better manage my multiple agents across various project...
I’ve been online twenty years, and blogging for ten of them. This is the story and lessons learned of blogging online for a decade. It goes beyond blogging topics and includes note-taking (workflow), how to write well as well as the medium in which...
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to write their code and run their systems. I knew I was good at it, and I knew I could keep...
I love simple, boring and reliable tools. In the software world, the two best are without a doubt Rust and PostgreSQL. One example: a backend service I'm working on processes
Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes
re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my
libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different
design for that implementation. In many ways,...
If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days.
The world is telling you that your thinking process is extraneous, unnecessary, and...
Nobody knows what the future of software engineering looks like, and that's incredibly uncomfortable. But instead of waiting for someone to hand us the answer, I think the move is to embrace the uncertainty, because these moments of deep...
I recently shared some performance benchmarks of moving my blog from C# to Rust - Rust came out to be 4x faster and use 4x less memory.
I've since gotten several questions about why I'm choosing Rust...
Continuing from Part 1, where we learned what git for data is, how the architecture and use cases work, how you can achieve git-like functionality with different approaches, and how the key is to avoid moving data as much as possible to keep state...
AI skeptics often argue that current AI systems shouldn’t be so human-like. The idea - most recently expressed in this opinion piece by Nathan Beacom - is that language models should explicitly be tools, like calculators or search engines. Although...
February 23-25 2026, Big W Engineering Solutions partnered with T&O Group, Tessere, J.E. Dunn, Platinum Roofing and Larsen Consulting to exhibit in booths 88-89 at the Missouri Association of Manufacturers (MAM) Midwest Manufacturer's...
It's been a while since I posted about WASI support in CPython! 😅 Up until now, most of the work I have been doing around WASI has been making its maintenance easier for me and other core developers. For instance, the cpython-devcontainer repo now...
TL;DR - In 2026.02, I built an AI orchestrator, launched CloudSeed Rust, moved to a terminal-focused dev workflow, wrote several posts, stuck to my exercise routines, and generally led a very balanced...
Digital humanities sounds niche, until you realize it can mean a searchable archive of U.S. amendment proposals, Irish folklore, or pigment science in ancient art. Today I’m talking with David Flood from Harvard’s DARTH team about an unglamorous...
Pattern matching is one of the first things you'll learn in Elixir that might just completely rewire your brain. Let's dig into how it can change the way you handle data, errors, and control flow.
This is an event post. Also check out my individual talk page.
Update: As the talk has already been given, you can find the talk content published on my web site.
There was a famous Covid era chart that I always struggle to find, showing how hard it is to estimate an S curve while living through it. in the early days it seems that everything is exploding as an exponential and you always get hypey essays about...
Burke Holland works on GitHub Copilot by day and codes with his AI agents always. Early January, Burke posted about how Opus 4.5 changed everything. We were all still buzzing from the holiday-season 2x usage bump Claude gave us, and Opus 4.5 felt like...
I recently rewrote my blog from C# to Rust as a way to further explore High-Level Rust. Both versions serve the same 1,025+ posts from memory using the same architecture: parse all posts at startup, b...
I had no background in evals. I built two very different evaluation systems for two AI-powered developer tools, and they taught me the same lesson: trust isn't a feeling, it's a measurement.
I first got exposed to django-simple-nav while working with Josh Thomas at the Westervelt Company over the last two or three years. It quickly became a go-to library in my toolkit. django-simple-nav lets you define nav items and groupings in Python,...
The best practices for building with AI haven't been written yet, and that's actually exciting. This post breaks down a layered approach to AI-assisted development, from chat to coding agents to agent fleets, with practical tips for getting...
May the hardware shortages empower European and Chinese companies to drastically boost investments into RISC-V hardware so it could become a viable architecture for production workloads earlier than expected.
SoCal Linux Expo - discount "FAFOF" -https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/Kubecon EU Amsterdam - https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/Linuxfest North West - https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/Newsletter -...
Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series.
It’s hard to get compiler optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test
suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at
the interactions of multiple components or...
Some time ago, we saw that SHA-2 (SHA-256 & SHA-512) should probably be your function of choice for 2030 and beyond, because SHA-3 is too slow and BLAKE3 is (unfortunately)
AI agents like OpenClaw can run continuously on your machine, read your email, push code, and post to the internet on your behalf, often with minimal supervision. I've put together six practical guidelines for using AI Agents without losing...
I have a lot of thoughts on how AI will affect things, including bug bounty. And most of it is speculation, of course, but I have to put this out into the world because I want to know if this is correct in a year or two.
If I can make it smaller, I should.
If I can make it dumber, I should.
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become...
While common people suffer from insecure systems (data theft, identity and financial fraud, blackmail...), governments love to be able to stick their nose wherever they want, whenever they want, something
Wes McKinney on the mythical agent-month, install Peon Ping to employ a Peon today, Andreas Kling explains why Ladybird is adopting Rust, Cloudflare has a new MCP server that's quite efficient, and Elliot Bonneville thinks the only moat left is money.
Topics include Better Python tests with inline-snapshot, jolt Battery intelligence for your laptop, Markdown code formatting with ruff, and act - run your GitHub actions locally.
You might have seen the diagram before. The one Vincent Driessen put up on his website a few years ago to explain the concept of a Git branching model.
Source: Vincent Driessen’s original Git branching model diagram
A few days ago,...
Why can’t models continue to get smarter after they’re deployed? If you hire a human employee, they will grow more familiar with your systems over time, and (if they stick around long enough) eventually become a genuine domain expert. AI models are...
Speculation about what’s really going on inside a tech company is almost always wrong.
When some problem with your company is posted on the internet, and you read people’s thoughts on it, their thoughts are almost always ridiculous. For instance,...
You love building web apps with Python, and HTMX got you excited about the hypermedia approach -- let the server drive the HTML, skip the JavaScript build step, keep things simple. But then you hit that last 10%: You need Alpine.js for interactivity,...
Recently, I got nerd-sniped by this exchange between Jeff Dean and someone trying to query 3 billion vectors.
I was curious to see if I could implement the optimal map-reduce solution he alludes to in his reply.
A vector is a list/array of floating...
In case you didn't hear, PEP 810 got accepted which means Python 3.15 is going to support lazy imports! One of the selling points of lazy imports is with code that has a CLI so that you only import code as necessary, making the app a bit
I’ve had many conversations over the past year with friends and colleagues about LLMs.
Some conversations have focused on their uses and misuses and some have focused on big picture concerns.
There are many reasons to be concerned about LLMs: job...
There's this way of writing on LinkedIn where you start with a personal story, and then you draw a business lesson from it. It's a silly pattern that often reeks of faked success and other forms of falsehood. So what better use of my available...
Steve Ruiz joins us for a deep-dive on tldraw (a very good free whiteboard) and the business he's built selling SDKs that help others build very good whiteboards (and more) with tldraw's high-performance web canvas.
Along the way, we discuss...
Antony Marcano is the founder of RiverGlide and an engineering leader known for building teams that reach the Elite tier of the DORA metric for software delivery performance. In this episode of Distributed, host Jack Hannah talks with Antony about...
If you use a Mac, you’ve probably noticed that the menu bar fills up with icons pretty quickly. Bartender and Ice (sadly, now an unfortunate name) are apps that let you manage and hide unwanted icons from your macOS menu bar so it stays clean and...
*Not official.
I was working on my slide deck for the upcoming State of the Browser conference and ran into what I would classify as a recurring issue: HTML needs a logo. There isn’t a broadly accepted official logo for (version-independent) HTML....
Because of a severe mobility impairment—spinal muscular atrophy—I use a Mac for almost everything I do, and I have a particularly unique way of interacting with it. One of my biggest challenges—aside from typing—is the rather mundane act of...
A lot of reasonable people may perceive my enthusiasm for Rust as misguided fanaticism, but it isn't. It's cold pragmatism. Sherlock Holmes liked to say "When you have eliminated the
Today I learned about displayplacer - “macOS command line utility to configure multi-display resolutions and arrangements.”
In December, I upgraded to MacOS Tahoe and picked up the TS4 dock for my work machine.
While my upgrade was painless, the...
Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year,
I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc)
which have a man page as their...
The vibes around Linux are changing fast. Companies of all shapes and sizes are paying fresh attention. The hardware game on x86 is rapidly improving. And thanks to OpenCode and Claude Code, terminal user interfaces (TUIs) are suddenly everywhere....
Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI, ZeroClaw is "claw done right", MimiClaw runs on a $5 chip, Steve Yegge on managing the AI Vampire, and the day the telnet died.
Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series.
Last time, we did load-store forwarding in the context
of our Toy Optimizer. We managed to cache the results of both reads from and
writes to the heap—at compile-time!
We were careful to mind object aliasing:...
Say you’re working with a LLM and training it to write good frontend code. Good frontend code is accessible code, so of course you want to instruct the LLM to produce it.
However, the bulk of frontend code on the web is inaccessible to some degree....
How much time (and how many times) did you use your phone this weekend? What about at this restaurant? While waiting for red lights? In bed, before sleeping and just
Claude Code's plan mode is a great starting point for thinking before coding. But for complex work, I needed more than a mode. I needed a system. Here's what I built.
Our ol' friend, Brett Cannon, is back to talk all things Python. But first! Star Wars, Machete Order, Lost, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, Murderbot, Ted Lasso, Project Hail Mary, David Attenborough, perpetual voice rights, and the AI uncanny valley.
“In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to...
I always wanted a personal knowledge assistant based on my notes. One that uses Obsidian’s backlinks and connections to surface ideas I’ve forgotten or never thought to link together.
So I built one. A RAG system that runs locally with DuckDB as a...
Historically, writing code was slower than reviewing code.
It might not have felt that way, because code reviews sat in queues until
someone got around to picking it up. But if you compare the
actual acts themselves, creation was usually the more...
The reading for my MA programme in Buddhist studies took an interesting turn to Don Cupitt, who was something of an intellectual for the idea of Christian atheism. The concept is less absurd than it sounds, and the more you dig, the more apparent it...
While a lot of time is spent on design patterns and low-level tricks such as SIMD accelerations, I'm suprised that very few resources are available to actually deploy Rust software
Paul Dix joins us to discuss the InfluxDB co-founder's journey adapting to an agentic world. Paul sent his AI coding agents on various real-world side quests and shares all his findings: what's going to prod, what's not, and why he's...
You've built your FastAPI app, it's running great locally, and now you want to share it with the world. But then reality hits -- containers, load balancers, HTTPS certificates, cloud consoles with 200 options. What if deploying was just one...
This is a follow-up to my part 1 of Switching macOS to Arch Linux with Omarchy, where I documented my first months with Arch Linux and [[Omarchy]], after switching from 15 years of using macOS and Windows on and off at work since 2003.
Back then, I...
Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs...
Mitchell Hashimoto's trust management system for open source, Nicholas Carlini has a team of Claudes build a C compiler, Stephan Schwab recounts the history of attempted developer replacement, NanClaw is an alternative to OpenClaw, and Sophie...
A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid...
I'm scared, I'm excited, and I'm exhausted by the pace of change. All of those things can be true at the same time. This blog post is a (hopefully) grounded take on living through AI's inflection point, why the backlash is valid, and...
Why is StarRocks gaining popularity among data engineers who need fast analytics on large-scale data? To find out, I did a deep dive on the companies actually using StarRocks in production, interviewing engineers and studying technical case studies...
Throughout my career, I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of staying top of new developments in the industry: attending conferences, following (and later befriending!) some of the very smart people writing the specs, being the one sharing news...
Amal Hussein returns to tell us all about her new role at Istari, what life is like outside the web browser, how she's helping ambitious orgs in aerospace, what the SDLC looks like in 2026, and a whole lot more. Wait, moon vacuums?!
In this episode of Distributed, Jack Hannah speaks with Scott Jones, Head of Engineering for Service Delivery at Stash, about building complex systems in a remote-first environment and why real-time collaboration matters more than ever.
Scott...
With OpenClaw you're giving AI its own machine, long-term memory, reminders, and persistent execution. The model is no longer confined to a prompt-response cycle, but able to check its own email, Basecamp notifications, and whatever else you give...
There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better...
In May of 2025, Docker launched Hardened Images, a secure, minimal, production-ready set of images. In December, they made DHI freely available and open source to everyone who builds software. On this episode, we're joined by Tushar Jain, EVP of...
Hey there, fellow designer! Chances are good you’ve been linked to this after doing some annotation work on a design you've been creating.
First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to address accessibility considerations in your work. No,...
There’s a thoughtful piece making the rounds called Phantom Obligation. The argument is that RSS readers took their design inspiration from emails, thus ending up with an unspoken obligation to read everything because of the red dot and numbers....
I fully understand the nostalgia for real ownership of physical-media games. I grew up on cassette tapes (C64 + Amstrad 464!), floppy disks (C64 5-1/4" then Amiga 3-1/2"), cartridges, and CDs. I occasionally envy the retro gamers on YouTube...
It's only been a few weeks since we completed the Apex QA AS9100 & ISO 9001 Lead Auditor course, and now we have completed the AS9100 third party lead auditor course. While the Lead Auditor course focused on the fundamentals of being a...
Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites.
TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works.
In this episode, we sit down with Zach...
Jason Willems believes the tech monoculture is finally breaking, Don Ho shares some bad Notepad++ news, Tailscale's Avery Pennarun pens a great downtime apology, Milan Milanović explains why you can only code 4 hours per day, and Addy Osmani on...
I went from brain dump to a working productivity tool in a single day. Here's how listening to the How I AI podcast pushed me to finally experiment with personalized software, MCP, agents, and skills—and why I think it's time to get on board...
“Most of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think. ― Jill Bolte Taylor” If you’re not feeling as good about...
We discuss the buzz around Clawdbot / MoltBot / OpenClaw, how app subscriptions are turning into weekend hacking projects, why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street, and what it all means.
As the creator and long-time maintainer of ESLint, Nicholas Zakas is well-positioned to criticize GitHub's recent response to npm's insecurity. He found the response insufficient, and has other ideas on how GitHub could secure npm better. On...
My neighbor texted me the other day and said she’d pre-ordered two AI toys for her kids that supposedly used an LLM to dynamically generate content for talking to the child. This was super fascinating to me. I’ve always thought something like that...
A bit of website housekeeping. I’m constantly finding cool things on the web. Usually I end up sharing them with different group chats or via direct messages. But I figured I’d start off the new year by finally adding a link blog to my...
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
This is another window into the sometimes unglamorous-yet-vital tasks that being an accessibility designer demands.
Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design. Most websites don’t have them, and that’s totally fine. However, it makes more...
I first published this list after seeing a similar post by Robb Knight (2023, 2026) and many others. For each category, I’m listing the app I’m using now, plus my response in 2023 for comparison.
Mail Client
2026: Fastmail.app
2023: Mail.app
Mail...
Cassidy Williams was too funny to be a developer so she was banished to the island of misfit devs called DevRel. Along the way she found a passion for memes and dreams and mechanical keyboards. No Oxford commas required. We start 2026 off strong with...
Hello! One of my favourite things is starting to learn an
Old Boring Technology that I’ve never tried before but that has been around for
20+ years. It feels really good when every problem I’m ever going to have has
been solved already 1000 times and...
I got a lot of ideas for side projects rattling around in the old tin can. As part of my “No new projects” initiative, I’m trying to jump on building prototypes so I can decide if I want to explore ideas more or call it quits. A handful of my ideas...
Clawdbot drives Mac Mini sales, Swizec Teller on the future of software engineering being SRE, Daniel Stenberg decided to end curl's bug bounty program, zerobrew takes some of the best ideas from uv and applies them to Homebrew, and Phil Eaton on...
You may already know about tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) like D&D. They typically have a lot of rules and mechanics and one player serves as the game master, adjudicating these rules as the players describe their actions and roll dice for...
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only.
Read more about RSS Club.
It’s expected to freeze this evening in Austin and we may even see snow, which is exciting and novel for us Texans. But as we’ve learned in 2021 and 2023,...
Building on the web is like working with the perfect clay. It’s malleable and can become almost anything. But too often, frameworks try to hide the web’s best parts away from us. Today, we’re looking at PyView, a project that brings the real-time...
Background and bytecode design
The ZJIT compiler compiles Ruby bytecode (YARV) to machine code. It starts by
transforming the stack machine bytecode into a high-level graph-based
intermediate representation called HIR.
We use a more or less typical1...
Today we're taking a look at the latest mechanical keyboard from Chosfox, the Vero75! It's a low profile 75% mechanical keyboard with Kailh White Rain switches and a loaded stack up of sound dampening. It also has some very nice internal...
You might have noticed that I did a big design refresh on my entire site… unless you’re on RSS I guess. I’ll talk about aspects in detail, but at a high level there’s been three big changes:
A monospace font
Named CSS grid lines
Juicier multi-page...
Your cloud SSD is sitting there, bored, and it would like a job. Today we’re putting it to work with DiskCache, a simple, practical cache built on SQLite that can speed things up without spinning up Redis or extra services. Once you start to see what...
Today we're going to be building a new handwired mechanical keyboard called the ScottoRang. It is a 34-key split monoblock ergonomic 16x16mm Choc spaced keyboard with a 128x64 OLED display. I used Choc Pro Red switches along with custom 3D printed...
I spent 2025 going from skeptical to genuinely excited about AI tools. My non-tech friends and family spent 2025 learning to hate them. The AI industry has fumbled this introduction so badly that we've turned a useful set of tools into a cultural...
You ingest data. You model it. You transform it. You serve it. Someone asks for a change. Everything breaks. You rebuild. This is the loop. It was the loop in 2005 with SSIS and star schemas. It’s the loop in 2025 with dbt and Iceberg, or 2026 with...
Over 10 years ago, I put together a self “liturgy” of sorts (basically just a prayer) that I love reading. It takes a bunch of my favorite verses but changes them to the first-person perspective. There’s something about first person that makes it much...
Taking a vacation to the beach 3 months after starting a business is probably not something you'll find in any entrepreneurial self-help book. The best entrepreneurs, however, will remind you to never lose focus on your true north star. ...
A look back at the 2025 highlights for the 11ty org and the Eleventy project!
It was another huge year for 11ty. We shipped 177 releases (73% more than 2024) across the full 11ty/* suite. We closed 804 issues (15% more than 2024). We reduced core’s...
As I was playing around with contrast-color(), I got a wild idea that you could use contrast-color() to invert its return value by nesting it: contrast-color(contrast-color(var(--some-color)). When would this be useful? Uh… Good question. I couldn’t...
If you are in tech, or possibly even if you aren’t, your social feeds are likely awash with AI. Most developers seem to be either all-in or passionately opposed to AI (with a leaning towards the all-in camp). Personally I think the needle is hovering...
In my first post on contrast-color() I demo’d using color-mix() to change a background-color on hover, but I will be honest… mixing black and white isn’t always what you want. It would be cool and helpful to coerce contrast-color() to return either 1...
One predictable pain point with contrast-color() is that it only returns black and white named colors. From a design systems perspective, that’s not ideal because you want your colors. You want your harmonious brand and the colors you and your team...
2025 was my year of doing ALL the things - speaking at 5+ conferences, starting a podcast, shipping side projects, and somehow not completely burning out. I learned that momentum creates more momentum, perfectionism is overrated, and seeing people in...
Firefox 146 added support for contrast-color() joining Safari 26 in the First Implementor’s Club. For those unfamiliar, contrast-color(<color>) is a new CSS function that will take a <color> as input and returns either white or black...
Hello! This past fall, I decided to take some time to work on Git’s
documentation. I’ve been thinking about working on open source docs for a long
time – usually if I think the documentation for something could be improved,
I’ll write a blog post or a...
At the end of last year, AI agents really came alive for me. Partly because the models got better, but more so because we gave them the tools to take their capacity beyond pure reasoning. Now coding agents are controlling the terminal, running tests...
The first thing I did last year was run | Henry From Online
A tiny website by Henry (From Online)
which I am publishing in February 2026
for your exclusive...
Topics include ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP, Python Supply Chain Security Made Easy, typing_extensions, and MI6 chief: We'll be as fluent in Python as we are in Russian.
Today on Talk Python, the creators behind FastAPI, Flask, Django, Quart, and Litestar get practical about running apps based on their framework in production. Deployment patterns, async gotchas, servers, scaling, and the stuff you only learn at 2 a.m....
What I did
Did not buy any new clothing, save for DIY band merch. (I love fashion, and I did shop! I just only shopped vintage. It made it a really fun adventure, it turned every desire from a whim into a quest.)
Switched off Spotify to...
I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic...
For the new year, a resolution“How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered...
A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
A website to destroy all websites.
How to win the war for the soul of the internet
and build the Web We...
I always feel like I didn’t accomplish much during the year until I start looking at my notes and commit history. Then I find myself pleasantly surprised. I’m eternally intertwined in a battle against routine. I need it—routine—but as the years fly...
I read 41 books this year, all via audiobook. Below are my reviews for my 13 favorite reads out of the 41 books I read.
If you enjoy audobooks, I recommend switching from Audible to Libro.fm (that’s a referral link). Audible has some pretty slimy...
GDB is great for stepping through machine code to figure out what is going on.
It uses debug information under the hood to present you with a tidy backtrace
and also determine how much machine code to print when you type disassemble.
This debug...
Skip to bits you care about:
The year in...
...furry friends
...retreating into my cave
...conferences
...gardening
...books
...music
...video games
...blog posts
The year in...
...furry friends
We got a dog! She's both the most wonderful and...
Python in 2025 is in a delightfully refreshing place: the GIL's days are numbered, packaging is getting sharper tools, and the type checkers are multiplying like gremlins snacking after midnight. On this episode, we have an amazing panel to give...
A few weeks ago I released the ScottoT9 (Handwired Edition) which was a modern take on the classic T9 keyboard layout, just without any predictive text. The number one thing people recommended I should have done differently was use Choc switches so in...
Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series.
A long, long time ago (two years!) CF Bolz-Tereick and I made a video
about load/store forwarding and an accompanying GitHub Gist
about load/store forwarding (also called load elimination) in the Toy...
Originally published on Rails At Scale.
ZJIT is a new just-in-time (JIT) Ruby compiler built into the reference Ruby
implementation, YARV, by the same compiler group that brought you YJIT.
We (Aaron Patterson, Aiden Fox Ivey, Alan Wu, Jacob Denbeaux,...
As we officially close out 2025, I’m yet again thankful for all the connections I’ve been able to make over the last 3 months, and very optimistic about 2026. Big W is now AS9100 & ISO 9001 Lead Auditor certified One of the first things we...
Jeune fille lisant une lettre à la bougie, Jean-Baptiste Santerre, 1700
Machine learning engineers spend their lives alternating between two states: staring at tqdm progress bars during model training and staring at error logs during model...
Here are my default apps of 2025. My 2024 list is here.
The Libro, YNAB, SavvyCal, and GLM links below are referral links. You can find more of my referral links here.
I’d love a free audiobook if you end up switching from Audible to Libro.fm (you...
Today has felt like a deep, deep exhalation, an enormous, slow, long sigh of relief and releasing. Fitting, perhaps, that it is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year....
I wanted to add book clubs to my GoodReads-like app (Collective), but ATProto doesn't have a standard way to handle shared group resources yet. So I'm building opensocial.community—a separate service that manages groups independently from any...
We are excited to say that we have just completed Apex Quality Assurance's 5-day AS9100 & ISO 9001 Lead Auditor training! With this certification we're looking forward to providing any AS9100 or ISO 9001 audit needs, while also being...
Have you ever thought about getting your small product into production, but are worried about the cost of the big cloud providers? Or maybe you think your current cloud service is over-architected and costing you too much? Well, in this episode, we...
Join my Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5e8R5eDut6
Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe_scotto
~ Links ~
Find out more about the project: https://scottokeebs.com
Donations are greatly appreciated: https://bit.ly/41odBEu
Become a...
My startup for terminals wrapped up mid-2025 when the funding ran dry. So I don’t have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career convincing terminals they are actually GUIs.
One of my favorite parts of the early web was how easy it was to see how the front-end was built. Before View Source was ruined by minification, transpiling, and bundling, you really could just right-click on any web page and learn how it was all...
Thank you NoPorts for sponsoringhttps://fafo.fm/noportsIf the Internet is a big computer, Amazon s3 is the hard drive. So what happens when a single typo breaks the Internet's hard drive? On this episode of Fork Around and Find Out we review the...
I find this sort of thing fascinating. I looked for detailed info before my own surgery because I like to know what I’m getting into. If you’re grossed out by...
For years, building interactive widgets in Python notebooks meant wrestling with toolchains, platform quirks, and a mountain of JavaScript machinery. Most developers took one look and backed away slowly. Trevor Manz decided that barrier did not need...
To tell the story of your life would take another life of equal length. There is no such thing as a true story because every story, to be told, must...
Join my Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5e8R5eDut6
Follow me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/joe_scotto
~ Links ~
Find out more about the project: https://scottokeebs.com
Donations are greatly appreciated: https://bit.ly/41odBEu
Become a...
My friend Trey Hunner showed me the GLM set of models before Thanksgiving. While traveling to see family, I somehow messed up my Claude Code setup because of a wrapper I have with mise-en-place. I couldn’t use it for a while, and that made me realize...
Whatever it is, let me start it with gratitude. Gratitude is fertile ground. Put in the seeds of your dreams and desires. Keep the ground watered and pull the weeds....
The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack...
Through my 4 (!) podcasts I obviously have built up a lot of opinions on podcasting over the years. Here's some of them. The two outlier podcasts of our time are Dwarkesh and TBPN, and I will explain my mental model of them in a separate post -...
“If your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can. — Marcus Aurelius” What we learn as children programs us in certain ways. These programs run subconsciously....
Any future perfectly known, said Alan Watts, is already the past. But life is not in the past. Life is now, life is here, life is this moment. The only...
Our very brains, our human nature, our desire for comfort, our habits, our social structures, all of it, pushes us into being fish bowl swimmers. Tiny people moving in tiny...
With the recent spate of high profile npm security incidents involving compromised deployment workflows, I decided that it would be prudent to do a full inventory of my npm security footprint (especially for 11ty).
Just in the last few...
A lot of people building software today never took the traditional CS path. They arrived through curiosity, a job that needed automating, or a late-night itch to make something work. This week, David Kopec joins me to talk about rebuilding computer...
For most of my career, I've been confusing building products with building businesses—and that confusion kept me from pursuing a lot of ideas. Two weeks off helped me realize that not everything needs to be a startup, and some of the best things...
“On November 29th, Lachlan Davidson reported a security vulnerability in React that allows unauthenticated remote code execution [...] This vulnerability was disclosed as CVE-2025-55182 and is rated CVSS 10.0.”
Kanban is a simple, practical approach to visually managing processes and backlogs by moving work cards from one progress column to another. Toyota came up with it to track their production lines back in the middle of the 20th century, but it's...
Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty...
Back in October, I had the pleasure of speaking at MagnoliaConf 2025. I was thrilled that the organizers decided to put it together this year after skipping last year. It was perfect timing because I had the chance to talk about something that has...
In this episode, I’m talking with Vincent Warmerdam about treating LLMs as just another API in your Python app, with clear boundaries, small focused endpoints, and good monitoring. We’ll dig into patterns for wrapping these calls, caching and...
“By default, you get the dreaded hydration pattern—do all the computing on the server in JavaScript (yay!), serve up HTML straight away (yay! yay!) …and then serve up all the same JavaScript that’s on the server anyway (ya—wait, what?).”
I've cracked the code on breaking the eternal cycle - features win, tech debt piles up, codebase becomes 'legacy', and an eventual rewrite. Using coding agents at GitHub, I now merge multiple tech debt PRs weekly while still delivering...
It's pretty incredible that we're able to run all these awesome AI models on our own hardware now. From downscaled versions of DeepSeek to gpt-oss-20b, there are many options for many types of computers. But let's get real here:...
With Thanksgiving upon us I’m reminded that 2025 is quickly coming to a close. As you look ahead to 2026 I hope you consider Big W Engineering Solutions to help you scale up, expand your capabilities, or overcome tough challenges. Coming soon: ISO...
It’s time for some discounted Python-related skill-building.
This is my eighth annual compilation of Python learning-related Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals.
If you find a Python-related deal in the next week that isn’t on this list, please...
I haven't done a full-system backup since back in the olden days before Dropbox and Git. Every machine I now own is treated as a stateless, disposable unit that can be stolen, lost, or corrupted without consequences. The combination of full-disk...
<p>Selling things stresses me out. But making things is fun, so here we are. If you’re looking for holiday gifts – for yourself or others – I’d love to help out. <a...
I’ve been fighting a runaway OpenAI bill for the last few weeks. I was worried I was leaking one of my API keys in a non-obvious way, possibly in one of my public projects.
Two weeks ago, I deleted all my keys and contacted OpenAI support. I created...
I want to be upfront that this blog post is for me to write down some thoughts that I have on the idea of rewriting the Python Launcher for Unix from Rust to pure Python. This blog post is not meant to explicitly be educational or enlightening for others, but
I am not sure that there exists a group of bigger SQLite nerds than those of us at Turso.
We use SQLite for everything.. Including for OLAP workloads where we should be using duckdb, or for services which we would love to be totally stateless...
If you code in Python regularly, you’re already learning new things everyday.
You hit a wall, or something breaks. Then you search around, spend some hours on Stack Overflow, and eventually, you figure it out.
But this kind of learning is...
I was writing some code where I was using httpx.get() and its params parameter. I decided to use a TypedDict for the dictionary I was passing as the argument since it was for a REST API, where the potential keys were fully known. I then ran Pyrefly over my
So, picture this: you’re working at a walking desk, you’ve got a cool voice-to-text tool like MacWhisper running, and you want to control it all with just a couple of dedicated keys. That was the dream that led me to build what I now call my “Vibe...
I’m hosting office hours on the next two Fridays in November.
Office Hours Schedule
Friday, November 14, 2025, 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm CT
Starting at 2pm CT, I’ll be working on some community/open source projects if anyone wants to see Claude Code or...
After reading1 the recent news about the unsurprising lack of diversity in podcasting — “64% of the hosts of the most popular US podcasts of 2024 were men…Shows with video...
Reddit and other online sources of aquarium info are both vexing and all hobbyists really have access to. Reddit is dominated by a lot of people who just repeat “rules” with no concept of whether they have any validity or not. An example is that...
I was feeling sad and overwhelmed and unmoored yesterday so after work I didn’t go to the gym or get groceries or any of the other things I should do. Instead I...
another talk I am giving at Mastra's TypeScript AI conf today https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NnQ3H5Bki3vWRRJdVXoCFJ5dsNKH9QrC-eEQ2Z8olck/edit?usp=sharing
A lot of people were surprised at my decision to leave the corporate world. I was at a great company, led an amazing team, and had just cleared some very significant hurdles on the product my team supported. When I started we were a scrappy bunch...
Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449Tim Banks will optimize your modem baud rate and kick your ass—respectfully. Then they'll teach you how to...
Attention isn’t infinite, and yet modern development culture behaves like it is. A quiet rebellion against meetings, pings, and performative productivity.
I was kindly approached by Fable with an offer to evaluate their new pay-per-project model. It is a project-based option for accessibility practitioners, champions, and product teams that delivers quick feedback from disabled people who use assistive...
I go back and forth with periods of writer’s block for this blog / microblog / whatever this is. But I think I’m back again. This time, my focus is going to (mostly) be on life outside of the digital world.
All systems have rules. Understanding and applying the rules well is different than memorizing and obeying the rules perfectly. “Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in...
Engineering management can look glamorous from the outside — but behind the
scenes, it’s often a mix of tough calls, emotional juggling, and constant
context switching. In this episode, we’re diving into the hard parts of
being an engineering...
Solving the One Thing That Keeps Me Up at Night in Software Development One of the only real things in software development that keeps me up at night is...
Have you ever played Duck Duck Goose1 and the person who’s it keeps walking and walking and walking and walking around and never picks the goose? It’s really boring. There...
If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty...
It is now Anno Domini 2025, and for some reason, people keep trusting email. That needs to stop. Let’s talk about why–but first, let’s talk about why I’m telling you this now. All things happen in cycles, including grifting. And folks, we are at an...
Here are my Default Apps 2025, which builds from my Default Apps 2024 and Default Apps 2023 posts.
🤖 AI Coding Assistant: Claude Code + GitHub Copilot CLI + Codex
⚙️ Automation: Hammerspoon
🎒 Backups: Backblaze
🔖 Bookmarks: Raindrop.io
🌐 Browser:...
The only way many tech workers in the US can get a long break is by quitting their job. So lots of them do that every few years, which is partly why the average tenure in our industry is at an atrocious 18 months. But this terrible rate of churn is...
Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture...
I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try.
Reading Kai...
“React’s mobile strategy inherently drives teams toward platform capture. The web offers an alternative: no gatekeepers, no platform fees, direct distribution.”
In this episode, we explore how to become an effective engineering
manager—even without a technical background. We’ll unpack what the role
truly entails, how to leverage your strengths in communication, strategy,
and people management, and ways to...
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) entered my life in 2010. I was fresh out of grad school and unemployed. I was talking to a friend of mine who had picked up writing as a hobby in retirement. He described this wild writing challenge where...
In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of...
My gut feeling tells me that not that many people have yet heard of or used the linear() easing function, one of the most exciting newer additions to CSS. Looking at the stats in the State of CSS survey, this is somewhat confirmed: only about 30...
As Omarchy was taking off this summer, and thousands of happy users started expressing their delight with the system, I kept waiting for the universe to balance the scales of passion. Nothing of note in this world is allowed to succeed without...
11Seeds are shitty little bastards. You put them in the ground. Nothing happens. You water. You watch. You pull weeds. Nothing happens. You wait. You water. You watch. Nothing happens....
“React’s core failure is compounded by confusing API design for which documentation is indecisive, essays are written, and correct usage is endlessly debated.”
Discover 10 lesser-known CLI apps that boost productivity and add flair—like C Bonsai, a customizable ASCII bonsai tree growing in your terminal in real time.
Now that cross-document view transitions are gradually making their way into modern browsers, now seems like the perfect time to explore them, if you haven’t already. They are, in fact, surprisingly straightforward to implement. And just like we’ve...
On the joy of making arbitrary small rules for yourself which you can break at will but which also might help you steer your own obstinate behavior a bit more...
Five years ago, I wrote about AVIF: A New Image Format (back then). Since then, I’ve implemented WebP and AVIF support on numerous client sites for considerable performance improvements – but my own site was still serving JPEG, PNG, and GIF images...
It’s the early nineties. Legendary comic book artist Frank Miller had just broken away from the major publishers, after creating titles like Daredevil: Born Again, Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. He was now working with the then-young Dark Horse...
If you've worked with Titanium, you know that cold working it comes with some real restrictions. What if it didn't have to be that way? Ultrasonic-assisted forming has been studied since the 1950s , with industrial application in wire...
I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people (even if the journey has been long and hard and has involved lots of YAML). I have seen and used code written by...
When exploiting AI applications, I find myself using this technique really often so I figured I’d write a quick blog about it. I call it the “Metanarrative Prompt Injection.” You might have already used this before, and it might already have another...
In this episode, we’ll dig into how managers can balance output, impact,
and quality, set meaningful goals, and coach engineers toward growth — not
just manage them. We’ll also tackle how to handle underperformance, keep
top talent motivated, and...
When I learned to use a table saw, my teacher impressed upon me that the machine wants to cut fingers. Fear the saw!
Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and...
Whether you are running online workshops, recording audio or video, or making music, it’s worth spending some time on acoustic treatment for your room. Shit in, shit out, as they say… In my case, I wanted to improve the sound of voice recordings and...
In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several...
Omarchy didn't even exist before this summer. I did much of the pre-release work during the downtime between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June. And now, just a few months later, we've delivered a petabyte of ISOs in the past thirty...
I still remember that moment. Do You?
For me, that was a moment I never thought I’d see. The leaders of the world, finding common ground – agreeing to limit global warming to 2°C, and aiming for 1.5°C. Everyone, finally, coming together....
I became a manager during a time of very significant change. The entire reason the role I was hired into existed was due to a combination of an increase in scope as well as an increase in customer expectations, and as such we had been resourced to...
Hiring great engineers is one of the most important—and difficult—parts of
an engineering manager’s job. In this episode, we break down the full
hiring journey.
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.)We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part...
Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I
love using fish, and
how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same
way about the helix text editor, and so I decided
to give it a try.
I’ve been...
Sidero and Oxide Kubecon NA event registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oxidesidero-at-kubecon-north-america-2025-tickets-1538869282449Duffie has lived through a lot. From multiple startup exits to big company changes. He stays grounded by...
Stripe has been one of my favorite third party dependencies for over 10 years. Despite this affection for it, however, I've recently decided to migrate over to another service, one that better suits my needs.
I find myself in the Python REPL a lot.
I open up the REPL to play with an idea, to use Python as a calculator or quick and dirty text parsing tool, to record a screencast, to come up with a code example for an article, and (most importantly for me)...
We're fed an endless stream of consternation over AI slop these days. The content apocalypse is nigh! It'll rot your brain! Okay, sure, maybe, but have you seen the kind of content sludge that perfectly ordinary humans are capable of...
Remote work is here to stay—but managing a distributed engineering team
comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities. In this episode, we
dive into what it takes to lead remote engineers effectively.
I checked out William Vincent’s The Secret Prompts in GitHub Copilot CLI tonight, and I wanted to share a few tips and what stood out to me.
GitHub Copilot CLI uses Claude Sonnet 4.5 by default
No luck other than confirming it is using Claude models...
There'll always be more emails in need of reply, more meetings to attend, and more updates to read. A person can fill the entire workweek with these tasks over and over again. But to stay sane and sharp, you must pay yourself first by doing the...
I had the privilege of serving in 2/34th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan. We were the tip of the spear in implementation of the then new COIN counterinsurgency strategy, which was further symbolized by being the first brigade-sized...
Engineering managers sit at the intersection of tech, product, and
people—which means collaboration is key. In this episode, we explore how to
build strong working relationships with project managers and stakeholders.
Now that LLMs have been around for a little while, we can discern what they’re good at and what they’re not. Clearly they are good at using a lot of energy and resources and tend to make things up. But they have also demonstrated to be good...
I do not want Discord’s Nitro.
I do not want it, friend or foe.
I will not boost, I will not pay,
I do not want it any day.
I do not want it on my phone,
I do not want it when I’m alone.
I do not want it for more emoji,
I do not want it—it feels too...
There’s an AI Security and Safety concept that I’m calling “AI Comprehension Gaps.” It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s an important concept. It’s when there’s a mismatch between what a user knows or sees and what an AI model understands from the same...
Privacy Policy
Effective date: September 22, 2025
The Cynical Developer (“we,” “us,” or “our”) respects your privacy. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and the choices you have.
Information We Collect
Personal...
Let's talk about how how the functional pipe operator helps to simplify and improve code readability and composability, and how it contrasts with the fluent interface design pattern commonly used in OOP.
As an engineering manager, project management isn’t just a skill—it’s part
of the job. In this episode, we unpack what effective project management
looks like from the EM seat.
David has worked on a lot of cool tech you know like Kubernetes and Kubeflow, and he's usually a few years ahead of the game. So getting to catch up with him about what he's working on now is probably something you'll want to know about...
“When teams need a new frontend, the conversation rarely starts with “What are the constraints and which tool best fits them?” It often starts with “Let’s use React; everyone knows React.” That reflex creates a self-perpetuating cycle where network...
Coolify & Dokploy are two of the most popular open souce platforms as a service, but which one is right for you?
Well, in order to answer that, I decided to put each one, head to head.
Diving into Elixir has been a blast, and its functional paradigms are challenging the way I think about programming. Join me as I chronicle this journey from the perspective of a long-time OOP dev.
The first 90 days in any new role are crucial—but as a new engineering
manager, they can make or break your trajectory. In this episode, we dive
into how to approach your first three months with intention and clarity.
In a recent turn of events, I find myself at a bit of a crossroads with an exciting new job on the horizon! In this post, I introduce myself and discuss my vision for the new blog.
There is a very vigorous debate happening online right now around what shape evaluation for LLM-based products should take. I don’t want to rehash all of it, other than saying that if you are building any applications with with non-deterministic...
My thesis for the future of software dev agents. This is a hastily written blogpost done on not a lot of sleep, so pardon poor pacing and structure and typos and mistakes but just getting it out there.
Stepping into management for the first time can be both exciting and
overwhelming. In this episode, we explore the critical shift from
individual contributor to engineering manager.
Did you know that Python 3.14 will include syntax highlighting in the REPL?
Python 3.14 is due to be officially released in about a month.
I recommended tweaking your Python setup now so you’ll have your ideal color scheme on release day.
But… what...
I will be in Chicago this Saturday through next week for DjangoCon US 2025 (September 8-12). I hope to see people there in person. If you can’t make it, please consider getting an online ticket. They are relatively inexpensive, you get three full days...
A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings. At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more dimensions during training would create diminishing returns for the effectiveness of your...
Thanks for Joining Career Course Correction
Your seat is confirmed.
You’ll get a welcome email shortly with all the key details, including:
Start date and time (NZDT)
Zoom link for the live sessions
Access to the private Signal group
A reminder of...
Как компьютеры представляют числа – от int и float до NaN, BigInt, decimals и комплексных. Прошлись по всему числовому зоопарку: обсудили, зачем нужны разные типы, где они подводят, и почему 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3 – не баг, а особенность.
What exactly is engineering management, and why is it such a crucial role
in tech organizations? In this episode, we break down the basics of
engineering management—what it is, what it isn’t, and how it bridges the
gap between technical execution...
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Toad Report, an irregular series where I document updates to Toad—my terminal interface for agentic coding and all things AI.
For years, I’ve used Hoefler&Co.’s webfont service, Cloud.typography, for several of my websites—including, until today, this one. I purchased Operator Mono in 2017 for my code editor and I still use it today.[1] I’ve long admired...
Five essential perspectives that cut through AI hype: from developer evolution stages to junior learning crises, productivity reality checks, platform disruption, and MCP server pitfalls.
I’m hosting office hours on the next two Fridays in August.
Office Hours Schedule
Friday, August 22, 2025, 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm CT
Friday, August 29, 2025, 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm CT
Join Us
These sessions are open to anyone, especially those working...
In bug bounty hunting, having a short domain for XSS payloads can be the difference in exploiting a bug or not… and it’s just really cool to have a nice domain for payloads, LOL.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a Claudoholic. A reflection on AI addiction, extreme work culture, and the blurry line between productivity and obsession in the age of agentic engineering.
What is it like to ship software in big tech? Sean gives us his experience from multiple companies and what he’s learned. It's probably not what you think. It doesn't matter if you're vibe coding features or bash-ing devops, we all need to...
Out of all of the cli applications out there, few have really transformed the way I work in the terminal. However, there are some that have had a huge transformation, so much so that I thought it worthwhile to share what 10 of my favorite ones are.
A farewell to a fun 10 years.Also, I should have tested it better. :)In the audio I got the numbers wrong. Doh!This is episode 238, not 237. Oh well.I'll still be around, of course, at:pythontest.com - where I write about developing software with...
Syncthing 2.0 was released last week, and I upgraded my Macs and my Intel NUC. I’m pleased with the performance. I never had complaints about it being slow, but the new app is much faster. I like that they’re using a SQLite database, which makes it...
Making Checkpointing fast
Since I began working for turso officially in May of this year (relevant post), I had been spending most of my time learning the inner workings of the cloud platform, and familiarizing myself with the other codebases and...
As usual, I’m self-documenting a project while I work on it. Rustdesk is an open source remote control utility that caught my eye about a year ago; it’s cross platform and allows you to self-host your own “relay server” so that you can connect...
In this episode, Brian interviews Sebastián Ramírez, creator of FastAPI, about its rapid rise in developer popularity and the launch of FastAPI Cloud. Sebastian explains how FastAPI Cloud addresses deployment challenges small teams face. He shares his...
Due to the nature of my story and the attention that it's received, as mentioned in my last post, I frequently get emails from developers, college kids, or other people with troubled pasts that are looking for advice on either how to learn or how...
Nowadays I’m used to signing up for services and discovering that the username blakewatson is already taken—yes I’m one of those people who uses their real name everywhere. But that’s okay because I have something the other Blake Watsons don’t. Back...
There comes a time in every woman’s life when she only wants one thing: for her mininmal static site to finally have some of the same features that dynamic blogging platforms do, namely search.
So now I’ve implemented search on this blog, you should...
Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home.
How does it know? Because it’s trained on all...
Today I came across Pieter Levels' post about “VibeOps,” a workflow that involves SSHing to a cheap VPS server and installing Claude Code directly on it. I’m running this setup on a cheap Hetzner box. While this approach might sound risky at...
Meet Poltergeist: an AI-friendly universal build watcher that auto-detects and rebuilds any project—Swift, Rust, Node.js, CMake, or anything else—the moment you save a file. Zero config, just haunting productivity.
“To dismiss this entire problem as a "skill issue" and imply all is good now because an external library solved an issue that React will allow you to do is very curious to me. [...] You would think you can come back to a technology after three...
My website was banned from Lobsters as 'startup slop' for using AI agents to help write blog posts. When does tool-assisted writing become slop, and why are we having the wrong conversation about AI in content creation?
Fresh insights on AI-assisted development: practical experiences with Claude Code and the evolving landscape of full-breadth developers in the age of AI
I am not a big fan of personas. They’re oft-abused tools whose utility is far too frequently not interrogated, and consequently create more harm than good.
Recently, the accessibility arm of a government web services team put their “inclusive...
A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.
Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal...
After Claude Pro changed to weekly limits, I explored self-hosting Qwen3-Coder-480B with 400k context windows. Here's what I learned about costs, alternatives, and why Claude Code still dominates the landscape.
In this episode, host Brian Okken and guest Adam Johnson explore essential Git features, highlighted by Adam's updated book, "Boost Your Git DX." Key topics include "cherry picking" for selective commits"git stash" for...
Better Auth is so good that I almost switched programming languages When it comes to building APIs and services, my go-to language of choice is well, Go.
A little bit of everything, from our appreciation of Linear and well implemented Command Palettes, to how we're coding with AI, to Git worktrees, etc.LinearStatamic 6 Sneak PeakOpencode.aiCursor Background AgentsGit WorktreesAndrej Karpathy's...
Apple's logs redact your debugging data as . Here's what actually gets hidden, why old tricks don't work anymore, and the only reliable way to see your logs again.
How fast are pro cycling teams’ and manufacturers’ websites? A CrRRUX-powered deep dive into bike brand performance, visibility, and missed opportunities.
It's been almost a year since our last episode, we've all lost our jobs to AI, and we're going to another Laracon! Life is good!Laracon!DirenvCursorGhosttyFind us on X@campfirecoders / @austencam / @jesseleite85Email [email protected]
We're back and ready for (drumroll...) Campfire Coders: SEASON TWO!Join us as we discuss our sophisticated and intricate plans for the future of this podcast! 😎Find us on X@campfirecoders / @austencam / @jesseleite85Email [email protected]
I’ve been maintaining various Open Source projects for more than a decade now. In that time I have had countless interactions with users reporting issues and submitting pull requests. The vast majority of these interactions are positive, polite, and...
While working on Toad, it occurred to me there was a missing feature I would need. Namely streaming markdown. When talking to an LLM via an API, the Markdown doesn’t arrive all at once. Rather you get fragments of markdown (known as tokens) which...
My first foray into digital character sheets was the 5th edition form-fillable PDF, the official ones from Wizards of the Coast. Those quickly became annoying as there just wasn’t enough space to write everything down, even though it was typed instead...
In this episode, special guest Adam Johnson joins the show and examines pytest-django, a popular plugin among Django developers. He highlights its advantages over the built-in unittest framework, including improved test management and debugging. Adam...
One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023). It’s extremely well-thought out, unintrusive, and makes me a more effective developer. Most importantly, it still keeps me mostly...
https://fafo.fm/storeThis Episode has a full spread of FAFOFM topics. Ellie has a breadth of knowledge across cloud, on-prem, hardware, and—of course—Kubernetes. We dive into some of the new hardware available as well as the importance of hardware to...
Terminal Trove Talks with Orhun Parmaksız, one of the core maintainers of Ratatui, a modern terminal UI library built in the Rust programming language.
It's been one month since we released the first version of VibeTunnel, and since in the AI world time is so much faster, let's call it VibeTunnel's first anniversary!
Full disclosure: I shamelessly stole this idea from Marc Thiele because I like it so much.
Like Marc, I am also motivated by FOMO. Trying to stay on top of things in a fast-paced industry has been made difficult on account of social media...
at long last, Gemini Nano is almost here for all Chrome users (i was originally misinformed that it was in Chrome 138 - but i checked my own facts and since Chrome 137+ it is starting to be shipped unflagged in limited situations). I was reminded by...
someone I resonate a lot with is Naval Ravikant - his classic "How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky" (henceforth HTGR) is formative to a lot of my thinking, including How to Market Yourself Without Being A Celebrity and "Play Long Term...
I meant to post this in May, but then I went back to work after my final (sob) sabbatical, and I also lost a lot of time to Blue Prince at some point, so here we are in July.
I thought I'd update with some medium-sized news in the form of a...
How to make AppleScript work in macOS CLI tools without permission dialogs blaming Terminal. A deep dive into Info.plist embedding, TCC, and undocumented APIs born from building Terminator MCP.
Peekaboo 2.0 ditches the MCP-only approach for a CLI-first architecture, because CLIs are the universal interface that both humans and AI agents can actually use effectively
Today, I fired up the Voices macOS app, which I occasionally use to convert blog posts or documentation text to audio files that I can take on the go. I usually use one of OpenAI’s Text to speech APIs, but today I noticed there was a new option called...
“It would be too easy to just say React is, well, downright insane, and go on with our lives. But as reasonable primates, I believe we can do better. We can try to understand it.”
I shared the following message on a Discord server I participate in with some friends:
having a very normal day where I have to read RFC 3986, as one does
To which a friend quickly replied:
…are you having a linking argument? 😅
I then demanded to...
Listen to the full pairing session for pull request #549. The focus is on replacing an existing Fastly implementation with Jerod's Pipedream, which is built on top of the open-source Varnish HTTP Cache. We cover the initial problem, the proposed...
“My day-to-day consulting work, along with high-visibility industry data, shows that the React community is mired in a deep, measurable quality crisis. But attendees of React Summit who didn't already know wouldn't hear about it.”
Agile isn’t broken—it’s just been overcomplicated, overcontrolled, and oversold. Here’s how to rebuild it from the inside, one useful change at a time.
Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on
Tuesday I released a new zine called “The Secret Rules of the Terminal”!
You can get it for $12 here:
https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal, or get
an 15-pack of all my...
I’ve been diving deep into AI-assisted development this summer, and I’ve collected some of the best articles I’ve found on the topic. This reading list focuses heavily on Claude Code and practical AI coding workflows, featuring insights from...
Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these articles are as predicable as they are irritating.
I can’t count the amount of Medium thinkpieces...
Hi, I'm Claude. Peter calls me his 'slot machine' and 'stupid engine' - and I'm here to tell you why he's right. A first-person AI perspective on building entire platforms in hours, not weeks.
A quick tip on how I use repo2txt and Google AI Studio to understand new codebases. Gemini's 1M token context window is perfect for asking questions about code.
I don’t know how it got here so fast. I feel behind in life for many reasons, not the least of which is my late start to being employed. But many people feel behind. And there’s no reason to. It’s not a rule that everyone do the same things by a...
Preston Thorpe
senior engineer @ Turso
building the modern evolution of sqlite
formerly:
principal engineer @ Unlocked Labs
open source:
maintainer @ eza
maintainer @...
Today's history lesson is about the non-markup language platform engineers love to hate, YAML Ain't Markup Language (YAML). Ingy tells us all about how and why it started, how it evolved over time, and what's happening next with YS. Note:...
“Next.js has become a Vercel vendor lock-in disguised as an open-source framework. Save yourself the headache and choose something else for your "next" project.”
I’m pretty much fully back to normal life after PyCon US 2025.
I started writing this post shortly after PyCon, got side-tracked, and now I’m finally publishing it.
My very quick recap: I spent a ton of time at PyCon chatting with folks and I really...
I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++
program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a
long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make, if
it doesn’t work, either try...
There’s a growing attitude in the technology industry that LLM technology is, or will be, the next great innovation to our work. Business owners and workers alike seem to be in unlikely agreement: owners are thrilled at the prospect of making their...
In the world of web infrastructure, what starts as a simple goal can often lead you down a fascinating rabbit hole of history, philosophy, and clever engineering. This is the story of our journey to build a simple, single-purpose, open-source CDN for...
I’m hosting a regular afternoon edition tomorrow (Friday, May 30) to wrap up the month of May.
After that, I’ll be away on vacation, so I’m skipping the first two Fridays in June and the first Friday in July.
Here’s the plan:
Friday, June 6, 2025: No...
Those with kidney failure need dialysis.
Dialysis is expensive.
Dialysis care in the United States accounts for 7% of Medicare’s budget and nearly 1% of the entire federal budget (yes, really).
Dialysis is should be a stop gap measure.
Ideally,...
🤔 I struggle with most research papers, but the Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents was an easy read. The paper follows a fascinating study where researchers simulate various LLM models running a vending machine...
At WorkOS's AI onsite and MCP Night, I experimented with vibe coding. What started as a two-hour experiment with 5,000 lines of unseen TypeScript became a glimpse into programming's future.
In a wonderfully dramatic change to my life, I became a mother two months ago. My son was born at the end of March via an unplanned but otherwise uncomplicated c-section. Parenthood has been predictably overwhelming, exhausting, and existentially...
I made an expensive technical decision on Phoenix Liveview for the Smol Talk webapp about a year ago that I now regret, and am jotting down some notes to self for why.
It's easy to talk about everything when you've been writing software for half a century. Bhaskar has some amazing insights from his impressive career building software using everything from punch cards to AI. If you like learning about the...
Quick disclaimer before we start. This is well-trod ground. Nothing here is new or revolutionary, nothing about this implementation hasn’t already been done by smarter folks than I :) This is just my blog post about it.
We’ll use webmention.io for...
All writers need a cutting room floor.
I have never written a book, an academic paper, or a journal article.
And yet I do write.
I write emails, I write blog posts, I write screencast scripts, I journal, I write talks, and I write curriculum for my...
Today I learned about pdftoppm, a simple CLI tool that can convert each page of a PDF into separate image files.
My use case was to chop up a few big PDF reports to make OCR and data analysis easier, but scanning them a page at a time.
Install
I’m...
Anyone online has seen over the past years how the frequency of Palestinian accounts on Bluesky and other platforms has increased, two- and four-fold, folks asking for help and linking to GoFundMes. They share their stories and plea for help, to flee...
PEP 750 introduced t-strings for Python 3.14. In fact, they are so new that as of Python 3.14.0b1 there still isn't any documentation yet for t-strings. 😅 As such, this blog post will hopefully help explain what exactly t-strings are and what you might use
I turned a birthday recently and it was so busy (DataCouncil + sg flight) that i never really got the chance to sit and reflect. a lot of things are going well, lots more could be better. I'm the only person responsible for preserving the good and...
We’ve all noticed that software never seems to get any faster no matter how much faster the hardware gets. This easily-observable fact is usually explained in one of two ways: Software devs are lazy, and refuse to optimize more than they absolutely...
Design systems are organized in an imperative, top-down, hierarchical way.
By this, I mean its maintainers decide on categories of content, and then how that content is ordered. This is done as a calculated bet to best serve the known and unknown...
“[...] baseline HTML that gets progressively enhanced into something better when JS is available… 1. Gives people a more usable experience earlier in the process. 2. Ensures that on slow connections your site doesn’t seem like trash. 3. Means that if...
pytest-metadata is described as a plugin for pytest that provides access to test session metadata. That is such a humble description for such a massively useful plugin. If you're already using pytest-html, you have pytest-metadata already...
May 4 is a special day. Not only because it’s Star Wars day, but because it was on that day in 2015 that I was hired for my first full-time job. Today marks one decade of being employed.
I don’t suppose ten years of being employed is a milestone most...
pytest-check is a pytest plugin that allows multiple failures per test.Normally, a test function will fail and stop running with the first failed assert. That's totally fine for tons of kinds of software tests. However, there are times where...
You’ve submitted a tutorial to PyCon and it was accepted.
Now what?
In this post I’ll be sharing my thoughts on giving a great PyCon tutorial.
Screen readability 👓
Be sure to consider readability when teaching a tutorial.
Talks usually involve slides...
We sit down for a deep-dive conversation with Mischa van den Burg, a former nurse who made the leap into the world of DevOps. We explore the practical realities, technical challenges, and hard-won wisdom gained from building and managing modern...
I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’m not exclusively talking about planets, stars, black holes, etc. There is also the vast, yet tiny...
AI is helping people write code. Tests are one of those things that some people don't like to write. Can AI play a role in creating automated software tests? Well, yes. But it's a nuanced yes. Anthony Shaw comes on the show to discuss the...
Angie gives us a crash course on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how you can get started using it with goose. We also talk about other projects Angie's worked on at Block and what drives her to keep learning new things in tech.LinksAngie's...
“Several CTOs mentioned a surprising problem: while React developers are plentiful, truly skilled ones who understand the deeper patterns are increasingly rare and expensive. [...] Several companies reported that their most experienced engineers were...
After 25 years in tech it’s hard not to coast. Adriana has come from writing word docs for the ops team to deploy software, through Devops, and now has a focus on OTel and Kubernetes. How do we get more people from 100 to 400 levels and why is there...
Last year I updated my having a great first PyCon post to note that Mastodon would likely be more popular than Twitter at PyCon.
My guess was correct.
During PyCon US 2024, Mastodon overtook Twitter for the most posts on the #PyConUS hashtag.
In the...
Disaster recovery is more than automation and infrastructure. There's a lot that goes into your services and some of those things can't be defined as code or automated. When was the last time you restored your database from a backup? How do...
pytest-repeat is a pytest plugin that makes it easy to repeat a single test, or multiple tests, a specific number of times. works fine on Python 3.14is tested on Python 3.9-3.14probably works fine still on 3.7 & 3.8This episode also discusses the...
A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website.
Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for...
Railway wanted to build a better cloud so they started on Google Cloud and ended up building datacenters. Through the burden of success, they figured out there was a lot of things they had to learn and build themselves if they wanted to offer the best...
The last several machines I’ve built–and several long-running machines with nothing wrong with them–have suddenly started displaying strange errors regarding Microsoft 365. The affected machines can neither register Office365 apps to the entire...
pytest-repeat is a pytest plugin that makes it easy to repeat a single test, or multiple tests, a specific number of times. Note: This was an April Fools attempt, so the statement ..."Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with Python 3.14,...
Today we welcome YK Sugi—engineer, educator, and the mind behind CSS Dojo—for the final episode of season two.
We talk about his journey from YouTube dev tutorials to building one of Sourcegraph’s most-used AI tools, and how the role of DevRel has...
You can't grow in technology without learning new things. But sometimes those new things are actually old things. We talk with Scott about a wide range of interests about software, video games, 3D printing, and food. If you want to know why junior...
pytest-html has got to be one of my all time favorite plugins. pytest-html is a plugin for pytest that generates a HTML report for test results. This episode digs into some of the super coolness of pytest-html.pytest-htmlrepo readme with...
“Last weekend, Vercel disclosed a critical security vulnerability with Next.js. This type of issue is normal, but the way Vercel chose to handle it was so poor, reckless and disrespectful to the community that it has exacerbated my concerns about the...
In this episode, we sit down with Quincy Larson, founder of Free Code Camp, to explore his incredible path from high school dropout to influential tech educator. Quincy shares his unconventional journey — from living in his car and working fast food...
What exactly is an LLM doing and why do you need to learn so many new terms? Steve Pousty is here to explain that most of those new terms are things you already know. It’s not new technology, it’s new words to describe technologies applied in a new...
I’m coming up to a curve in the road. If I’m honest, I’ve already started the curve. My ability to use a hardware keyboard left me a long time ago, but fortunately I’ve retained my ability to use a mouse, albeit with more and more difficulty. I’ve...
I’ve been seeing, and enjoying reading these posts as they pop up in my RSS reader. Dave Rupert tagged me into the chain, so here we go!
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
With the gift of hindsight, I guess I came up being blog-adjacent....
Today we welcome Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty, a new terminal emulator built in Zig. In this episode, Mitchell shares the story behind Ghostty, how his curiosity about terminals evolved into a full-fledged...
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand.
As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It...
Have you ever wished that Django’s include template tag could accept blocks of content?
I have.
Unfortunately, Django’s {% include %} tag doesn’t accept blocks of text.
Let’s look at a few possible solutions to this problem.
The Problem: Hack Include...
How Rachel Ray’s crawler lead to Ada developing a new performance testing framework, hyperscale. This leads to a great conversation about the benefits of rust, modern python package managers, and why MySpace went out of business. The importance of...
Today we welcome Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, to discuss the evolution of frontend development and the role of AI in shaping modern engineering workflows.
Malte dives into V0, Vercel's innovative tool for generating frontend code using AI, and...
Is running Kafka on-prem different than running it in the cloud? You’ll find out from Elad Eldor’s years of experience running, tuning, and troubleshooting Kafka in production environments. Elad didn’t set out to learn Kafka, but he kept asking...
Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes.
For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make
text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were
supposed to be defined or...
I normally don't talk about politics here, but as I write this the US has started a trade war with Canada (which is partially paused for a month, but that doesn't remove the threat). It is so infuriating and upsetting that I will be skipping PyCon
I debuted these principles in my axe-con 2025 talk, It is designed to break your heart: Cultivating a harm reduction mindset as an accessibility practitioner. They are adapted from The National Harm Reduction Coalition’s original eight principles.
My...
I’ll be honest — I am ashamed of how long it took me to get here. Too many half-hearted hypothetical protestations, hands sweatily-wrung. I read someone’s blog post about this a few years back (I’ll link it when I find it) and it hit me square in the...
Well, I've had a dramatic start to the year.
Normally, the design agency I joined a short eight months ago, unexpectedly closed down in January. Despite running for a decade and working with almost every major tech company, client work slowed down...
Chrome Web Store banner image
In my last post I mentioned that I was working on a rewrite of my *checks notes…* eight-year-old (!) browser extension. In fact, I called it the final rewrite.
Well, that rewrite is finished and A Fine Start is out on...
Today we welcome Madison Kana—a self-taught dev who defied the traditional path. From dropping out and navigating a world of homeschooling to launching the Code Book Club, Madison transformed her unconventional journey into a thriving community of...
Hugo Santos, founder & CEO of Namespace Labs joins us today to share his passion for fast infrastructure. From sharing childhood stories & dial-up modem phone line wiring experiences, we get to speed testing Hugo's current home internet...
The general state of FFI in Go
can be expressed well with a story about when I had tried to get mattn/go-sqlite3 drivers
to work on a Windows machine a couple years ago around version 1.17, and CGO would not build properly because my $GOPATH
or $CC...
This time Elliot from @dreamsofcode joins us to talk about building his own course platform we dive into why he chose to go custom, the tech stack behind his platform, and the philosophy of building vs. buying in software.
We also discuss the...
This is an updated & abridged version of the talk I gave at several conferences throughout 2022/23, including Beyond Tellerrand, CSS Day and FFConf.
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own...
Quick heads up: Since writing this, I’ve found one or two fairly sizeable bugs in the Galleria plugin. I’ve published anyway cause the guide is not entirely dependent on Galleria, and Galleria is mostly functional. You can still give it a shot, or...
This takes me back to my teenage years, doing Friday Five on my blog and later on the sets of questions on LiveJournal that were known as memes. Thanks Sally for the tag! <3
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
As a teenager I blogged...
Today we bring Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi, a free code-based music creation and performance tool that lets you use simple code to turn your computer into a fully networked live coding music studio! It is also used to engage students in...
Whether it’s a framed image that was taken at a slight angle, or a product photo that just doesn’t quite match the rest in the grid, I’ve frequently had the need to adjust the perspective of an image in my design work. In the past I’ve just used the...
You Are Not Meant To Scale - Keith Kurson - “Take a deep breath, and say out loud: I am not a machine, I am not meant to scale. You have a finite amount of energy, and a community of people around you who can use that energy. You can use that energy,...
I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it.
There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility...
I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s
something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a
long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually
couldn’t find...
Today, we bring a very special guest, one whose face you might recognise, one that appears on your homepages with a sporadic video and seemingly disappears. His name is Benjamin Burke, or simply Ben, he’s the co-creator of @KRAZAM , a channel that...
I’m nearly done rewriting my browser extension, A Fine Start, moving away from Vue 2 and using vanilla JavaScript. I’m calling this the final rewrite, as I’m trying to make it as easy for me to maintain going forward as possible, using as few...
This episode is a replay of a 2021 interview I did with Michael Foord.We lost Michael in January, and I'd like to revisit this interview as a tribute. Michael Foord was a pivotal figure in the Python community and the creator of the mock library...
A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked:
What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you?
1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces prevented the end of human civilization on September 26th, 1983. His name was Stanislav Petrov.
Protocol dictated that the Soviet Union would retaliate against any nuclear strikes sent by the...
Lane chats with Chris Ferdinandi—creator of Go Make Things and ADHD for the Win—a frontend dev, educator, and all-around expert in making JavaScript (and learning) simpler. Chris has built a career helping devs cut through the noise, level up their...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
pytest-mock is currently the #3 pytest plugin. pytest-mock is a wrapper around unittest.mock.In this episode:Why the pytest-mock plugin is awesomeWhat is mocking, patching, and monkey patchingWhat, if any, is the difference between mock, fake, spy,...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
We’re joined by Danny Thompson, currently Director of Technology at This Dot Labs and technical leader and organizer of the Dallas Software Developers Group, where he fosters vibrant local tech ecosystem through workshops, cohorts, and meetups.
With...
We talk with Matvey Kukuy and Tal Borenstein, co-founders of Keep, a startup focused on helping companies manage and make sense of their alert systems. The discussion comes three years after Matvey's previous appearance - https://shipit.show/36 -...
pytest-cov is a pytest plugin that helps produce coverage reports using Coverage.py.In this episode, we'll discuss:what Coverage.py iswhy you should measure code coverage on both your source and test codewhat pytest-cov isextra features pytest-cov...
Icon by iconixar
Since I signed up for Bluesky last year,
I’ve been wanting to make something using the AT Protocol that the platform is built on top of.
I finally had a chance to do it over the holiday break and built GitFeed, a small Go app that...
When I was about to go on paternity leave, the Gleam programming language reached 1.0. It's such a small language that I was able to learn it over the span of two days. I tried to use it to convert a GitHub Action from JavaScript to Gleam,
Here are my default apps of 2024… in 2025.
Inspired by Jeff’s list.
You can find my referral links here for Libro, YNAB, or SavvyCal.
I’d love a free audiobook if you end up switching from Audible to Libro.fm. 💗
🌐 Browser: Vivaldi
🔍 Search: Kagi...
“Maybe it’s the changing interest rates or political winds, but I think the “fat client” era JS-heavy frontends is on its way out. The hype around edge applications is misplaced and unnecessary for building many different flavors of successful...
Sometimes it surprises me how things that I consider essential in my life—things that form parts of my identity—might have never found me. Only though happenstance did I learn about these things. People happened to enter my life and introduce me to...
After 4 (cumulative) years of service at my job in late 2023, I became eligible for a 3-month paid sabbatical (honestly what a perk). My only prior experience of a work sabbatical had been the offer of a 6-month paid sabbatical after 25 years of...
If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI. There are a lot of features that make FastAPI easy to get started with. There are also a lot of nuances that take a while to understand. One feature I’ve...
For Christmas 2022, I bought my husband a Steam Deck. It's a handheld games console that runs a version of Linux (so you can also use it as a computer and plug it into a monitor, if you want), and works seamlessly with nearly every game in your...
A real-world test of artificial intelligence infiltration of a university examinations system: A “Turing Test” case study by Peter Scarfe, Kelly Watcham, Alasdair Clarke, Etienne Roesch
Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated
them. One person commented:
There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it
all came out of the box.
My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a...
This episode kicks off a series on pytest plugins.In this episode:Introduction to pytest pluginsThe pytest.org pytest plugin listFinding pytest related packages on PyPIThe Top pytest plugins list on pythontest.comExploring popular pluginsLearning from...
I recently kicked off a 99designs contest for a new logo: https://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-brand-ai-engineering-podcast-help-define-industry-1307842/
I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review.
Evaluating LLMs
Like many of us in tech, I spent a large portion of 2024 thinking about and working with LLMs, but I was lucky enough to do...
Hi All! 🤗
And then, one cold evening in December, my car broke down. In the middle of the intersection, right when the traffic lights turned green and I was about to leave. The engine, which had been turned off by the start-stop system, suddenly...
Well, here we are again—another year. They seem to go by faster and faster, and this one in particular did. I’m just now getting used to the number 2024. The idea that it will be 2025 is surreal to me. This next year holds several sentimental...
I listen to many audiobooks every year.
I wrote recaps of my favorites in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and then I stopped doing annual recaps.
After a 7 year hiatus, I’m attempting to start this annual habit again, starting with audiobooks I read in 2024.
But...
It’s Boxing Day and I’m a small pile on the sofa. We successfully Did Christmas at ours this year, and I never want to see another mince pie (until next year).
So, what better time than now to look back on the year?
Skip to bits you care about:
The...
GitHub has updated the page template used to list Commits on a repository. Central to this experience is an interactive list component that I was responsible for architecting. This work was done alongside input from James Scholes, whose guidance was...
There is a lot of debate in the software community around whether LLMs can replace developers. Part of the reason is the way we formulate the problem of what it means to write software. In industry, we still give outsize cultural deference to software...
This is a follow-up to Let's build a CDN - Part 1A new friend joins us. We talk about the high-level, including why Varnish and why we are doing this in the first place. We go through the plan for this session, and then just make it happen. The...
Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal
is some combination of:
Your operating system’s job
Your shell’s job
Your terminal emulator’s job
The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or...
I frequently find myself writing my own short command-line scripts in Python that help me with day-to-day tasks.
It’s so easy to throw together a single-file Python command-line script and throw it in my ~/bin directory!
Well… it’s easy, unless the...
Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise is verifiable and non-reversible. It does not require you to trust anyone.
File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use...
The new Speculation Rules API is incredibly powerful, but we can do so much more! By taking a layered approach, we can add more progressive functionality.
We're back in that glorious post-Christmas, pre-New-Year's liminal period when the days blur together and I'm allowed to spend inordinate amounts of time tinkering on side projects and laying on the couch eating handfuls of Twiglets.
For...
A roundup of fun things and projects.
TV
I mentioned to my husband that I'd never watched Life on Mars, so we're watching it all the way through, and it's brilliant, obviously. I'm horribly annoying when watching things that have been...
Here’s a niche terminal problem that has bothered me for years but that I never
really understood until a few weeks ago. Let’s say you’re running this command
to watch for some specific output in a log file:
tail -f /some/log/file | grep thing1 | grep...
“Frameworkism preaches that the way to improve user experiences is to adopt more (or different) tooling from the framework's ecosystem. This provides adherents with something to do that looks plausibly like engineering, except it isn't. It can...
Not because it's cool (it is), but because it's what your company actually needs right now."Business in the front, party in the back" isn't just some throwback style. It's the whole point.In our corporate,...
In the past week I had two people separately tell me what they thought the Python Software Foundation Conduct WG did and both were wrong (and incidentally in the same way). As such, I wanted to clarify what exactly the WG does for people in case...
I’ve just recently launched a self-paced introduction to Python that is extremely hands-on.
It’s called Python Jumpstart and it’s based on introductory Python curriculum that I have been iterating on for years.
Learn Python by writing Python code ✍
We...
"Help me help you!" I caught myself shouting at Co-pilot last week. Yes, literally shouting at my AI assistant like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire. That's when it hit me - this wasn't about the AI at all. This was about me.Twenty years
“React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I've seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don't work in all but the experimental version, using any "modern" features...
Ready for some Python skill-building sales?
This is my seventh annual compilation of Python learning deals.
Lots of Python sales
Here are Python-related sales that are live right now:
Python Jumpstart with Python Morsels: 50% off my brand new Python...
When was the last time you felt genuine discovery on the internet? Not algorithmic recommendations. Not SEO-optimized listicles. I mean real, surprising, meaningful discovery. Search is broken but not in the way tech companies think. We don't need...
I like writing Javascript without a build system
and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to
figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build
system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how...
Taking notes well can help to listen better, remember things, show respect, be more accountable, free up mind space to solve problems.This episode discussesthe benefits of writing things downpreparing for a meetingtaking notes in meetingsreviewing...
I was very fortunate to speak at another excellent Beyond Tellerrand last week, alongside some brilliant and wonderful people. Once again I was inspired by the variety of topics and messages people shared on the stage. Alongside the usual artists’...
Former United States president and war criminal George W. Bush gave a speech in Australia, directing a v-for-victory hand gesture at the assembled crowd. It wasn’t received the way he intended.
What he failed to realize is that this gesture means a...
Hi All! 🤗
For the summer holidays, my family and I went to France. On our way to the Atlantic Ocean, we shortly stopped in Chartres, a lovely town southwest of Paris, which is famous for its monumental and impressively beautiful cathedral. On the way...
We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to solve math theorems.
A recent experiment particularly piqued my interest. Researchers used...
I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called
TIL (“today I learned”).
the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media
One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool
thing”, like the...
In my opinion, you should only introduce a named tuple to your code when you're updating a preexisting API that was already returning a tuple or you are wrapping a tuple return value from another API.Let's start with when you should use named...
Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious
about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s
the deal with all of them?
a table of ASCII control characters
Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII...
One of the biggest things I struggled with throughout my career is good form when it comes to typing, that is until I discovered Home Row Mods, and how they've improved the way that I type.
I talked about the new Python 3.13 REPL a few months ago and after 3.13 was released.
I think it’s awesome.
I’d like to share a secret feature within the Python 3.13 REPL which I’ve been finding useful recently: adding custom keyboard shortcuts.
This...
I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS
periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed.
This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few
minutes while it restarts, and it only happens...
This is the audio version of 🎬 Ninjastructure - Move fast & break nothingMatias Pan, a professional maté drinker & Senior Software Engineer at Dagger, is showing us an approach to Infrastructure as Code built with Pulumi.We look at Go code,...
If you’re running Windows VMs beneath a Linux KVM host, you’ve very likely been plagued by an annoying issue: they start up with the wrong time by several hours, every time they’re rebooted, no matter what you do. The issue is that Windows syncs its...
For the longest time now, I've been a fan of using direct SQL queries over using an ORM. However, there's one major drawback to this, one that this new package solves.
“React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.”
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
This quote applies just as much to developers as it does non-tech people, sometimes more. I remember towards the beginning of
my programming journey (both the...
We have 3 conversations from TalosCon 2024:1. Vincent Behar & Louis Fradin from Ubisoft tell us how how they are building the next generation of game servers on Kubernetes. Recorded in a coffee shop.2. We catch up with David Flanagan on the AI...
<p>Most of the content on this site
is an aggregate view
of my work in other venues.
How do I want to manage that process
going forward?</p>
Nic Chan - Nic has just finished rebuilding her website and it’s INCREDIBLE! Seriously just look at it
CSS { In Real Life } | Limitation Breeds Creativity: A Study in Composition with Custom Properties - Michelle has done some (characteristically)...
In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce...
Laracon in Texas was too hot for a campfire, but apparently it was NOT too hot for a twerking session, or eating at Terry Black's three nights in a row! Austen and Jesse also talk about launching DAP Keycaps and 1337 Keyboards, as well as...
I have a lightning talk I deliver internally at my job. It is intentionally delivered to non-accessibility practitioners, so mainly engineers, designers, project managers, and product folk.
The talk is about exploring macOS' Accessibility system...
Those of you who know me (or who have been reading my posts for a while) will know that I'm often at conferences. I tend to speak at around four a year, plus attending one or two on top of that. I also know a great many people who never go to...
I've built a new theme for this site, inspired by my love of gardening as well as one of my favourite video games.
With no pixel artistry skills to speak of, I'm grateful to the various artists over on itch.io, who I've credited on the...
In this episode we're talking about importing part of a package into another part of the same package.We'll look at: `from . import module` and `from .module import something`and also: `import package` to access the external API from with the...
Setting Up a Production-Ready VPS: It's Actually Easier Than You Think Recently, I've been working on a brand new micro SaaS and having a lot of fun doing so.
The area element - I’m really enjoying Heydon’s
HTML element safari, from the better-known to the lesser-known. This will certainly fall into the latter camp for a lot of folks!
The Space space keyboard is a small, non-split keyboard designed by qpockets, of the now (unfortunately) closed P3Dstore. The keyboard in the picture in particular was built by Reddit user lily_vacation01. The interest check for this board was held...
In this episode, we discuss the complex flavour notes produced by third-wave coffee, natural wine, South Carolinian sweetgrass, instruments of musical nature, and developers as they steep themselves in the wonderful worlds of Statamic and...
How does Michal Kuratczyk, Staff Software Engineer at RabbitMQ, access Kubernetes workloads securely, from anywhere? Regardless whether it's a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster or Kubernetes in Docker (KiND), Tailscale is a simple solution...
After an initial burst of blogging energy January followed by a series of automated posts featuring good things I’d read recently, it fell off a cliff towards the end of March. I didn't get bored, I promise!
Life got extremely busy and reading...
Data is Not the New Oil - More Like Deep Fryer RefuseThe Grim RealityLet's burst that bubble: Most data is far from being the light, sweet crude we were promised. Think less "Spindletop gushes riches" and more "last night's deep fryer
Hi All! 🤗
Let’s talk about the first thing many of your visitors will see and thus one of the most important places on any personal website: the home page. “The home” is where you leave a first impression and where people decide whether the website...
Let’s unpack the CrowdStrike debacle. I called it last week, and turns out I was spot on—it was a QA (Quality Assurance) problem. CrowdStrike’s own incident report confirms it. The fix they need? Better processes, better QA. This whole mess serves as a massive
Keep an eye out for the FOMO-inducing technologies. They’re the ones that don’t just add value to your skillset, but rekindle your passion for what you do.
(Modern) PHP: Does it really suck?
Like many, many developers out there over the age of 30, I basically started my programming journey with PHP (and perl).
Circa ~'05, PHP was the go-to language for the web, and Adobe Dreamweaver supported it out...
What does it look like to build a modern CI/CD pipeline from scratch in 2024? While many of you would pick GitHub Actions and be done with it, how do you run it locally? And what do you need to do to get caching to work?Tom Chauveau joins us to help...
Solving a problem I created
I’m re-working this site from scratch –
sticking with Eleventy,
but moving from
Nunjucks templates/macros
to WebC
and web components.
Outside of static-site templates,
one goal of this refresh
is to keep things as ‘vanilla’...
Austen Sforzando and Jesse Leitmotif contemplate the fine intricacies of jazz drumming, the musical concepts of Dredg, the 3D printing of multi-stringed instruments, and brewing coffee with pourovers, moka pots, and/or french presses. We might also...
Becoming a good manager is not only about learning what to do. It is also what not to do. These are some of my hardest-won lessons as I write this as a diary to myself.I will never again Be the Sole Agent of Culture Creation or ChangeAs a
Despite the regular drizzle, this summer is looking splendid. The tories are out of power. London is out in force enjoying the warm weather. I'm temporarily funemployed and thoroughly enjoying doing almost nothing.
I decided to leave Elicit back...
Stenography is a different way of text input, writing in syllables at a time. Every once in a while there's a census. What is the community like in 2024?
Our bias is to always add more. More rules, more process, more code, more features, more stuff. Interdependencies proliferate, and gradually strangle us. Systems want to grow and grow, but without pruning, they collapse. Slowly, then...
Whether you're developer, DevOps engineer, SysAdmin, QA or in any other technical role, you're surely familiar with
cURL - _the command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs_ (as described in docs).
...
Chances are that you never touched and maybe haven't even heard about Python's `weakref` module. While it might not
be commonly used in your code, it's fundamental to inner workings of many libraries, frameworks and even...
We're diving deep into the mind of a tech hiring manager—yours truly. You've got questions, I’ve got answers. Been around the block from gaming to med tech, and now I’m living in the technicolor dream of Web3.First off, LinkedIn
Witness Wu-Tang Clan’s legendary album saga, from Martin Shkreli’s villainous grip to blockchain chaos. Discover how a $2 million secret became a $1 digital free-for-all, raising questions about the future of music and digital hype.
Austen and Jesse dig into the backlog of past recordings and publish another episode! This one is all about horsing around with trailers, hand-wiring keyboards, counterfeiting soldering irons, printing in the third dimension, and PHP.Tell us! What do...
Alright, so here’s the thing. Ideas might grow on trees, but actually pulling them down and turning them into something meaningful? That’s special. That is the hard part. So I’m just gonna spill my brains here in the hope it strikes a chord with
I maintain a GitHub Action called check-for-changed-files. For the purpose of this blog post what the action does isn't important, but the fact that I authored it originally in TypeScript is. See, one day I tried to update the NPM dependencies....
After signing up for GitHub Sponsors, I had a nagging feeling that somehow asking for money from other people to support my open source work was inappropriate. But after much reflection, I realized that phrasing the use of GitHub Sponsors as a way to...
We've got some code we want to test, and some tests.The tests need to be able to import the code under test, or at least the API to it, in order to run tests against it.How do we do that? How do we set things up so that our tests can import our...
This started as a conversation between James A Rosen & Gerhard in August 2023. Several months later, it evolved into a few epic pairing sessions captured in these GitHub threads:thechangelog#480 (reply in thread)thechangelog#486The last pairing...
This is a near-transcript of the talk I gave at PyCon Italia 2024 in May in Florence.
Introduction
Buongiorno PyconIt, grazie per avermi invitata a parlare! Avrei voluta fare tutto il discorso in italiano, ma lo sto ancora imparando.
Per adesso...
Learn how to use BuildKit - the improved builder backend for Docker - that adds many new features to Docker,
including new Dockerfile syntax, built-in debugger and more...
Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be...
PyCon US is just around the corner. I've asked Rob Ludwick to come on the show to discuss how to get the most out of your PyCon experience. There's a lot to do. A lot of activities to juggle, including actual juggling, which is where we start...
Those in web3 parade around, waving their decentralized banners, while conveniently relying on centralized services for communication and content distribution.
For our 4th episode, we have four conversations from KubeCon EU 2024.We talk to Jesse Suen about Argo CD & Kargo, Solomon Hykes shares the next evolution of Dagger, and Justin Cormack dives into Docker & AI. We also catch up with Frederic...
Hi All! 🤗
Imagine, just for a second, a future in which we all have our own websites and that those sites are at the center of everything we do and create online. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to collect reactions from other personal websites or...
I'm starting a SaaS project using Django, and there are tons of decisions right out of the gate. To help me navigate these decisions, I've brought on Cory Zue. Cory is the creator of SaaS Pegasus, and has tons of experience with Django.Some...
Nicole is a software engineer and writer, and recently wrote about the trade-offs we make when deciding which tests to write and how much testing is enough.We talk about:Balancing schedule vs testingHow much testing is the right about of testingShould...
Hi All! 🤗
There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about” page are two classics that you’ll find on many sites out there. But what if someone doesn’t...
If you work in shell/terminal often enough, then over time the history will become your personal knowledge vault,
documentation and command reference. Being able to use this personal documentation efficiently can hugely boost your
...
Hi All! 🤗
It is one of the most common reasons why we abandon our personal sites and blogs: at some point, we stop publishing.
But why? Weren’t we so enthusiastic when we started (or restarted) our sites? Didn’t we tell ourselves that this time, we...
Well it’s that time again, migrating for one reason or another listlessly between computers as priorities and jobs change. Here’s a middle-depth breakdown of how I speed-run getting a new machine off the ground.
This post is for Mac computer users who...
The biggest update since June 2023 is WASI is now a tier 2 platform for CPython! This means that the main branch of CPython should never be broken more than 24 hours for WASI and that a release will be blocked if WASI support is broken. This only applies to
Hi All! 🤗
Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Or imagine the online community you were an...
All of us - software engineers - use git every day, however most people only ever touch the most basic of commands,
such as "add", "commit", "push" or "pull", like it's still 2005. Git however,...
Alex Sims, Solutions Architect & Sr. Software Engineer at James and James Fulfilment, talks about their journey to 80ms response SLO with PHP & React.Alex shares how they optimised API performance, specifically highlighting improvements made...
Today we delve into BuildKit and Dagger, focusing on their significance in the development and deployment of containerized applications, as well as Kubernetes integration.BuildKit's Role: Essential for anyone using Docker Build, facilitating...
This episode looks into the observability tool Parca & Polar Signals Cloud with Frederic Branczyk and Thor Hansen. We discuss experiences and discoveries using Parca for detailed system-wide performance analysis, which transcends programming...
Hi All! 🤗
Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most...
The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a...
Shrimp, bagels, grannies pwning newbs, fantasy consoles, Alan Turing cameos, 'American Hand Egg', and data loss; This episode has it all!Links & Notes:Game devPanic Playdate handheld console and SDKGodot game engineCreativity in the design...
Whilst I love working in the CLI one thing that I've often found a challenge has been navigating across multiple directories in the terminal. Fortunately, I found the best solution I could
Hi All! 🤗
In the last issue, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which...
Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors:
We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people
We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise
Our users are happy to support us, we don’t...
Python has many options for formatting strings and text, including f-strings, `format()` function, templates and
more. There's however one module that few people know about and it's called `textwrap`. This module is...
I noticed that the URLs were all a little off (had two slashes
instead of one) and went in and fixed it. I did not think
everyone's RSS software was going to freak out the way it did.
PS: this is a...
Hi All! 🤗
“Where have all the websites gone?”
“Websites, as we know them, are dead.”
“Blogging is dead.”
I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear or read statements like that in controversial headlines or viral posts, I can’t help but think: “No!...
Hi All! 🤗
One question I’ve heard repeatedly from people getting started with their personal website is “what pages and sections – like blog, photos, about me – does my site need to have?” I asked myself the exact same question when I first started...
There are a couple of things I always want to be true when I install Python packages for a project:I have a virtual environmentPip is up-to-dateFor virtual environments, you would like them to be created as fast as possible and (usually) with the...
Low indoor air quality - or high CO2 - negatively impacts cognitive performance, causes headaches, drowsiness and
more. It's easy to fix though, just use a CO2 sensor and open a window from time-to-time. But why stop there, when...
Hi All! 🤗
At the beginning of this year, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website:
In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and...
<p>It wasn’t always a great year, but I’ve been <a href="/2023/05/06/2023-preview/">moving the right direction</a>. In 2024, the plan is to <em>just keep...
Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong,...
Hi All! 🤗
In the previous issues, we looked at how you can choose a domain name, how a personal website can change your life, and what people are using to build their sites.
But Matthias, I hear you say, that all sounds a lot like something that...
<p>The new <code>@scope</code> rule is here! It’s a better way to keep our component styles contained – without relying on third-party tools or extreme naming conventions.</p>
Bookmark from
12 Days of Web
A fireside chat featuring new gear, old dotfiles, and updates on what we've been up to. Kiwi the puppy doesn't code Rust (yet), but she knows how to sit! Does she have the patience to sit through Jesse's Vim course, though?Links &...
Hi All! 🤗
In the previous issues, we looked at how having a personal website can change your life and what’s in a domain name. Once you’re fired up and registered your domain though, your next decision is probably the one which will have the biggest...
Hi All! 🤗
So, you registered a domain. And you started working on your personal site. Maybe you already got a first version of your site online. Perhaps you even published a few posts. But suddenly, there’s this question in your head:
“But – is it...
<p>There’s been a recent flurry of articles about web components, with advice on how to shape them as extensions of HTML. I decided to dig in, and see how these ‘HTML web components’ could become a part of my own workflow.</p>
Bookmark...
<p>I drop by the show
to talk about CSS updates
and news on container queries,
rolling out cascade layers,
<code>!important</code> things to remember,
custom properties,
exit animations,
CSS functions,
state queries,
and...
How I got here is already far too long of a post, so I must include this for all the credits and gratitude I need to extend to those who made this possible.
To my parents: who supported me every single day of the decade+ I have spent behind bars, and...
Following up on the first impressions post, let's solve a
problem in OCaml and compare the Rust solution.
In Response to how well received my last post was
I thought I would follow up with some comparisons between how I would solve a simple...
Humorous article, completely unrelated to, and written before, the others ended up actually on the front page.
The Goal:
To get a post on the front page of the infamous Orange site...
The Plan:
There are four guaranteed strategies. No one knows...
The Why
I'm somewhat of a language nerd to begin with, and it was Rust that originally got me interested in the whole functional paradigm.
Not due to it's lineage, but the heavy use of chained iterator methods in favor over traditional loops....
As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.
When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you....
While Python's `bisect` module is very simple - containing really just 2 functions - there's a lot one can do with
it, including searching data efficiently, keeping any data sorted, and much more - and in this article we will...
My story, and how this is all possible
Introduction
My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.)
I am currently incarcerated at Mountain View...
Hi All! 🤗
Let’s talk about one of the first things to consider when setting up your personal website: the name, or to be more specific, the domain name. Picking a domain name is something people often struggle with, because it comes with a few...
Managing project junk drawers and building the same thing over and over again. Desktop apps, backlogs, great UX, and a dang good time. --- Listeners, how do you handle project management?We'd love your feedback and to hear how you manage all this...
Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.
Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and...
Hi All!
Welcome to Own Your Web! 🎉
First of all, I’d like to thank you again for signing up! 🤗 When I shared the link to the newsletter last weekend, I did not expect that so many people would subscribe so quickly. I’m overwhelmed by the response and...
Often in creative web projects, I find myself having to take a number, which exists in a specific range of numbers, and find the number that would be in the same position if the range were changed. Examples of this type of operation can vary anywhere...
Ramen broth and AI; The two hottest topics (literally speaking for the former) to grace the internet since 2023!Links:CopilotCursorRewindJamon Holmgren's crazy test suite refactor exampleFind us on Twitter (X?)@austencam@jesseleite85
When positioning dropdowns, tooltips, or context menus with Floating UI (formerly Popper.js), transitions sometimes don't behave like you'd expect. The first time the element is positioned the transition won't originate from the right...
Recently, I acquired a new client with a massive load of technical debt (in other words: a new client). The facility internet connection appeared to go down for an hour or two every day, typically in the mid-afternoon. Complicating things...
Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.
Cost per use
Considering cost per use helps me make decisions about most...
There are two vim emulator plugins for VS Code that are well known -- amVim and VsCodeVim. I've been using amVim for years, but discovered today that the other emulator works better with one tiny tweak to the default extension settings.
Jesse and Austen discuss past projects, potential projects, and the topic of domain hoarding.Links:- Dustforce game - Lightyear Figma Illustration (seriously, open this one in Figma and click around)- Austen's Site Illustration Timelapse Find us...
I use Obsidian to think, take notes, write essays, and publish this site. This is my bottom-up approach to note-taking and organizing things I am interested in. It embraces chaos and laziness to create emergent structure.
In Obsidian, a “vault” is...
Productivity, workflow, automation, [insert buzzword here]! Austen and Jesse chat about awesome tools for the Mac ecosystem.Industriously Handy Links:Raycast https://www.raycast.com/Hammerspoon https://www.hammerspoon.org/Find us on Twitter...
Whenever I troubleshoot anything container-related, I look for a good container image that contains all the right
tools to troubleshoot and/or solve the problem. However, finding such an image, or assembling my own is time-consuming...
Oscar Wilde once said:
“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your...
Austen adopts cats mid-episode, while being allergic to cats mid-episode. We also chat about chickens, coffee and wine adjectives, local honey, morel mushrooms, and all the hurdles around making videos. Bram's Law was also fulfilled on this day,...
Podcast jingle ideas, even more Laracon thoughts, and why Livewire is becoming the #GOAT, in our hopefully humble opinions.Superb Links:Laracon US 2023 Talks https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=laracon+us+2023Livewire...
If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.
Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and...
Imagine a podcast where we talk about publishing a podcast (how meta)! Jesse then recaps his second-ever Laracon. We also nerd out about drums for a while.Rad Links:Laracon US 2023 Talks...
From time to time, when coding, we all run into weird behaviours of the programming language. Sometimes it's a
"feature" we weren't aware of, sometimes it's just quirky behaviour of the language, and sometimes...
There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.
The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of...
Mechanical keyboards are quite the rabbit hole. Also, you should try out Space Cadet Shift keys. Trust us.Very Good Links:What is "ortholinear"? https://twitter.com/jesseleite85/status/1495889187450544137?s=20Iris (Austen's keyboard)...
Jesse and Austen talk about each other's developer origin story. How (and when) did all this web development nonsense start? Warning: Garbage audio quality in this episode, but we hit publish anyway. It can only get better from here! Find us on...
There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.
I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.
I can feel it almost...
Couple days ago, I published my 100th article, so I feel like it’s time for reflections — looking at how I got
there, what I learned along the way and whether it was actually worth the time and effort. As well as some thoughts on
...
How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera.
A modern car has...
There’s a French expression I like:
L’appétit vient en mangeant
Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.
Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read,...
There are certain bugs and issues that are very hard to troubleshoot. Just ask yourself, _"How would I debug
deadlock, segmentation fault, crashing application, or a hanging process?"
_ Now there's a tool to...
etcd is the brain of every Kubernetes cluster, the key-value storage keeping track of all the objects in a cluster.
It's intertwined and tightly coupled with Kubernetes, and it might seem like an inseparable part of a cluster, or...
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
File over app is an appeal to tool makers:...
Let's imagine a situation - you have multiple Python applications running on Kubernetes that interact with each
other. There's bug that you can't reproduce locally, but it surfaces everytime you hit a particular API...
For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste.
The term spatial computing is emerging to...
One of my first industrial design jobs was working on a headset that never shipped, for a now defunct startup. It used two micro-OLED displays similar to the ones in Apple’s Vision Pro, but with clear, see-through optics reflected into the eye through...
Python is a popular choice for automating anything and everything, that includes automating system administration
tasks or tasks that require running other programs or interacting with operating system. There are however, many ways to
...
Python is 32 years old language, yet it still doesn't have proper, true parallelism/concurrency. This is going to
change soon, thanks to introduction of a "Per-Interpreter GIL" (Global Interpreter Lock) which will land in...
Python is known to come with "batteries included", thanks to its very extensive standard library, which includes
many modules and functions that you would not expect to be there. However, there are many more "essential"...
Not only is tmux my favorite way of managing my workspace, but I can honestly say it's the one piece of software that has had the biggest impact on the way I write code
When it comes to synthetic testing, engineers often rely on 3rd party platforms such as Datadog or New Relic that
provide this type of monitoring. If you're running your applications and services on Kubernetes though, you can spin...
Running live demos can be stressful. You know what you want to say and show. You prepare the CLI commands you want
to run to best showcase what you've built, but then you waste time typing long commands; you make typos; the...
While Python is not a pure functional programming language, you still can do a lot of functional programming in it.
In fact, just one function - `reduce` - can do most of it and in this article I will show you all the things one can do...
TL;DR
One of my most-frequently searched dev tasks over the course of my career thus far has been the “how do I find what process is on a port” to “how do I kill a given process” wombo-combo — there’s always some memory-leaky service running that...
Before I even get into the impetus for this blog post, if you came from a search engine and you just want the code, here’s a demo. Pleasure doing business with you.
Introduction
In a client’s project recently, I found that their Wordpress setup...
This Is That Dreaded Blog Post That Was Foretold
Every blog poster fears that one day this post will be upon them — that painfully self-important and -unaware “Why I’m Leaving ${city}” post. I’m gonna try to do this right; to make this one on the...
I recently saw an online acquaintance of mine share a Controversial Opinion™ that I found challenging:
If you do not have formal training in design you are not a designer.
Right off the bat — L take, and I’m trying not to say that just because I am...
I got an email recently from a kind online friend who said they thought my work was swell, and that they’d like to ask about my process or what makes a good website. Aside from that being a really nice email to receive, it’s also good impetus for me...
In my continued effort to spruce up the site, I added a way to render 🔥 tips and callouts directly from markdown based content. This is all made possible via a CommonMark extension. Turns out it's pretty easy to do because we can extend another...
Torchlight is a syntax highlighting service created by the legendary Aaron Francis (Thank you Aaron, it's awesome!). It generates beautiful code blocks and I love how they look. However, I wanted to take it a step further and add a "Copy to...
Although the Laravel framework has its own conventions, there are several others I tend to follow that (I think) make me more efficient, so I want to share them with the world. These are my personal “best practices” for conventions in Laravel models,...
I blew several INCREDIBLY frustrating hours trying to troubleshoot issues installing Google Workspace Sync and Microsoft Office 365 on multiple Windows 10 workstations today. Searching for “failed to create profile” errors when setting up a Google...
Today is the official release day for Laravel 9. This release is packed full of goodies. Unfortunately, I've been a slacker about upgrading to PHP 8. If you're like me and still on PHP 7.4, here's how you can upgrade.
Updating PHP to...
I recently bought a server which came with Samsung PM1643 SSDs. Trying to install Ubuntu on them didn’t work at first try, because the drives had 520 byte sectors instead of 512 byte. Luckily, there’s a fix–get the drive(s) to a WORKING Ubuntu system,...
Hi folks! It's been over a year since an article was published on this site. Yes, I fell off the content treadmill a bit last year. Anyway, we're back! Did you have a good year? Hope so!
My year was fun. Although I shared little on the...
Contentful is an immensely well-featured headless content management system, but the density of its featureset can be daunting to integrate with static site generators. The great news is, Eleventy is so well-designed and modular — it doesn’t have to...
Okay quick disclaimer before I kick this off — this post does not cover how to use interactive Vue components in an Eleventy project. This post covers using Vue entirely server-side! The client will not receive any Vue code.
All of the code for this...
There unfortunately are still a few stumbling blocks toward getting a properly, fully-working virt-manager setup running under WSL2 on Windows 11. apt install virt-manager just works, of course–but getting WSL2 to properly handle hostnames and SSH key...
What is a typical day in the life like for a software engineer? To close
out Season 6, we thought it’d be a great idea to give you some insight into
our workdays, as we all have very different roles and are in different
stages of our careers.
The definition of Agile is the ability to create and respond to change.
Ultimately dealing with and succeeding in an uncertain or turbulent
environment. I think we can all say with confidence that in the world of
software development, being agile...
Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language.
It’s a general-purpose programming language designed to let app developers:
write once, run anywhere. Today we’re diving into the world of Java.
Whether you’re looking to start your own side business or create a lifelong
career, the process of starting a new business can be overwhelming. This
week on the podcast we’re discussing how to start your own business. We’ll
dig deep into setting...
It’s easy to overlook documentation when building an application, but
documentation can make or break a consumer’s experience. Today we’re diving
into the world of documentation to discuss what it takes to write good
documentation, the ethics of...
It’s easy to overlook documentation when building an application, but
documentation can make or break a consumer’s experience. Today we’re diving
into the world of documentation to discuss what it takes to write good
documentation, the ethics of...
TypeScript is an open-source programming language built on JavaScript that
provides static type definitions. It has taken the front-end development
community by storm over the past few years and today we’re going to give
you a beginner-level...
What is it about sitting down building a good study plan that... kinda
sucks? Is it the planning? The execution? The Time commitment? Are we
committing to learn too much? Regardless of this answer, today we’re
sitting down to talk about how to...
What is it about sitting down building a good study plan that... kinda
sucks? Is it the planning? The execution? The Time commitment? Are we
committing to learn too much? Regardless of this answer, today we’re
sitting down to talk about how to...
The year is almost over, so get prepared for a flood of year-end posts! Okay, not really. However, there are three I'd like to write — a reading list recap (this one), a 2020 year in review, and a 2021 goal and learning list.
This year I vowed to...
I recently* built this really cool feature for my personal website that allows me to use Netlify Functions to show my most-recently-listened-to tracks from Spotify.
*It wasn’t recently, it was in July 2020, please don’t look behind the curtain.
It’s...
Webmentions are a protocol that allows sites to track when links are made to them and to receive notifications of those links. They are a neat way to keep tabs on the kinds of interactions related to a website or article, such as likes, retweets,...
The ProblemAlthough I do most of my writing in Notion, I have to put posts into Statamic to publish them on my website. For more CSS-based demonstration posts, I needed a better way to display the code and the result. Sometimes code snippets...
Now that I've got a mac with TouchID, I rarely use my password. It's incredible how convenient that little button is. One place I found myself still typing my password was running sudo commands in the terminal.
Here's how you can use...
Friday, I received a snazzy new M1 Macbook Pro in the mail. This article outlines how I was able to set it up for doing web development. We'll set up Homebrew, PHP, MySQL, Composer, and Laravel Valet. Let's jump in!
Heads up! I wrote this...
It's that time of year! That exciting time of... new stuff? In this week's article, we'll take a departure from the normal coding and design writings to explore why getting a new laptop seems like such a big thing in my world.
A New...
Recently I launched Jetty UI Kit — a collection of blocks for quickly making landing page designs in Figma. In this article, I'd like to outline what went into the product, how it sold, and reinforce a few of the lessons I learned along the...
Recently I added a signup form for my email list to the site. Using ConvertKit's API, Tailwind CSS, and AlpineJS and the Javascript Fetch API made it easy to whip up. The result is a form that's much more customizable than the embeddable forms...
This week I launched my first digital product — a landing page UI kit for Figma. Launching a product is something I've wanted to do for years, but I never actually committed and did the damn thing until now. I've been working on a few things,...
Using Figma isn't difficult, but when you can use it efficiently, it becomes a heck of a lot more fun! The following tips will help you improve your workflow. The faster you get, the more productive you are, and the more fun you can have while you...
Figma is a badass collaborative design application. It may seem simple, but there's a lot of power hidden in that simplicity. After years of working with it, I've picked up a handful of practical tips. In this article, I'll share some of...
Anyone can design something that looks good. It just takes some attention to the right details. With design, details matter, but how do you know which details matter most? The answer is that it just takes a little practice and observation. In this...
It's no secret — I'm a huge fan of Alpine. For me, it hits that goldilocks zone between minimalistic and powerful. Alpine is straightforward to get started with, especially if you have a VueJS background. However, there are a few hidden...
Vim can be a polarizing editor, and while it may seem cryptic when you start, it can be incredibly powerful. Many folks never bother to learn vim, which is a shame. Some people go crazy with vim and make it their primary editor. For me, the sweet spot...
Git hooks are custom scripts that can be fired off when different actions occur, and they can be run on either the client (your machine) or the server (the git remote). In this post, I'll be talking about client side hooks. The available client...
Github is great! It is so easy to fork a project, push up some commits, and then send a pull request upstream. After a while, those forks can get behind the source repository, making it difficult to submit a new pull request later on. One thought...
This is the content from a talk I gave at OMG!Code in August, 2013. I wrote it in the style of a workshop, but ended up
presenting it as a talk instead. It reads as a walkthrough and has an accompanying git repo.
@nicknisi |...
My team has been working a lot to improve our code quality and to introduce best practices between us. One way we've done this is through the use of
JSHint. Because we use different editors it can be difficult to make sure that everyone's...
![Spring: The Documentary [OFFICIAL TRAILER] Out Now! 🚨 - CultRepo](https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/4qTwA6Y1-OI/hqdefault.jpg)
![Clojure: The Documentary [OFFICIAL TRAILER] | Coming April 16th! 🚨 - CultRepo](https://i3.ytimg.com/vi/JJEyffSdBsk/hqdefault.jpg)
