English

A good overview of how Git developers configure git for themselves with a bunch of settings that should be the default for everybody but which will take ages to be rolled out. You should copy most of these into your own config.

I think this critique of Flamework is a bit rich coming from the author of Flask with its global request object. But there is a point in being able to iterate really quickly, it’s even better to be able to work crudely without creating a disastrous unmaintainable mess.

“The only good laws are the laws that make *me* more money.”

Chronicle of how you make a hit game. Balatro is amazing even if I ripped through it in a couple of days.

I usually enjoy Cortex’s romps into productivity porn, but what struck me here is that they open with Grey discovering Asana and how he spent the week setting his business and life up in it.

Our work in software engineering consists mostly of learning and for me and my team a fair part of that is teaching. Both of these are immensely difficult and rewarding components of the job.

Here’s a good article about platform teams that I got to read an early draft of. I can say from my own experience that all of these traps are very easy to go into. Be aware and prioritize ruthlessly what works and what doesn’t work.

I think when people ask what’s so great about jj they tend to go deep into things such as mega-merge strategies and stacked PRs. These things are cool, no doubt, but jj can be useful starting from the very small.

A beautiful lush essay and homage to an ubiquitous typeface without a name.

I can relate to this because I’m using Cursor to write a bit of Gleam where it’s usually off entirely because this is such a small language.

So much car traffic is absolutely unnecessary which makes it all the more galling that we allow people to poison everybody else by doing it.

Lots of people are going to have a problem with the truth going forward, so get those Wikipedia backups handy and start thinking about how to host it in a more distributed and resilient way.

Not a major surprise that minorities would be treated poorly at a nazi charity like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Wheel of Time is low key one of the best fantasy tv shows out right now. Each season is going from strength to strength and the next one looks to be the best one yet.

A lot has been made of this talk about Egoless Engineering but I can say that for me it came at the exactly right time. In our platform team we got to the point mentioned in the talk and are now working on #3: Empower Everybody Else.

Obsidian is a knowledge worker’s lightsaber. It’s indispensable for any kind of serious work and it is now free to use.

Rare to see an actual apples-to-apples comparison of databases like this. Postgres comes out ahead versus Sqlite but as always, it depends.

Another funny relic from the depths of version control: the Octopus Merge

This is the way “A Pattern Language” intended we should talk about patterns: applied and without making things more complicated. Patterns should simplify and be grasped immediately.

Filing this away for future reference when at some point we’ll want to get out of managed Kubernetes.

A very good explanation about “object soup” and how Rust is uniquely poorly suited to model problems in that way. It pins down a very fundamental issue that people coming from an object oriented background run into all the time and offers a helpful solution.

Quanta’s write-ups of math discoveries are always enjoyable to read. In this case an undergraduate (!) figured out something new about hash tables and how fast they can be. Not sure yet when this will be shipped in code, but still it’s a pretty amazing discovery.

An enjoyable dive into where all these patronyms and nicknames came from. I could make one for Turkish but where I came from the lakap (nickname) is more common than the diminutive (Hatça = Hatice).

Just one of the ways that Zuckerberg full willingly enabled neonazis on his platforms.

Hundred percent sure that if the same policy would be applied to Berlin most car traffic would evaporate from our streets here immediately. Most traffic in my neighborhood is people without really that much to do who could be doing something other than driving and drug dealers.

Wild to see the materials that go into making a single inference machine for private use. At scale this stuff will of course be more efficient, but still the main components will be more or less the same.

We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.

LLMs are fundamentally matching the patterns they’ve seen, and their abilities are constrained by mathematical boundaries. Embedding tricks and chain-of-thought prompting simply extends their ability to do more sophisticated pattern matching. The mathematical results imply that you can always find compositional tasks whose complexity lies beyond a given system’s abilities.

Overview of the performance of different caching solutions for Rails comparing Redis to some competitors.

It’s a shame these people are so thoroughly psychopathic (from this epic Guardian profile) because this piece about pronatalism is nothing if not well argued.

This was exactly a discussion I had yesterday where when teams reach higher levels of maturity, they may catch and fix issues internally before they become full blown incidents.

Even the most basic functions in foundational libraries can be iterated on and improved by reading papers and implementing novel algorithmic approaches. Here’s a breakdown of how the time crate got faster (even though “no one has complained”).

Good luck hiring talent for your struggling economy with racism becoming even more rampant than it normally is. Not that that is the only problem facing Germany, but it’s a huge distraction for all parties while nothing material has improved for decades.

I enjoy James Stanier’s newsletter on engineering management a lot. This one is about information processing in organizations, something which will make or break you.

SQLite is a tiny, somewhat quirky but incredibly convenient and fast database. For side projects I definitely don’t bother with a “real” database anymore and for many of them I just check the entire .sqlite file into version control for easier deployments.

After missing the previous edition, I’m ‘attending’ HYTRADBOI 2025. Databases are the bread and butter of our team and I enjoy keeping up with the cutting edge of the field while using the most boring possible one at work.

Imagine being this rich and having this much free time and using all of those capabilities to drive yourself mad with ignorance. Nothing bad has happened to these people yet they are convinced the entire world is out to get them.

Thiel’s op-ed in the FT was truly insane. Who hurt these people?

As if it wasn’t obvious that the New York Times is a pile of crap, here’s them getting rid of Paul Krugman for views that aren’t Trump positive enough.

“OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else’s data without permission or compensation.”

This is a very good framework from Matt Webb for organizations how to do strategic pathfinding when it comes to AI. In Germany especially, lots of orgs would benefit from doing this instead of whatever it is that they are busy with right now.

I don’t think there’s been a Python developer tool that’s been adopted as quickly as uv is being right now. Dealing with dependencies and running Python code has never been easier.

Looks like food waste and food security are going to be very important going forward.

A write-up of the current dream stack in practice: prototype work in Python and then hook it up to Rust to bring it to production.

Quick turnarounds on fixing vulnerabilities usually correlated with general engineering operational excellence. The best cases were clients who asked us to just give them a constant feed of anything we found, and they’d fix it right away.

[…] the abandonment of responsibility in two dimensions. Firstly, and following on from what was already happening in ‘big data’, the world stopped caring about where AI got its data — fitting in nicely with ‘ surveillance capitalism. And secondly, contrary to what professional organisations like BCS and ACM had been preaching for years, the outcomes of AI algorithms were no longer viewed as the responsibility of their designers — or anybody, really.

The scientists are all on Bluesky which is understandable given the war on science and truth taking place on Twitter.

Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say “stability” or “job security” as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.

Artemis, fostered with Apollo, virgin who delights in arrows, far-shooting goddess, who swiftly drives her all-golden chariot through Smyrna to vine-clad Claros, I ask that you establish a loop counting from ninety-nine to one called beerLoop.

I had no idea that Git trailers were a thing, but this is pretty cool. Not sure where I’ll ever use it though: “trailers are severely underutilized”