subscribe to these scribbles via email or RSS feed jottings Scribbles born from superfluous thoughts, probably half-formed fragments of whatever I was...
A few times a year I'm standing somewhere with mountains in front of me and wonder what they're called. I use PeakVisor for this. Point the camera at some mountains and it shows their names. The free version limits you to one location per day though, and apparently I don't want this badly enough to pay for another subscription. (People who make good apps are allowed to charge money. I'm just a…
I've gotten into the habit of recording most of my meetings. Being able to go back to what was actually said has been a pretty serious productivity boost. Even more so now that a transcript isn't just something you search manually. I can throw it at an LLM, query it from a CLI, expose it through MCP, pull decisions into whatever I'm working on, etc. Once you start doing that, meeting transcripts…
I haven’t written much this month. I’ve been busy, although to be fair, quite a lot of that “busy” was running. I’m properly back at it now, and the injury finally seems to be more or less under control. Touch wood. The other thing taking up some of my time has been talking to people about automating the boring parts of their work through skills and agents. And I keep running (pun intended) into…
Talk to anyone building a small software product right now and this pops up quickly. I ran into it on a side project: the app itself can be hacked together in a weekend, but getting access to the Strava API or figuring out whether Garmin will even talk to you can take weeks or months. Google OAuth verification is the same kind of drag. A lot of useful products depend on someone else's platform.…
So the podcast has a new name, a new co-host, and a slightly different focus. For the past year Murilo and I have been doing The Monkey Patching Podcast. We grew it to 8,000+ YouTube subscribers, mostly on the back of weekly tech updates and a fair bit of code chatter. I loved doing it. But the episodes that got me most excited were the ones where we sat down with founders actually building things…
I was re-reading Taleb's Antifragile last weekend, and it gave me a name for a tradeoff I've been making in code without one: robust vs antifragile. I think AI coding just tipped the balance away from robust, and most of us haven't updated our instincts yet. Quick recap for anyone who hasn't read Antifragile (or been cornered by someone who has). He splits systems into three types. Fragile things…
I used to open-source a lot of what I built. Mostly tools and utilities that scratched a particular itch. The math was simple enough: let's say building something internally took about a week. Open-sourcing it (writing docs, cleaning up the API, adding tests, making the README make sense to someone who didn't write the thing) added another week or two on top. So roughly 2x the effort, but you got…
I was at an event the other day and got talking to someone building a carbon certification platform. It's a compliance-heavy space with a lot of tracking and reporting, and genuinely useful if you can digitize it properly. The thing is, they had paying clients and real demand. Companies asking for features across the full lifecycle of carbon certification, not just the one-off audits they were…
People keep asking me, especially since it's out in the open that we're building Cambryo , whether LLMs are going to kill SaaS. Short answer: no. But also, that's the wrong question. Everyone's debating whether SaaS lives or dies, and I think the more interesting shift is happening underneath that debate. Fair warning: this is my thinking right now . I'll probably need to rewrite half of this in a…
So I've been onboarding a few people on projects lately and trying to get them into an AI-native workflow. What I noticed is that getting started with Claude Code is genuinely hard, not because the tool is complicated, but because when you search online there's so much shit out there. Half of it was written six months ago and is completely irrelevant now (as will this text be two months from now).…