Doc Watson & David Grisman - Doc & Dawg
I think I’m going to buy a mandolin.
Ben Papillon
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Rift - Christopher Meiklejohn
“Rift: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.” by Christopher Meiklejohn - as good a description as I’ve read about what was different in the Before Times.
Record Low Crime Rates Are Real
“Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care” on Astral Codex Ten - helpful data and analysis.
james K - Play
Most-played discovery from the annual year-end list comb-through.
Mindstorms - Seymour Papert
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert - hard to imagine a book about computing from 1980 aging better than this one has.
Blue Ruin - Hari Kunzru
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru - interesting book about art, success, status; the “Covid era” already feels so long ago.
Blood Incantation - The Stargate
Why Co–Star uses Haskell
Why Co–Star uses Haskell
Readwise Reader
Readwise Reader - The best read-it-later/bookmarking app I’ve found; I’m about to renew my subscription to it for a second year. If, like me, you’ve been wandering in the wilderness since the demise of Google Reader, consider giving it a try.
Dancing on the Edge
Recommended by a friend who knows the frontman through past touring, my interest was piqued by a comparison to the Silver Jews. Davis is apparently best known for his lyrical prowess, but this record demonstrates a lot of inventiveness in the musical arrangemements and forms as well. I caught them live in Atlanta recently and it’s also quite a high-energy live show.
Just Use the Command Line
So good. This here is the level of self awareness all technical people should aspire to. It takes introspection like this to actually improve computers, since most people who happily tolerate esoteric tools usually forget how much pain they went through to become proficient.… https://t.co/jrAbuuLHbq pic.twitter.com/EEM0QH31wI — Tyler Angert (@tylerangert) January 28, 2024
Open-Source LLMs with Simon Willison
This is a great hour to catch up on the current state of things in open source LLMs. Willison is always enjoyable.
Chuck Johnson - Balsams
Ambient pedal-steel guitar. An expansive sound that evokes American landscapes.
Odd Lots - How An Old Banking Regulation May Have Driven The 1970s Inflation
Interesting episode that presents an alternative narrative for the 1970s inflationary episode, pinning it on regulations that cap bank deposit returns in order to prevent irresponsible insured lending at unsustainable rates (or lending at high rates and incentivizing risky behaviors to get those returns back). This disincentivizes deposits and incentivizes spending, also has some business credit…
The Economics of Programming Languages
Wide-ranging and thought-provoking talk from the creator of the Elm language, given at the final Strange Loop conference in 2023. I was at the conference, but didn’t see this talk in person.
About
I’m a software developer and software engineering leader with a focus on B2B SaaS startups, data analytics, marketing tech, and payments. I’m currently working on a new startup, Schematic . Previously, I’ve built software at Relay Payments, Matcha, Umbel, and Webmail.us/Rackspace, among others. I live in Atlanta, GA with my wife, two sons, two dogs, and two cats. When I’m…
Feature Flags: Theory vs Reality
A discussion about DevOps in 2023 The Rise of Feature Flags in DevOps During the second half of the 2010s, the DevOps movement gained massive momentum throughout the SaaS industry. Riding this wave and buoyed by the marketing efforts of LaunchDarkly, feature toggles rapidly became an essential tool for engineering operations used by practically every SaaS company. In the DevOps context, feature…
Dwarkesh Carl Shulman
At ~6 hours, this two-parter is an investment, but one of the more engaging speakers I’ve heard discussing AI risk. Teh first episode focuses more on industrial fast takeoff, while the second part is more about existential risk.
Fernando Boretti - Sketch of a Post-ORM
“Sketch of a Post-ORM” by Fernando Boretti - He has a lot of fantastic posts, there are probably 5 others I could have shared instead.
Could we simply choose to not be slow
'There's this curious background belief many have where they think most systems must operate near the efficient frontier except of course every system they’ve ever worked inside.' “Could we simply choose to not be slow?” plus incentive compatibility is a surprisingly powerful mix, including in fields where it is not (yet) widely deployed. https://t.co/n6AIV07cPp — Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)…
examples of influential software made by one person?
examples of influential software made by one person? — AKHIL 🪡 hiring C++ engineers (dm) (@fkasummer) October 18, 2022
Carbon
Carbon - handy website for making nice-looking images of code snippets
An Oral History of Bank Python
“An Oral History of Bank Python” by Cal Peterson
Inputs and outputs for September 2021
Inputs This month, I read Ted Chiang’s two books of short stories, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others , both of which were incredible. Chiang’s stories are often presented in the first person, and he allows the circumstances of the story and protagonist to affect the writing style of a story; two of my favorite stories, Story of Your Life (which was the basis for the movie…
Inputs and outputs for August 2021
Inputs Meghan, Jasper, and I camped at Jekyll Island for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was Jasper’s first time seeing the ocean, and our first vacation in quite a while without other family or friends joining. It’s a friendly, quiet place to get away – we loved it. I finally finished the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series , which I had been…
Day-one deploys
Several of my past companies have had an onboarding convention where a new developer makes a code change that is deployed to production on their first day, or at least their first day after any company-wide onboarding is finished. This is hard to pull off, but in some ways that can be a benefit, and there are a lot of good reasons to do it. Here are a few: Success breeds success : It is impossible…
Inputs and outputs for July 2021
Inputs The only book I read this month was Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary , which delivered more or less as promised - a scientifically dense but nonetheless easy-to-read page-turner that is surely destined for the silver screen. I spent a lot of time with newer rap releases this month, including Dave’s “We’re All in this Alone Together” , Mach-Hommy’s…
A Tale of Two Economies: A Collaboration with Fynn Glover
Fynn Glover and I worked together at Matcha, where he was CEO. Fynn and I have always enjoyed debating topics outside of work relating to history and economics, and recently decided to collaborate on a post for his blog . I’ve cross-posted it here, and recommend everyone subscribe to his blog for similar posts about technology, history, economics, and literature. Recently, Fynn and I both…
Inputs and outputs for June 2021
Inputs This month, I started my new job at Relay Payments after a few weeks off. So far so good - I’ve been working throughout their stack, and it’s been a nice change of pace to work on React/Typescript, as well as being challenged to level up my Go skills. I have a draft underway about what I’m learning as I try to ramp up on the latter, but I’ll say that Effective Go was…
What I've learned about management: Expectations, decisions, and teams
I’ve been in software management roles for the past six years or so. As I prepare to take on a role that will shift my attention away from management for a while, here are a few things I’ve learned during that time about how to be a good manager. I had initially hoped to summarize all of my major points of view on this topic in a single blog post, but I’m finding that I…
Inputs and outputs for May 2021
In the last few weeks, I left my position at Springbot , about six months after I joined the company as part of its acquisition of Matcha , and will be joining the engineering team at Relay Payments later this month. I’ll leave it to another post to reflect on what I learned from the RootsRated/Matcha/Springbot chapter of my career. I do have a post in the works specifically focused on what…