A software engineer's blog? How original.
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April 2026! Each week, one of us chose a prompt and we all wrote posts. For the bonus wrap-up, Sam chose the prompt: “One thing you like about each other’s blogs–content, design, etc” Sam: “April Blogging Challenge Wrap-Up” Jared: “April Blogging Challenge Wrap-Up” Dave: “April Blogging Challenge Wrap-Up” All of these…
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts. For week 4, I chose the prompt: “You have been given one month away from your obligations to use your talents to enact societal good. What do you go do?” Sam: “Talents for Good” Jared: “” Dave: “Doing the most good” The best charity is local. My reason…
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts. For week 3, Dave chose the prompt: “How do you compute? (Explain what computers you use, ones you used to use, software you use, just whatever you think answers the question)” Sam: “How Do I Computer” Jared: “” Dave: “How I Compute (2026)” My general…
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts. For week 2, Jared chose the prompt: “What are your favorite places on the internet or favorite things about the internet and why? How do they differ from the parts of the internet that you dislike” Sam: “Internet Driven Memories” Jared: “My Preferred…
The theme for my book club this month is “choose your own adventure” books. Turns out, Choose Your Own Adventure™ is a trademark of Random House. The generic name for the is gamebooks. It’s a larger genre than I thought it might be. We’re reading Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography ( Goodreads ). Someone in the group said that it might be fun to have everyone record their path and…
My friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge for the month of April, 2026! Each week, one of us chooses a prompt and we all write posts. For week 1, Sam chose the prompt: “What’s something cool I’m caring about or into recently?” Sam: “Four Key Book Arts and Project Hail Andy” Jared: “The Nature of Prototyping in Professional Development” Dave: “Nintendo announces 3DS successor ‘3DS…
Correctly packaging an npm package is hard. It’s certainly something that I’ve struggled with at work and spent many hours on. So it’s understandable that even Anthropic and Claude could do it wrong. Xitter user @fried_rice noticed that Anthropic accidentally distributed the source map. . Revealed in the source code were lots of interesting things, including leaks to upcoming model with fun…
I’ve always loved Android and Google. Even before I had a smartphone, I downloaded Android Studio onto the family computer just so I could run the emulator. I thought Randall Monroe’s random 2010 blog post about Android bugs he encountered was bizarre—how could the company that is not evil produce anything less than perfect? For the past 10 years and from the first smartphone, they have all been…
To create is to recreate. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood…
I am devoting a section of my site to “experiments”—little “what if’s” and prototypes of ideas. They aren’t big enough to turn into apps or tools, nor do I want to spend the time to fully integrate them into my main site. They are independent, atomic, and fun. The point is to be non-committal and give me a chance to try out new things then throw them away. You can see them all on my tools page .…
Inside of me there are two wolves. One of them is named DIY, who says “build everything from scratch. Only you know what you need. You will learn the most this way.” The other wolf is the do-work wolf, who says “use what’s already been built. It’s easier and you can focus on the important stuff. ‘You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake’… By giving up vain individuality, you can leapfrog the…
Last updated: 2025-08-04. Like a .cursor/rules.md or CLAUDE.md file, but for me. I thought it might an interesting meditation to try and figure out what rules I personally follow when writing code. This is a _strong opinions, loosely held approach to things—I’ll do what I think is best, but I’m pretty easily convinced to pick something else, especially if you seem like you care. I don’t…
It happened again. The desire to change up the design of my site hit me. But… The ad-hoc CSS model that I had created made everything so fragile. Turns out, if you have no system in mind, then everything is very fragile. Who knew! The only formal CSS model I have experience with is Tailwind (atomic?), so I stuck with that. Sorry BEM and BOM and and all those other three-letter acronyms. The desire…
Matt Pocock shares “one weird git thing for local development” The one weird thing I always put in my .gitignore: *.local.* Makes it super simple to create temporary local scripts (fix-names.local.js) Or save outputs as json (output.local.json) Started doing this so many years ago but I guess I only just remembered no-one else does it. At work, I recently attended a training on Cursor background…
Simon Willison, “My approach to running a link blog”, 2024-12-22 Going to try this out. The point of that article was to emphasize that blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all). In that article I proposed two categories of…
I find that the urge to change the design of my site happens pretty frequently. That’s probably a good thing—sense and fashion change. The biggest issue (maybe) is infrastructure. The 2024 version of this site was built on Tailwind . However, I’ve always been enamored with the CSS Zen Garden —it has the ability to change the design of a site without changing the HTML. But Tailwind doesn’t make it…
In and Out 📤 Out Polyester Viewing myself as a burden. Doing things out of a sense of obligation instead of utility and joy Cupcakes. They just aren’t good. Brownies are better. Trying to smoke meat on a charcoal grill 📥 In Things made of wool, wood, and leather Viewing myself as a benefit Writing Fit pics 📸 Hats Books outside of sci-fi and fantasy Caspar David Friedrich. His works satisfy my…
Recently, I’ve been working on moving my family’s banking strategy from traditional checking and savings account to money market funds in a (Fidelity) cash management account. The migration has started, but I’m pretty happy with what I think will be the result. Please note: I am not a financial advisor. I am not a finance professional. I should not be in charge of your money. I don’t even want to…