I recently saw complaints about Google’s search engine crawler taking down websites by sending them too much traffic: We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI training also. It's honestly kind of frustrating also because you then search on it and theres (was) nothing on how you are meant to "correctly"…
“We are not suggesting this is attainable on the first try, but we think we know how to get there.” There are no new ideas in software engineering, only ones we’ve learned and then forgotten. In 1989, the Zero Defects memo at Microsoft was already arguing for the ideas that became Continuous Integration, Test-Driven Development, and “shift left”. In 1989, Microsoft had shipped MS-DOS but hadn’t…
An interview with open-source maintainer Seth Larson on creativity and taking up space.
An interview with eieio.games on how to connect people and keep the internet fun.
An interview with multimedia artist Morry Kolman on humor and his creative process.
An interview with the creator of Red Blob Games on motivation, ambition, and creative process.
When you can make anything, what do you choose? And why even try, when someone else is doing it better?
I keep hearing variants of this complaint lately: “This (tool / workflow / service / slot machine ) is slower than me doing it manually. Therefore, it's not worth using.” These people are missing the point. Speed is easy to measure - that’s great. But focusing on speed overlooks the importance of subjective effort and mental load. Let's talk about grocery stores, naval signaling flags, and the…
My talk at BSides SF 2026
Clashes of tech and the US government.
As the title implies, I just created a font that displays numbers in a compact format used by Cistercian monks . You can play with it on my demo site here : This project was inspired by Chris Heilmann’s post about creating a generator for Cistercian numerals . His version creates PNG and SVG images, but I had the thought - why not use font ligatures instead? Font ligatures are fun and useful Font…
Recently my wife and I needed to call a car, so out came the apps to compare rideshare prices. There’s always a bit of variation here, but this time was striking. My wife’s Uber app quoted her $28, while mine gave me $47. Same app, time, and place - but two wildly-different prices. Who knows why? I’m usually more willing to spend than she is, and I bet that's represented on my user profile. I was…
One common complaint about computers is that they’re too hard to understand. Check out this lamentation related to the British East India Company: The Controller and the Computer of the Duties on unrated India Goods attend the Sales of the East India Company , and take an Account of the Goods sold, and the Price; this Account is agreed with the Company, then the Controller and Computer cast the…
And what’s next.
The real reason for all those “Oops!”
A couple weeks ago, I spotted a phishing campaign targeting developers on GitHub - actually, my coworker Max tapped me on the shoulder to show me. Phishing is nothing new, but this one caught my attention with the tactics, plus recent current events. The attack used GitHub’s own features This was a clever social engineering attempt to reach open-source maintainers. In one form, it looked like…
Plus thoughts on the bitter lesson.
A firsthand investigation of 2.8 million posts.
In 1975, five whole decades ago - before Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or even vi and emacs existed - a new document editor was born at Xerox PARC, and it was named Gypsy. It’s hard to properly introduce Gypsy because its ideas succeeded. Can you imagine an editor where you can’t type immediately into the document, or cut-copy-paste, or double-click to select a word? Borrowing the phrase from Scott…
Art, history, and the agent experience.