A blog about software, projects, and building things
I'm finally feeling back up to speed at work after returning from my parental leave. In this post I want to share what my daily routine looks like as a software engineer with a 1-year-old. My Daily R...
AI agents have been getting a lot of hype for how good they are at coding. But there are still plenty of naysayers saying AI can't replace human programmers. I've worked professionally as a software e...
I've been experimenting with GPT 5.6 + OpenCode for the past couple weeks, running GPT 5.6 Sol through OpenAI's $100/month ChatGPT Pro (5x) plan. Before this I only used the Claude Max plans for perso...
GPT 5.6 came out several weeks ago and the initial benchmarks look good - capable, fast, and cheap. Claude and Claude Code have been my daily driver for the past year, and I thought it was a good time...
I've been leaning into agentic engineering for the past six months, and I've finally hit my stride at work after coming back from parental leave. AI token spend has been a hot topic and we have intern...
TL;DR - In 2026.H1, I started feeling like a real dad, took parental leave, went to a programming retreat, shipped CloudSeed Rust + QuietCut, reached 130k views, got back to building for fun, and star...
I've been back at work for about a month now after parental leave and a 12 week programming retreat at Recurse Center. We're leaning hard into agentic engineering and I'm bullish on it - I spent a lot...
I've been running a new meditation practice for the past several months and it's working great so wanted to share. Morning Pages My meditation practice is morning pages adapted from The Artist's Way....
TL;DR - A game where you get $1 trillion of Elon Musk's money and spend it. Try it now: Spend Elon Musk's Money What is it You get $1 trillion of Elon Musk's money. Spend it on a catalog of things f...
TL;DR - A dashboard visualizing your GoodReads data export. Try it now: GoodReads Dashboard. What is it A small site that visualizes your GoodReads data exports. Total pages and books read Top author...
I've always been a quiet person who prefers to write than to talk (though this may not be obvious based on the number of YouTube videos I've published). So it feels a little weird to say that I think ...
For the past few weeks I've been using Claude Code from my phone and while it's not a 100% replacement for something like OpenClaw I've found it covers 80% of what I want without too many glaring secu...
I've been using AI to try and automate / optimize parts of my life from software engineering to exercise and diet. My latest experiment has been to use AI to improve my book recommendations by turning...
Agentic engineering is the future. But it's still unclear which harness will win, if any. I've been hedging my bets by moving to a harness-agnostic system for AI skills so no matter the harness I use,...
I get this question a lot so wanted to summarize what I've been up to all in one place. In 2026.01 I started my 16 week parental leave for my first born. Here's what I did. Parenting First and foremos...
For the past couple months I've been writing High-Level Rust which gives ~80% of its benefits with ~20% of its pain. One of the biggest pieces of feedback I've gotten is why not just use a high-level ...
For the past several months I've been searching for the Missing Programming Language - a language with a good balance of types, performance, ecosystem, and agentic AI performance. I've landed on a spe...
We recently went on a 9 day trip to Japan. It was awesome. Japan has been at the top of my bucket list since ~2020 but with Covid, getting married, and having a kid we just never found the right time ...
For the past several years I've been building server-side rendered apps using hypermedia libraries like HTMX and Datastar to sprinkle in interactivity where it's useful. I like this approach because i...
TL;DR - In 2026.Q1 I participated in a 12-week programming retreat, published my 1,000th blog post, started building with Rust, solidified my agentic engineering workflows, shipped my first game, star...
In this post we'll be building a fullstack web app with server-side rendered (SSR) HTML using Rust and Maud. This post continues our series on building webapps with Rust: Build a Simple Single-File R...
I just finished my 12-week programming retreat at Recurse Center. As is tradition, we write "return statements" to reflect on the time - what we did, built, and learned. What is Recurse Cen...
In this post we'll continue our series of building web APIs with Rust. In the last post we built a single-file web API with Rust and Axum using in-memory storage. Now we're going to add a database as ...
I've spent the last few months learning Rust as part of my 12 week programming retreat at Recurse Center. I came to Rust because it scored well in my missing programming language analysis and I heard ...
I've thoroughly enjoyed building in Pokopia, sinking dozens of hours into organizing and optimizing my islands. But this comes at the cost of lots and lots of resources. It is PAINFUL to be halfway th...