Buy the truth, sell it not
With every auto-update, Claude Code has gotten better at writing software. What it hasn’t improved at, tragically, is communicating to me in a way that doesn’t make me want to punch it square in the /artifacts As I’ve written before, Claude is finding its voice and I’m really happy for this important step in its life but also I hate its voice and I hope its voice dies in a…
Last night was a somewhat typical Sunday. That’s why I’m writing about it. I want to remember this phase of our lives before it’s gone. The end is nigh. I can feel it. 1 The whole family was at home. All eight of us. Rach called a moratorium on screens for the remainder of the evening, so our screenagers 2 had a moment like when Chip Douglas falls on the dish at the end of Cable…
Here’s a smattering of things I found interesting lately. Tools, articles, bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica . SVG Backgrounds SVG has slowly, steadily become one of my absolute favorite web technologies. This set of free SVG-based web graphics by Matt Visiwig will instantly improve your project with a copy/paste. Email.md - responsive emails, written in Markdown I don’t write an…
It’s officially late July and I feel officially compelled to notify you that Late July ’s Jalapeño Lime chips are officially the greatest snack chips in the known universe. Think of them like Elevated Doritos . They’re great with salsa. 1 They’re great with guac. They’re great with queso. They’re just as great naked. I eat them in my car . I eat them the most by…
Sometimes, while agentic coding… I feel like Michael Scott: Dunder Mifflin’s best salesman who got Peter principle’d into a management role 1 he’s kinda terrible at and now spends his days watching other people make all the sales calls. Sometimes, while agentic coding… I feel like Jean-Luc Picard: my childhood hero 2 who always weighs the trade-offs, makes the tough…
A year ago this week, I hopped a flight to Denver 1 to pick up my shiny, new Tesla Model 3. The 8-hour ride 2 home was a revelation. I’ve never been a car guy for the same reason I’ve never been a fashion guy: I don’t like superficial status games and there’s few status games more superficial than what wheels you’re driving or what heels you’re wearing. I would…
I was enjoying Benn Stancil’s latest column 1 on generalized vs specialized models (his typical, punchy, link-ridden screed) until this paragraph jump scared me: And that’s the turn nobody priced in. Here’s what the spectrum hides: The real axis was never general-versus-specialized—it was unmonetized-versus-monetized. We called Claude general-purpose because it could be a boyfriend, an…
My first thought when I saw Cursor’s Origin announcement last week was: You could see this move coming a mile away My second thought was: Dang, GitHub really is under siege Cursor is now building 1 the exact thing that GitHub is : the place our code actually lives. Their announcement is what sent me down this rabbit hole, but it’s certainly not where the story starts. Origin is yet…
Here’s a hearty amen to Tom Bedor’s answer to the question, “When is it OK to forward the output of an AI to another human to read?” If useful, I send AI generated content to teammates. But when doing so, I take care to clearly label what is AI generated, and I add my own commentary alongside it. For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.…
From this morning’s Robinhood Snacks : The ancient Egyptians believed that the measure of a person’s worth was calculated upon their death when Anubis, god of the afterlife, would weigh their heart against a feather to see if a heavy heart would be fed to Ammit, the Devourer of Souls. Here in America, we do things a little differently, where the measure of worth is the net present value of…
The legendary adage Steve Jobs deployed to push the original Macintosh team over the finish line has outlived the hardware it helped ship. Had Apple’s software engineers been equipped with AI coding agents back in 1983, much of the work would’ve been easier to accomplish. But shipping?! That’s one thing AI isn’t a huge help with (yet). At least not according to a new paper…
This essay by Owen McGrann about his “dead economy theory” is the best doomer take on the AI debate I’ve read yet. What Owen does, which I’m not seeing elsewhere, is remove AGI / ASI as a prerequisite for doom. Owen thinks we’re headed there regardless, because the tech industry depends on it: As we’re getting excited about discovering how to use claude.md files in…
Why exactly do coding agents make us feel so much more productive as developers? I think Max Hodak hit the nail on the head at end of a recent Naval pod : The thing that really changed is—it used to be you could build a lot, a lot would go straightforward, but then you’d hit some random thing and you could spend an indefinite period of time debugging some narrow thing. Now, with agents, you just…
When it comes to systems design, John Gall knew his stuff. He even has a LAW 1 about it: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. Gall isn’t the only promoter of simple systems. Here’s…
I guess I can’t help myself. ¯\ (ツ) /¯ When I retired from The Changelog two months back, the only real plan I had 1 was to plant a little tree farm on our land. 2 Check! ✅ It might not look like much, 3 but that’s 250 evergreen seedlings, planted and mulched. 4 Oh, and watered. Sooo much water. I was going to install a drip system immediately, but that’s an entirely different…
After 13 years , 1042 podcasts , 452 newsletters, and countless friends made along the way… it’s time to say goodbye to The Changelog. I shipped my final News last Monday and Adam shipped our Friends finale yesterday. For reasons I cannot explain, during “big change” moments like this my brain shoots clichés at me like Nitro fired tennis balls at approaching American…
One fascinating part of our conversation 1 with Steve Ruiz from tldraw started when he confessed that he feels bad going to bed without his Claudes working on something . I share the feeling. But why? We analyze it on the pod, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts here as well, if for no other reason but to get it out of my head. Just one more level… After talking with tldraw Steve, I read…
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to make people stop typing this drivel into textarea s near me. Tell me you’re $X without telling me you’re $X 1 You 👏 don’t 👏 have 👏 to 👏 clap 👏 between 👏 words 2 I was today years old when… 3 The. One. Where. Every. Word. Is. A. Sentence. 4 I…
In September of last year, I covered a post by Mike Judge arguing that AI coding claims don’t add up , in which he asked this question: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware ? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in…
At this point, anybody saying things about AI’s usefulness in software development like notch did on X the other day is either a) burying their head in the sand, b) an old man yelling at clouds, or c) seriously entrenched for some other reason. Here’s notch’s take, so you don’t have to bounce: Reminder that using AI to write code is an incredibly bad idea still, and anyone…
One of my goals when I refreshed my blog was to publish with Hugo , but write with Obsidian . Turns out that was as simple as: ln -s ~/src/jerodsanto/net/content/posts ~/Dropbox/obsidian/Jerod/blog That’s a good start, but once I’m writing in Obsidian… I don’t exactly want to leave. There’s friction when managing various Hugo tasks from a separate terminal session.…
I remember once telling curl creator, Daniel Stenberg, he’d achieved total world domination . Turns out, he was just getting started. Fast forward to last weekend when football fans around the world witnessed curl propelling the LA Rams to the NFC Championship game (and on to the Super Bowl?)
The homeschool basketball program that all three of my boys play in (and I have coached in a volunteer capacity for ~10 years) is doing a little fundraiser to help keep registration fees low. Please check it out and consider donating to Levi’s campaign. He’s working hard to bring in as much support as he can!
Justin Searls quit social media by posting more. How, exactly, did he do that? By writing way too much Ruby code to cross-post his blog to all the social networks using an atom feed of his design. POSSE is an old idea: publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. That’s desirable, for sure, but not always easy to accomplish. POSSE Party is the new app Justin released so others can…
It’s about time ! They’ve been working on this since time immemorial. Next question: when will it land in Safari on iOS? Not any time soon, it seems. Until that fateful day… polyfills, y’all. Polyfills .
I have discovered a natural law of the Universe. I will call it “The Chip Dip Depletion Principle” , which states: Given sufficient snacking time, for any suitable chip/dip combination, the chip to dip ratio remains imbalanced until one of the two supplies are depleted. “Jerod’s Chip Dip Depletion Principle” , a practical example: “Yay, chips and dip! I’m…
Here’s me, writing in Changelog News last October: I’m getting back in to reading. Not Audible. Not e-ink. I’m talking physical books held in my physical hands scanned by my physical eye balls. I need recommends! Please reply with the best book you’ve read in the last 10 years. Fiction. Non-fiction. Whatever! I was overwhelmed by the response! There were too many thoughtful…
I’ve needed to refresh the ol’ blog for years , but I never have the time. Thankfully, Claude Code compresses time just enough for me to finally get it done! All I need now is an obligatory “I refreshed my blog” blog post… The last time I did this was forever ago. So long, in fact, that I cannot remember exactly when. 2013 maybe? I don’t know. I didn’t…
Some may say my path was paved My skin color made it so. Others claim I walked the easy way Thanks to my XY chromosomes. Those things may be true, how can you actually know… But they appear as molehills in a valley next to the mountainous peak my perch was placed by my parents. A perspective of true privilege. See After fifty plus years, they still love each other
Adam Wathan invited me on his excellent Full Stack Radio podcast to talk about building Changelog.com with Elixir and Phoenix. Topics include: How pattern matching works in Elixir and why it’s more powerful than method overloading in other languages How Elixir’s pipe operator makes the transition from OO to functional programming more natural Why you don’t need to be intimidated…
I was honored to be interviewed by Elmer Thomas for SendGrid’s very cool Some Coding Required podcast. We talked about my favorite open source project, how open source has impacted my life, and gave some advice for open source contributors and maintainers. My segment starts right here . Or listen to the whole thing. 14 minutes short.
It’s been a good year. Take a listen : We’re going behind the scenes to look back at 2018 as we prepare for 2019 and onward. We talk through our most popular episodes, most controversial episodes, and even some of our personal favorites.
We shipped 44 episodes of The Changelog in 2016. That’s a lot of conversations! All of our guests are interesting and insightful in their own ways, but there are a handful that continue to resonate with me in my work and life since we spoke with them. Here they are, in chronological order: Nadia Eghbal Nadia’s outsider (turned insider) take on open source and funding sparked debates…
To celebrate episode 100 of Jaymie Jones’ Coder Catchup podcast, Jaymie reached out to a handful of people and asked us 5 questions about web development, which he then read on the show. I was honored to be on the show alongside such great web folks as Chris Coyier, Wes Bos, Adam Stacoviak, Sarah Allen, and more. Since I wrote my answers to Jaymie in Markdown and shipped them off for him to…
This fact will ruin your day if, for instance, you are expecting Rails’ jQuery UJS to Just Work when you add a remote: true or method: :post to that link_to helper. You know, something like this: It’ll work in Chrome. It’ll work in Firefox. But Safari on the other hand… Safari will not trigger a click event and whatever JavaScript you were expecting to fire will not. How…
It’s been a few weeks since I started the process of setting up my new laptop. I wrote previously about which apps and tweaks I made immediately after unboxing. Now I’m back to share what I’ve done since. The most surprising thing to me is that I’m still dual wielding. It’s been pretty nice to have the new machine always plugged in and configured with multiple…
Spring is in the air and a shiny new 13" MacBook Pro is in my office 1 . It will replace the mid-2011 13" MacBook Air that I’m writing this post with. Why aren’t I writing it on my new machine? Because for the first time ever I’ve decided not to migrate. My current install has been through 6 major operating system upgrades, countless experiments, untold hacks, and more.…
The features that had me the most excited with the advent of iOS 8 and Yosemite fall under Apple’s Continuity umbrella. From the marketing page: Apple products have always been designed to work together beautifully. But now they may really surprise you. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, you’ll be able to do more wonderful things than ever before. Answer phone calls and send SMS messages from my…
One Ruby feature that I fell in love with back in the day is the ability to tack conditionals on at the end of a line. For example, this bit of code: if some_condition? object . perform_some_action end Can be expressed as a one-liner, like this: object . perform_some_action if some_condition? It’s a small difference, but the latter form often maps more directly to how the author thinks about…
I’ve been battling pain in my left hand 1 and wrist for the past couple of years. There are but 3 things on my person that I need to bring to work each day: A Brain Eyes Hands Losing any of these faculties would send me down a new career path, so I’m quite protective of these particular body parts. This hand pain worried me. It started out in my forearm and felt like fatigue more than anything…
One virtue shared by the people I admire most is this: they are deeply thoughtful . We emulate those we admire. We model our lives after theirs. They’re called role models for a reason, after all. My desire to emulate my role models has made me strive for thoughtfulness. I don’t always make it. Rarely, perhaps. But I’ve been working at it. I continue to work at it. Thoughtfulness is a verb 1 .…
As I teased on Monday, two things I’m excited about were announced this week. It’s always fun to finally share things you’ve been quietly toiling away on. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter 1 , here’s a recap of the news: Big News #1: We’re putting on a conference! The first annual NebraskaJS Conference will take place on August 7th, 2015 at the…
I’m at the tail end of a couple-day sickness. Nothing serious. I was just miserable enough to put on my woe-is-me attitude, but no worse. It’s times like these — when I’m laying in bed feeling sorry for myself so leave me alone and slam the door on your way out thank you very much — when I try to make my elementary school teachers proud and “turn that frown upside down”. The only way I can get…
I watched The Truman Show again recently. I always loved Truman’s romanticization of Fiji. He believed it was exactly half way around the world from his little town. That got me thinking. What is half way around the world from me ? Static Showdown When I heard about Static Showdown , Yet another 48 hour programming competition, but with a static twist, I used it as an excuse to build my…
Cody and I recently added a subtle feature 1 to Oma / Sprout that we think is pretty neat. I haven’t seen other people doing this, so I thought I’d publish the idea and how we pulled it off. The Problem Much of our recurring traffic comes from social media 2 . To foster this flow of traffic, we post our sites’ daily event pages to Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis. The web…
I published a lengthy post on The Changelog all about how we turned Trello 1 in to a CMS for Weekly — our email newsletter that covers everything on our open source radar. Want to know why and how we do it? Read the full post here ! Trello is quickly becoming one of my favorite tools of all time. Who would’ve thought that a list of lists could be so useful? Fog Creek, I guess!…
I’ve been quietly publishing a Bible podcast — hosted by myself and John Malone — since the start of 2014. The reason I’ve been quietly publishing it is because it took a bit for us to iron out the podcasting kinks. I love podcasting, but it still hasn’t had its “Blogger moment” 1 . The show is low on ceremony and (hopefully) high on content. It’s just two guys…
My vote for “GIF of the Year” goes to… There’s so much to love here. The Michael Jackson glove 1 . The girlfriend who wants nothing to do with it. Home boy in the background pimpin’ his soda. I’ve looped this one countless times in 2014. What’s your favorite GIF this year? Upload or link it up in the comments! I revel in the possibility of that guy having…
Welcome to my fourth annual list of my favorite digital things! Remember how I roll? Like this: List items must be anatomically digital List items must have won me over in 2014 List items may or may not have been released in 2014 Here’s the goods. Oh, and if you’re really bored, check out 2011 , 2012 , and 2013 . iOS Apps Overcast I was a loyal Instacast user for years. Emphasis on was . Somehow,…