JOSH MOCK IS ONLINE
If you write code for a living and you aren't your own boss, there's a solid chance by now that you are using AI-powered coding tools somewhere in your workflow, whether you want to or not. There's also a decent chance that someone in your org thinks that "bots write code" means "coders get more done, faster" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Agents can indeed write code faster than most…
I've been experimenting with specification-driven development (SDD) using GitHub's Spec Kit on some greenfield work as well as for some long-open issues on a couple TypeScript projects I maintain at work. My hope has been that I can put the up-front effort into being technically exhaustive in describing what I want built, so that handing it to a swarm of coding agents will lead to quality results…
It's been a while! Over three years since my last post, to be exact. Jesus Christ, how things have changed. The main one being, for me, the unavoidable impact of AI on software engineering, both as a practice and in the resulting tools and products we build. I am, as many senior-leaning engineers are, ambivalent about whether AI is making us more productive coders, and especially whether it's even…
Happy Halloween, and happy Samhain to everyone except for all involved with the production of Halloween II that failed to catch that Dr. Samuel Loomis completely butchered the pronunciation of the word “Samhain.” In 2019, my wife Erin and I started having a Samhain feast with a rotating cast of friends each year. I wrote the following and read it aloud at that first dinner, and at every dinner…
I've built up a fairly robust strategy for how I manage my personal files. I had a conversation with some fellow computer enthusiasts the other day where I was describing it, and figured I'd capture it here. In the past I've talked about my home-rolled NAS , which is where a lot of this magic happens, but I'm mostly going to focus on the software here. First, I make a distinction between backups…
I've come across a few threads this week giving helpful advice, following the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, about how to protect yourself and others when getting an abortion or assisting others in doing so. There were many valuable warnings about being careful what you say and do online. Still, the recommendations for covering digital tracks were reduced to a one-liner, like "use a VPN." While VPNs…
I recently read Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. Technically, I read it twice because I had to make two passes to catch it all due to it being, you know, philosophy. But, again because philosophy, I scoured the internet after my first pass looking for some writing that summarized the book in a way that confirmed or adjusted my understanding. What I found instead was writing on two ends…
In light of, you know, the whole internet yelling about this week's Twitter news, I figured I'd write down some ( more ) thoughts about my experiences with SSB after using it for the last few weeks as a social media alternative. Just some observations, tips and warnings about things that weren't immediately obvious until I got started. It attracts a certain kind of crowd It's a fairly small, but…
I've been experimenting with Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), a protocol that powers a decentralized social network where posts are propagated peer-to-peer with no central server like Twitter or Facebook. One of the things that's interesting about SSB is that, because it's decentralized, your news feed is built by fetching posts stored on peers' devices. This makes organic discovery of friends-of-friends…
It was another rough year all around, and yet the musicians kept us all going. Lots of great stuff this year. I largely stayed in the same rabbit holes of ambient music and underground metal subgenres that I fell into last year. Some year-over-year consistency aside from the never-ending avalanche of bad news was needed. My December 5th episode of Sad Songs for Happy People on WXNA includes…
Happy Thanksgiving week, friends. Don't forget that it commemorates the beginning of centuries of colonial oppression of indigenous peoples in North America. I haven't done one of these for a while, so here's a list of links. This Twitter thread about ruining evangelical Thanksgiving Ask how much of the food they bought at Walmart. When they say "just about all of it," ask what they think of…
On occasion, I share a few links that have given me inspiration, revelation or joy. Here is a new batch of those links. Dust to Digital’s social media posts It's hard to give up Instagram when accounts like Dust to Digital share priceless content there that I would otherwise never come across. They have created a venue for sharing music that gives equal attention to the talents of street…
In my ongoing quest to divest from Big Tech, social media's moment on the chopping block has been lingering for a while. It's had me thinking a lot about the way we interact socially on the web and how that maps to interactions in real life. Before the ubiquity of social media, we still had plenty of ways to connect with others online. As a teen, I had email and AOL Instant Messenger to chat with…
In the spirit of I Miss Your Smell and Tom MacWright’s “recently” posts , I’m going to try sharing a few links that have given me inspiration, revelation or joy. Hopefully on some semi-regular cadence, but don’t hold me to that. The Syllabus A content recommendation engine that uses a combination of human and AI curation to deliver a weekly list of high quality articles, academic papers, podcast…
In 2020, I found myself spending more time with extreme forms of music—harsh noise, experimental, drone, and all forms of metal and hardcore. There are plenty of things on this list for everyone, but the trend toward the extreme was worth noting. One quick note: Spotify Wrapped has become a huge social event every December, allowing artists and fans to post their listening stats all over social…
Over the past year, I’ve been building out a NAS-based file archival and backup system for our home. The original goal was to relieve our laptops of being the primary place we store our memories, giving us easy access to all of our music and photos, and a place to store incremental backups in-house. As a bonus, it gives us some of that power I've been talking about by letting us control our data.…
I’ve spent a good part of this past year moving bits and pieces of my digital life around in an attempt to break my dependence on large tech companies. We’ve been given ample proof over the last few years that: Facebook has enabled politicians showing predatory advertisements and misinformation to undecided voters in critical elections. Their leaders tend to defend their positions rather than…
I'm trying to own my own data and divest from social media . This site is my first attempt at expressing that. Eventually I'll move my activities from Twitter and Instagram—the only two social media platforms I still use regularly—here and either syndicate the content there or, hopefully/eventually, delete those accounts entirely. I've blogged on my own and in the name of independent music in the…