100% AI-free half-assed writing hand crafted by Kevin Lawver about programming, life, cooking and random nonsense.
I don't remember if I've mentioned this or not on the blog, and it's relevant to this post, so I'll say it again just in case. I have coffee every Tuesday morning with four guys in their seventies. I'm the "kid" in the group because I'm only fifty-one. We talk politics, laugh a lot, drink too much coffee and I answer a lot of tech questions. That's been happening more this year because of AI and…
I posted this in Slack at work on Friday and I'm feeling it today, so you're getting it too. I don't know why I feel compelled to share it with you. I don't know why I felt compelled to share it at work, but I haven't talked about this with a single person who's still working in tech who doesn't also feel it; and I figure there are a lot of people who don't have the privilege I do to be vulnerable…
Back in January, not long after I moved this blog, I wrote up my post about my intentions for 2026 . I was thinking about it this morning, and since it's almost June and that means we're almost halfway through the year, I figured it was about time to check in and see how it's going. The song is still appropriate . Every branch of the federal government is still racing to see which of their sins:…
I woke up early, and there must have been something a little extra in my coffee this morning because I decided that today was the day that Claude Code and I would redesign my blog. Here's what it looked like before... boring, just like everything else, right? And well, I grew up loving comic books and I thought, OK, I could use some color and pop around here, so why not? Here's what happened: My…
I rage quit LinkedIn about a week ago in a post about the whole Moltbook nonsense . To save you having to go to LinkedIn, here's what I said: The whole Moltbook farce, the engagement trap, the outright lies, and that literally every suggested post on LinkedIn for the past three days has been from someone unironically boosting some nonsense part of it - I’m done. You can find me on my blog, where…
This made me cry in my coffee . If you don't want to read it, it's basically a letter to senior engineers just like me about AI coding tools, and how they're just a fact of life now. He's right. As much as I, or anyone else wants to fight, at work, he's right. I do think there's still a place for craft and for hand-crafted code. The craft is all around you. You still need to know how to break down…
This blog is almost twenty six years old (here's the first post from July of 2000). Just like me, it's gone through a lot of changes. It started on Blogger, moved to Movable Type, where I think I had to move it between hosts a couple of times, and then to WordPress where I know I moved it at least four times. It changed text formats at least four times between HTML, Textile, Markdown, back to…
https://youtu.be/2Se76S0XH-I?si=hFddcWQ7ksPItzCK I'm stealing my theme for 2026 from The Mountain Goats: " I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me. " I've been trying to get healthier for a while now, and just this week, as winter is at its metaphorical and actual darkest, I hit a goal I thought was unthinkable - I've lost 100 pounds. I'm now smaller (I have cheekbones?) than I've been…
I have a draft post all about 2025, but you know what? Fuck 2025 . It was a complicated year and I'm tired of thinking about it. I'd rather listen to music, hang out with friends and get ready to vote against every Republican I can for as long as I can until they take that away too. This video is the energy I want to bring into 2026: https://youtu.be/TUQDQraBn3Y?si=NyqvdObde0_7xc3D
The layoffs in tech continue unabated. I realized that there's no one place where I've got all of the things I've written about them collected in one place (and I don't like Wordpress' tags page). So, here they all are, plus one bonus one about all of the ways that working in tech can make you bitter and how not to let it take your humanity. The Layoff Line - this one's practical, kind of what…
What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: ‘Who is to blame?’ Valery…
I wrote this as my farewell in Slack, and wanted to keep it, so it's turning into a blog post! Tomorrow is my last working day at Gusto , which has meant a lot of good-bye conversations, some tears, and a good bit of advice. It's bittersweet leaving a company full of kind people, but the thing that's come up in pretty much every conversation is some advice that just keeps coming up… enough that I…
This was originally published on the Creative Coast's (now Startup Savannah) blog way back in 2016. With AI, it's feels even more relevant now. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” — Annie Dillard I’ve been organizing…
My nonsensical House rep, Buddy Carter, filed a bill to rename Greenland to "Red, White and Blueland." This isn't the first time Buddy's been ridiculous in public, embarrassing his constituents. Here's a letter I sent to him this morning. Dear Mr. Carter, What are you doing? Greenland doesn't belong to us. It's not ours to rename. Yet, you filed a ridiculous bill to rename it that is being loudly…
2024 was a lot of things, a lot of them not so great. But, there was good stuff too! Here's a quick recap of some good things and favorites from 2024: Jodi Chromey's multiple posts about how men don't appreciate art created by women ( start here ) bounced around in my head all year. My intention for 2024 was to read more fiction by women, and it was extremely successful! How successful? Read on!…
Automattic, the owner of both Tumblr and Wordpress, admitted that they're working with AI companies to sell their users' creations to help train AI models . This site has been on WordPress for a long time, and moved WordPress installations between hosts at least twice. This is so hard to take. So much of the web trusts WordPress with their work, and Tumblr users trusted it with their communities…
I am apparently not in the musical consumption mainstream. I still love sitting down to a meal of an entire album instead of singles. I keep my playlist of favorites from the year still, but I love albums. This year, I'm trying to avoid albums by artists I've called out in previous years, so even though they were great, no New Pornographers (but go listen anyway). This post might grow as I listen…
I don't know if you watched Carl Sagan as a kid, but a friend shared this poem, and I was instantly transported back to watching him tell me I was made of star stuff when I was 6. We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains. 93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames, we are all just stars that have people names. 93 Percent Stardust by…
Between writing a blog post almost every day and going back to the beginning of this blog and re-reading stuff I wrote over twenty years ago, it's been a bloggy month over here! I only missed two days. I can live with that. I've blogged more this month than I have in years, and that was the whole goal. My big learning from this experience is that social media really killed my blogging. If you look…
I've played product manager more often this year than I have in years. It's been a fun role to get back into. It's also been a long time since I played product manager at a larger company. The last two times were tiny startups, and well, it's a very different experience. With tiny startup product management, I didn't have a lot of internal expertise to rely on, so most of the research was external…