JavaScript, math, maps, etc
I'm feeling more repelled from software subscriptions recently, primarily for products that have their own proprietary data storage or formats. Partly it's the lock-in effect, and also the platform decay that is accelerating as all companies (besides major AI labs) get nervous about their margins and sustainability. Anyway, so far: From Fantastical to BusyCal . They're both proprietary mac-assed…
If you're encoding some binary data as text, you have a lot of options . My cheatsheet: encoding transport-safe length standard case-sensitive hex safe long yes no base32 safe medium meh no base58 safe short no yes base64 meh short yes yes base64url safe short yes yes transport-safe mostly meaning whether it'll survive being a url parameter. base64 includes + and - which necessitates base64url.…
An update since the last Effect devlog : I finally vanquished the last bits of neverthrow from the codebase and replaced them with Effect abstractions. neverthrow was great for what we used it for - I'd still use it on a simpler project, but Effect is a better fit for Val Town . The LLMs are getting incrementally better at writing Effect code : they now do a decent job of annotating functions with…
I went on a run this morning and got the idea to write this, but Nolen and Robin and Robin again have written other, maybe better versions of it. Still, I have some recent experience and feelings to get out there, so here goes: Like Robin, I have been getting a lot of incoming emails that follow an LLM-like formula of observation about me and how it could be relevant to some product + ask that i…
Back last year, I wrote Putting an untrusted layer of chatbot AI between you and the internet is an obvious disaster waiting to happen . An update: yeah! Trusting LLMs to be search engines is turning out to be pretty bad, as The Atlantic covers in Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized . There's a whole category of companies doing Answer Engine Optimization which do the double disservice of…
Zachary Kai , space fantasy writer and cool indie web maker, interviewed me for his 'Shelf Source' series about people who like to read books. Read it to learn about some of my favorite books and stuff: Shelf Source: Tom MacWright .
This is partly inspired by Chris Krycho's report on the 2026 Boston Marathon . He is proper fast . He ran the marathon at a 6:32/mi pace. My effort here is far less impressive, but is still a PR and a significant improvement on what I was running before, so I'm writing it up. My running is solidly in the impressive to non-runners, but not competitive bucket. Anyway: Official time: 1:31:21 Pace:…
Aut inveniam viam aut faciam : I shall either find a way or make one. Another ranking of people on GitHub dropped, and for the odd metric of 'stars from repos where a developer has merged PRs' I rank third, as of this writing, in the United States . Like all rankings, it's mostly lies, statistics, coincidence, and a reflection of GitHub's top-heavy usage. But it's a nice metric because that is…
It's been three months since the last Effect devlog and I'm still incrementally adopting Effect in Val Town . Things are going well but not spectacularly. My approval rating is a solid 'B' right now. I'm far from the only or most important Effect user, but I'm bummed that a majority of my annoyances from October & November of 2025 are outstanding: a drizzle bug, a Cron bug, a vitest…
What's new with Placemark and open source recently: Placemark The features table in Placemark now lets you sort by different columns in ascending or descending order. The features table had resizable columns, which broke. I fixed that, and you can resize columns again. I've created a documentation website for Placemark, recreating some of what existed with Webflow but with Astro Starlight . tokml…