Thoughts on software development, technology and the future.
I've always enjoyed making small tools for myself to improve daily life as a software developer. Most of the time they are CLI tools, since the command line is where I live most of my life. With the advent of agentic coding, this tendency of mine has multiplied. I'm writing more tools now. Agents are really good at writing small, self-contained tools, and you can kick one off from the Claude app…
If you are using the pnpm package manager for Node.js projects, chances are that you have seen a warning about "ignored build scripts" when you run pnpm install , or other commands that install packages, such as pnpm add . What do these warnings mean? And how are you supposed to act on them? Dealing with these can require digging into implementation details of things you wish would just work. In…
I wrote my first blog system in 2003, or something like that. It had very rudimentary authoring and commenting functionality. It was written in Python and stored things in a PostgreSQL database, running on my friends' server helgo.net (which I think has been down for some time). It was called "blogdans", a pun on the Swedish word "logdans" ("barn dance"). Not the funniest of puns, but there you…
Following Week 13, 2025: Links and things , here comes Week 14, 25: Links and things! Although it is already the monday of Week 15. Let's kick off with some AI stuff: AI 2027 is a nauseating read: "We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution." Scott Alexander introduces the project at Astral Codex Ten , and I hope…
Let's do another links and things! Last week was fun! Let's start with some Java stuff. I linked to a Gunnar Morling post last week as well. I would say he is one of the best Java bloggers out there. And this week he's doing my favorite kind of blog posts, a "let's take a look at..." post – about Ahead-of-Time Class loading and Linking . Since I've mentioned gatherers for two weeks in a row,…
Continuing the trend from last week , here are some links and things that I've found interesting this week. Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers? – fun story about a sequence of unfortunate design decisions that led to the unintended behavior of Git pausing for 0.1 seconds before executing a mistyped command. A patch has now landed in git 2.49 – see Github's Highlights from Git…
Various links and things that I've found interesting this week. Julia Evans wrote a great post on escape codes and the standards, or lack of standards, or lack of well-working standards in the area, especially regarding the terminfo database. I've been feeling this problem lately as I moved to ghostty as my terminal emulator of choice, and haven't yet set it up properly on my remote hosts. ( This…
There is a kind of ultramarathon race called a backyard ultra . Here's how it works. Every hour a new lap starts. You need to finish the lap within the hour. The person who runs the most laps wins 1 . Each lap is 6.7 km, or 4.1 miles – it is set to this distance so that if you complete 24 laps, i.e stay in the race for 24 hours, you have run 100 miles. I was in the mood for a random little web…
I recently built a small race timer tool for the browser using React . I think I will write a separate blog post about that 1 , but first I wanted to discuss a specific issue. I will demonstrate it by building a simple clock widget. The post assumes some previous experience of using modern React with hooks. First, let's just have a component that shows the time: function WatchFace ( { date }: {…
The other day, I was playing around with some React code. I have some ideas of a simple deploy tool, and basically just wanted to try out some UI ideas. One part of this would be to build a component that would show a git log. I wasn't going to write any real git integration right at the moment, as that wasn't the purpose of my current exploration, but I still wanted to have some real data to use…