Featured post what's this? ✨ GitHub seems to be struggling with three nines availability : Slowdowns, outages, and Copilot problems afflict code shack
Using FireWire on a Raspberry Pi After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear. I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that int...
Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating Microsoft spent four years stuffing Windows 11 with ads, forced Copilot integrations, and bloatware, now they want applause for promising to remove it.
The (n) War of the Decade This is a blog where I talk mostly about programming in the workplace. These past few years the subject has often been AI, because it affects everything. From the hiring process to the very code we ty
A Ramsey-style Problem on Hypergraphs Construct hypergraphs as large as possible that do not have a certain easy-to-check, difficult-to-find property.
FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign-Made Consumer Routers Update Follows Determination by Executive Branch Agencies that Consumer-Grade Routers Produced in Foreign Countries Threaten National Security
How I Got a Dear ImGui App Approved on the Mac App Store A technical deep-dive into shipping a Dear ImGui / C++ desktop app on the Mac App Store. Code signing, static linking, sandboxing, and what Apple's review process actually checks.
The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up. The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up. by David Abram
The Anatomy of an Agent Loop | Steve Kinney Every major AI agent runs the same core loop. The 6-line version is easy. The production-hardened version—with context compaction, loop detection, cost budgets, and graceful termination—is where things get interesting.
Building the Good Web What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.
My Sage Barista espresso machine is now smart The goal is simple: having my Sage Barista already warm when I wake up.
crib: Just Enough Devcontainers After building dev environment tools on and off for many years, I scratched the same itch again, this time on top of the devcontainer spec.
Unlocking 25 Gigabit/s on 10 GbE Direct Attach Copper A tip that can save you big money when upgrading to 25 Gig Ethernet
davidbau.com Does Computer Science Still Exist? I have always seen the computer as a tool that gives us new ways to think.
Django Custom Managers Are Silently Leaking Data Django custom managers are a common way to exclude rows by default, such as inactive or soft-deleted rows. However, they don’t run everywhere you’d expect, which leads to unintended data exposure. This post covers where that happens and how to fix it. The...
Things Will Take Longer Than You Think They Will - Don't Break Prod Don't Break Prod provides bite-sized pieces of career advice for software engineers.
TLA+ mental models In the age of LLMs, syntax is no longer the bottleneck for writing, reading, or learning TLA+. People are even getting value by generating T...
Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s
Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs academic, developer, with an eye towards a brighter techno-social life
Kamal, Rails deployments, and Rega turntables Lately I've started to put back into a working state my turntable. It's been disconnected from my main audio chain for about five years. The TT is a Rega RP3 with a bog-standard Rega Carbon...
Making a Language This is a series that teaches you how to make a statically-typed functional programming language. It was motivated by a gap between compilers as taught and compilers as seen in production. Production compilers are deeply concerned with being interactive, ...
How I’m Productive with Claude Code It’s been about 6 weeks since I joined Tano, and this is what my commit history looks like:
The Priesthood of System Design People say LLMs can code but can't do system design. I disagree. System design is more pattern-matching than people admit — and if you give an LLM enough context, it can outdesign 99% of engineers.
Codex with GPT-5.4 vs Claude Code with Opus 4.6 — Why I Now Use Both After using Claude Code with Opus 4.6 daily for almost a year, I spent a week with Codex and GPT-5.4. The verdict: neither tool wins outright. The combination — cross-model review, complementary strengths, operational resilience — is better than either al...
My new toy: FreeBSD on the HP Z2 mini revisited Last week, I wrote about my initial FreeBSD experiences on my new toy, an AI workstation from HP. FreeBSD runs lightning fast on it, but the desktop was somewhat problematic. Well, I made lots of improvements this week! A bit of debugging While there are ...
US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1 billion' deal to end offshore wind projects The US and the French company signed an agreement to end TotalEnergies' offshore US wind farm projects and redirect those funds towards fossil fuel production.
