24 March 2026

41 links · Tuesday

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 into an …

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

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.

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 Setu…

Wait it out

You know what I’m talking about.

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

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, accom…

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.

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 still…