27 March 2026

35 links · Friday

Bring back MiniDV with this Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT

In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older Fi…

Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

Sharing a Name

My bank card never arrived. I called the bank and, after being redirected through several departments, was assured that it had been mailed. Then we argued a bit about what "7 to 10 business days" mean

building a digital doorman

A lightweight AI agent that answers questions about my work by reading actual code. Architecture, security, and model selection decisions.

An embedding compression experiment for vector search

An experiment in vector search storage reduction and embedding compression, comparing dimensionality reduction, fp16, and quantization without breaking search quality.

From error-handling to structured concurrency

How should errors propagate in concurrent programs? We start from that question, work step by step, and end up reinventing structured concurrency. Some reflections on why this matters as much during development as in production.

It Depends

That's the answer I would always get from the lead developer on my team, many years ago. I wanted clear, concise answers from someone with experience, yet he never said "Yes" or "No." It was always "I

How I Use Claude Code to Build Features

My current workflow for building features with Claude Code: plan mode, a living SPEC.md, TDD, and how to resume sessions without losing context

Yes, Learning to Code Is Still Valuable

Every few weeks, someone shares a bold opinion: "Don't bother learning to code, AI will do it all." I've seen this from VCs, influencers, and people who have...

Your Framework Doesn't Matter

I instrumented a FastAPI app and measured where time actually goes. Network is 69-83% of what users experience. Framework overhead is 0.2-0.8%. Your framework choice doesn't matter as much as you think.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linear Search (evanjones.ca)

Thanks to programming interviews, we have memorized that a binary search performs O(log n) comparisons, while a linear search performs O(n), so a binary search is going to be faster. Unfortunately, this ignores the constant factors. Linear search is the same o…

I Trained a Chess Model on Just $14

I recently created my own hybrid-transformer model trained specifically to plan implicitly rather than explicitly, called the Liquid Chess Model.

Using Quarto to Write a Book

I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a complete draft of the book at its website. The production pro…

Infinite Jest Extraction

I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest via audiobook, which at the default speed, takes over 52.5 hours. On paper, the book is usually over 1,100 pages, including its 388 endnotes. I’ve writte…

How we get radicalized in America

The moment you get sick, the american insurance industry gets into gear to see how they can deny you care. While healthcare industry tries to make money.