The One-Person Stack | ivan.codes
How to ship real products alone and what to care about at each stage.
We Are Not Language Machines
The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. - Wassily Kandinsky
Good Design vs. Bad Design
Most designers will talk to you about fonts, colors, and layouts. Few will ever tell you what design actually is — and why that misunderstanding costs everyone.
Building a SQL Analyst Agent
How to build a simple AI SQL analyst agent with Node.js, OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and SQLite.
Notes on Serial Experiments Lain by Jordan Matthiass
Notes on Serial Experiments Lain, the Wired, fractured selfhood, alienation, and the digital apocalypse that came true.
Exponentially Smoothed FPS Counters
Exploring how to apply an interesting numerical technique with constant time and space complexity to FPS counters.
I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers
One month, one prototype — the first Intensity Pad, and why I think striking movements deserve a power meter of their own.
Your blog is a radio station - Down the Road
A useful metaphor for us niche bloggers that helps explain why some readers stay.
A Brief History of SQL: From 1970 to 2026
SQL was created in 1973, survived NoSQL, and 55.6% of devs use PostgreSQL today. The full history with standards, tools, and why SQL won.
Softmax, can you really derive the Jacobian? And should you care? — idlemachines
Practice machine learning engineering with hands-on coding challenges. Implement neural network components, backprop, and more — from scratch.
The cost of being "nice"
The other day, a link popped up on Hacker News reviving this old Reddit post1 in which u/flipstables shares a pretty long and honest list of things they learned as a senior engineer. I highly suggest going through it as most of the things there are pure gold. …
Most People Who Ride Bikes Have Soft Tires
A look at the quietest barrier to bicycle adoption (inflating your tires), and why bike share and public pumps deserve more credit than they get.
ChatGPT Images 2.0 Still Can't Draw the Seven-legged Spider I Want
ChatGPT Images 2.0 is able to generate a seven-legged spider, but it's not missing the leg I asked for.
steer coding agents with interactive diagrams — Will Hennessy
The Claude Architect plugin adds an interactive architecture diagram to Plan Mode so you can review, annotate, and revise the plan with Claude in real time.
You can beat the binary search
We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the array. We sometimes call this algorithm a linear search. In C++, you can get the …
Uptime golf
I’ve been noticing a lot of service outages lately. Some with few enough nines that you’d think they were going for a low score. My guess: this is probably going to get worse before it gets better. But maybe not for the reasons you’d think.
LLMs and the Adversarial Loop
LLMs are confident. So much so that if you ask one to give you the recipe to immortality, it will probably take a stab at it, even though it knows as much about mortality as it does its own existence. Ask one to write a design spec and it’ll produce something …
Why You Can't Write That Book
I could do that, I just need more time.
Cost of PostgreSQL performance issues | Stormatics
Understand the cost of PostgreSQL performance issues. Learn how query inefficiency, bloat, and misconfiguration drive unnecessary spend.
Postgres's lateral joins allow for quite the good eDSL
../postgres-lateral-makes-quite-a-good-dsl
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Starting June 1, your Copilot usage will consume GitHub AI Credits.
GitHub - pgbackrest/pgbackrest: Reliable PostgreSQL Backup & Restore
Reliable PostgreSQL Backup & Restore. Contribute to pgbackrest/pgbackrest development by creating an account on GitHub.
Vector Search Engine Performance: 16x Faster Vamana Search
See how sembed-engine made Vamana vector search 16x faster with flat arrays, lightweight views, squared distances, SIMD-friendly loops, and cached candidate scores.
fast16 | Mystery ShadowBrokers Reference Reveals High-Precision Software Sabotage 5 Years Before Stuxnet
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
Why SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities
SWE-bench Verified is increasingly contaminated and mismeasures frontier coding progress. Our analysis shows flawed tests and training leakage. We recommend SWE-bench Pro.
Claude Design is Real Design
Design is due for its Opus 4.5 moment
Get Your Reps - Alejandro García Salas
product, design, and engineering lessons from building Sail & Muddy
The fastest Linux timestamps · hmpc
Adventures in over-optimising timers for niche applications.
You've Been Doing Harness Engineering All Along
AGENTS.md, skills, MCP, sandboxes, tests, and review agents are not random tricks.
3 constraints before I build anything
['Programmer', 'Computer nerd', 'Unix enthusiast'];
Abort, Retry, No, Thanks – Unsung
A blog about software craft and quality
voice modems
If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in …
DevOps Is a Culture, Not a Team: What I've Learned Building at Scale | Austin Xu
After 20 years running infrastructure at scale, here's what DevOps actually means — and why the most common implementation is an anti-pattern.
Do I even want to be a coder anymore? | Kristian Polso
Drupal, tech and all things geek.
interblah.net - Self-updating screenshots
A blog by James Adam, of lazyatom.com fame.
When the cheap one is the cool one
Apple and Porsche both figured out the same secret that the cheapest product in the lineup can be the most exciting. It just takes a little intention.
A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It - Blog - Koshy John
Read about the .
Your Agent is a Distributed System (and fails like one)
We start with a re-definition and an observation.