The recent AUR incident did not make Arch unusable, but it changed how I think about trust, package sources, and the amount of maintenance I want from my desktop.
Autonomous coding loops excel at search, not judgment. They can optimize toward a goal, but they can’t reliably tell when the goal is wrong. Engineering is still more than iteration speed.
Rails engines aren’t free. When adding engine boundaries is over-engineering — the performance, boot-time and memory costs — and how to tell when a boundary actually earns its keep.
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team…
A Small Fintech Challenge, and Why I Let Postgres Hold the Money
I took a small fintech-style coding challenge — a marketplace where players buy and auction items with in-game gold — and treated it as one question: how do you keep money correct when many people act at once? The answer wasn't a clever lock in my code. It was…
Michael Bertel's personal website
The Wrong Abstraction — Sandi Metz
I've been thinking about the consequences of the "wrong abstraction." My RailsConf 2014 "all the little things" talk included a section where I asserted: > duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction And in the summary, I went on to advise…
Getting locked out of a BitLocker laptop with a frozen keyboard brought back a feeling I hadn't had since LLMs took over my workflow: the satisfaction of thinking at the edge of a hard problem.
Real-time dreamy Cloudscapes with Volumetric Raymarching - The Blog of Maxime Heckel
This article is a deep dive into my experimentations with Volumetric rendering and how to leverage it to render beautiful raymarched cloudscapes in React Three Fiber and WebGL. In it, I walk you through everything from the basics of Volumetric Raymarching to t…
Nix needs relocatable binaries
This is my problem statement and proposal for a TacoSprint 2026 project 🏄.
We had two Robinhood accounts and no shared view of anything. Schwab has a free API most people don't know about. We migrated, built a bot in two hours, and it changed how we think about money together.
Snowboard Kids 2 has been recompiled for modern platforms, bringing widescreen, 60 FPS support, and modding to Snow Town.
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Beyond All Reason ★ RTS
Beyond All Reason is the ultimate epic-scale RTS game for Windows and Linux. Command colossal armies in battles with thousands of units in fully simulated environments. Wage war across land, sea, and air with 2 factions and 400 unique units. Enjoy skirmishes, …
Developers don't understand CORS
The recent Zoom vulnerability is just one of many examples which show us that many developers do not understand how CORS works
Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world. Researchers say the answer isn’t to stop following current events—it’s to build healthier habits around how, w…
Huang et al. show that prolonged exhalation increases risky decisions by enhancing reward sensitivity and cardiac parasympathetic activity. Individuals with greater parasympathetic upregulation exhibit stronger reward-related responses in the vmPFC and precune…
Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel
Google hits 50% IPv6 | APNIC Blog
IPv6 has reached a major milestone, with around half of Google’s users now accessing its services over IPv6.
SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible, Opening Standards Library to the Global Media Technology Community
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — June 17, 2026 — SMPTE®, the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global media technology community.
Manifest V3 weakens ad blockers in Chrome. The real technical losses, Google's incentives, and how to retain full filtering.
Some honest notes after several months building software with LLM agents: what works, what breaks, and why architecture, tests, context, and taste matter more than ever.
Software optimization manuals for C++ and assembly code. Intel and AMD x86 microprocessors. Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X. 16, 32 and 64 bit systems. Detailed descriptions of microarchitectures.
This post is an example of how to add a cover/hero image
Efficient Data Logger Design
A battle-tested data logger design for local disks and remote storage.
Is anyone still using Emacs?
Self-answering the question posed in a recent Hacker News discussion
Building and hosting a website in less than 3 minutes
I recently wrote about building a website in minutes, and now it's even faster. As in, literally 4 minutes and 22 seconds. Cloudflare released the ability for agents to deploy with temporary accounts. Using my example from the other post, that means you can po…
Cyberdecks, Going Analog, Permacomputing, Medieval Guilds, and the Arts and Crafts Movement
People are moving away from corporate controlled tech, and making their own. How the designs of cyberdecks are being driven by women. And how medieval guilds, Luddites, and the Arts and Crafts movement are all connected to our current moment.
Words: 3,500 Reading Time: 15 minutes This post details my process for designing a backyard deck for my house. Since this post is about showing how to produce the drawings for the deck in order to get a building permit, in this post I'll skip the details o…
Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons
For context, this is based on a recent freelance contract in a Django/React TS/React Native codebase size: 20-person team. I have 17 years' experience with w...
A Case Study in the Limits of Takeoff Automation
An empirical case study on the accuracy ceiling of vision-language models on real Australian construction takeoff. Given everything but the final numbers, a Claude Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 extractor peaked at 77.5%: because the per-job billing conventions that de…
Windows 11's New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
It replaces Groove Music and the classic Windows Media Player.