5 July 2026

23 links · Sunday

Wormhole Hall of Shame

Permit me to regale you with my very niche pet peeve: circular, two-dimensional wormhole entrances in science fiction.  (Fantasy gets a pass; unless you’re trying to do science-y magic, the magic p…

Introduction to Compilers and Language Design

This is a free online textbook: you are welcome to access the chapter PDFs directly below. If you prefer to hold a real book, you can also purchase a hardcover or paperback below. The textbook and materials have been developed by Prof. Douglas Thain as part o…

The tests are the code now

With AI coding, tests suddenly becomes the most important part of our code to maintain

Keeping Code Reviews From Dragging

You know the feeling. You open a pull request on Monday morning. You ping the reviewer(s). You go to lunch. You come back. Nothing. You context-switch to something else. On Wednesday, the reviewer finally leaves a comment — a single one, on a minor detail. You…

Six Months with Claude Code

Since October 2025, I have been using Claude Code extensively for work. In the beginning, there was definitely a learning curve, and I had to adjust my workflow around it. I remember back when I worked as a Kotlin developer at my previous compa…

A Big Markdown File Should Become a PDF You Can Navigate

Convert a long Markdown document to PDF and it becomes something you move around in: a clickable bookmark outline, working [text](#heading) jumps, a page-numbered contents, bidirectional footnotes. Why that's the part most converters skip, and how it all falls…

Coding without AI: a revolutionary new way to work • Minimum Viable Blog

For the last 20 years or so I’ve been trying out a new way of programming, one that (surprisingly) doesn’t use any LLMs or AI coding agents at all. It’s just me, a keyboard, and an IDE or text editor, writing code line by line—literally typing things like func…

Are we still writing software?

In 2009 I built a complete WordPress site on EC2, from source, in the time it took a train to get from St Pancras to Ashford. It had monitoring. It had SSH login. It had a seed article. By the time I got off the train, I knew Chef would become a fundamental pa…