The Future of Vibe Coding: Building with AI, Live and Unfiltered(opens in new tab)
I demonstrate 'vibe coding' - a new approach to software development with AI, building two apps from scratch in a 3-hour live workshop.
Curated river of news
Reader
Latest posts from blogs I follow
2985
entries
60
pages
MCP Best Practices(opens in new tab)
My comprehensive guide outlining best practices for building reliable, user-friendly Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools with proper configuration, testing, and release management.
Finding My Spark Again(opens in new tab)
I reflect on my post-exit journey from emptiness to rediscovering my passion for building, sparked by AI's transformative potential.
Terminal Trove May 2025 Wrap Up(opens in new tab)
A wrap up of all the things that happened in Terminal Trove in May 2025.
RSC for LISP Developers(opens in new tab)
Quoting for modules.
Progressive JSON(opens in new tab)
Why streaming isn't enough.
Why Does RSC Integrate with a Bundler?(opens in new tab)
One does not simply serialize a module.
I LOVE TLS(opens in new tab)
In the world of web infrastructure, what starts as a simple goal can often lead you down a fascinating rabbit hole of history, philosophy, and clever engineering. This is the story of our journey to build a simple, single-purpose, open-source ...
šļø Office Hours for June(opens in new tab)
Iām hosting a regular afternoon edition tomorrow (Friday, May 30) to wrap up the month of May. After that, Iāll be away on vacation, so Iām skipping the first two Fridays in June and the first Friday in July. Hereās ...
Fixing errors installing the charlock_holmes ruby gem redux(opens in new tab)
A while back I posted about fixing an error installing the charlock_holmes gem on MacOS, well the error has returned. Hereās the newest fix. If you get an error that looks something like this: Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem ...
One Roundtrip Per Navigation(opens in new tab)
What do HTML, GraphQL, and RSC have in common?
The promise that wasnāt kept(opens in new tab)
This isn't progress.
Let's end kidney deaths: buy one of my kidneys(opens in new tab)
š¤ When AI Agents Start Panicking: Wild Emails from a Failing Vending Business(opens in new tab)
š¤ I struggle with most research papers, but the Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents was an easy read. The paper follows a fascinating study where researchers simulate various LLM models running a vending machine business over ...
Speaking & Consulting(opens in new tab)
Want a dose of dry wit and hard-earned lessons at your event or in your codebase? I speak and consult on legacy systems, privacy, burnout, and fixing things that actually matter.
Coding With My Eyes Wide Shut(opens in new tab)
At WorkOS's AI onsite and MCP Night, I experimented with vibe coding. What started as a two-hour experiment with 5,000 lines of unseen TypeScript became a glimpse into programming's future.
How to collect Webmentions for your site(opens in new tab)
Quick disclaimer before we start. This is well-trod ground. Nothing here is new or revolutionary, nothing about this implementation hasnāt already been done by smarter folks than I :) This is just my blog post about it. Weāll use webmention.io ...
Writing bugs with K.S. Bhaskar(opens in new tab)
Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers!Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFMEdgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19Kubecon NA ...
Elixir/Phoenix Liveview was a mistake(opens in new tab)
I made an expensive technical decision on Phoenix Liveview for the Smol Talk webapp about a year ago that I now regret, and am jotting down some notes to self for why.
TIL Poppler's pdftoppm to convert PDF pages into PNG files(opens in new tab)
Today I learned about pdftoppm, a simple CLI tool that can convert each page of a PDF into separate image files. My use case was to chop up a few big PDF reports to make OCR and data analysis easier, ...
OKRs: Objectives, Key Results, and Corporate Cosplay(opens in new tab)
A cynical developer's guide to why OKRs often fail, how they sometimes help, and what to do when you're assigned 15 of them.
Scrum Helped. Then It Got in the Way.(opens in new tab)
Scrum helped us escape the waterfall. But itās become more ceremony than substanceāand the real work is happening in the cracks between stand-ups.
About(opens in new tab)
The Cynical Developer is a blog for tired engineers, reflective skeptics, and anyone whoās seen too many āNext Big Thingsā end up as tomorrowās tech debt. This site is maintained by a seasoned developer with a mild aversion to buzzwords ...
Contact(opens in new tab)
Want to reach out? Iām happy to hear from fellow devs, writers, or the hopelessly over-engineered. Email: [email protected] Please donāt send cold sales pitches. Iām not that kind of cynical. Got something to say? Use the form below. Please, no ...
From JNDI Hell to CDI Heaven: A Developerās Path to Sanity(opens in new tab)
Because @Stateless shouldnāt require 3 XML files and a blood sacrifice.
Well, what if I'm wrong?(opens in new tab)
Anyone online has seen over the past years how the frequency of Palestinian accounts on Bluesky and other platforms has increased, two- and four-fold, folks asking for help and linking to GoFundMes. They share their stories and plea for help, ...
Have We Lost Our Way?(opens in new tab)
Agile was never supposed to be a checklist. Somewhere between the ceremonies and the certifications, we forgot what it was for.
Unravelling t-strings(opens in new tab)
PEP 750 introduced t-strings for Python 3.14. In fact, they are so new that as of Python 3.14.0b1 there still isn't any documentation yet for t-strings. š As such, this blog post will hopefully help explain what exactly t-strings are ...
Design Pressure(opens in new tab)
Ever had this weird gut feeling that something is off in your code, but couldnāt put the finger on why? Are you starting your projects with the best intentions, following all best practices, and still feel like your architecture turns ...
Laser-cut pottery throwing gauge(opens in new tab)
Salterās Screwdriver Theory of Latency(opens in new tab)
Weāve all noticed that software never seems to get any faster no matter how much faster the hardware gets. This easily-observable fact is usually explained in one of two ways: Software devs are lazy, and refuse to optimize more than ...
2025 Advice to my old selves(opens in new tab)
I turned a birthday recently and it was so busy (DataCouncil + sg flight) that i never really got the chance to sit and reflect. a lot of things are going well, lots more couldā¦
As the pendulum swings(opens in new tab)
Getting from command-and-control to trust and autonomyāand why most teams never quite make it.
Organizing a design system via folksonomy(opens in new tab)
An Evolution of a Software Company(opens in new tab)
The startup origin story you've lived through at least onceāand what usually comes next.
Distributing command line tools for macOS(opens in new tab)
In this post Iāll show how to properly distribute a command line tool for macOS.
Knowledge creates technical debt(opens in new tab)
Some history on term ātechnical debtā and on better language to use when communicating about it.
The experience is enough(opens in new tab)
I found my tribe at a conference.
š¤·āāļø I miss Visual Basic(opens in new tab)
I miss Visual Basic. I could build something meaningful with it in 15 to 30 minutes in a way that I have never seen anything since then, even come close to. āFor example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did ...
HTML is better than React!?(opens in new tab)
ā[...] baseline HTML that gets progressively enhanced into something better when JS is availableā¦ 1. Gives people a more usable experience earlier in the process. 2. Ensures that on slow connections your site doesnāt seem like trash. 3. Means that ...
It wasnāt the idea that failed: it was the execution(opens in new tab)
And we still can't get it right in 2025.
šļø Office Hours for May 2025(opens in new tab)
This Friday, Iām hosting a morning edition of my office hours, and here is my schedule for the rest of May: Friday, May 9th, 2025, 8am to 10:30am - š Early edition (Time.is link for CT) Friday, May 16th, 2025: ...
234: pytest-metadata - provides access to test session metadata(opens in new tab)
pytest-metadata is described as a plugin for pytest that provides access to test session metadata. That is such a humble description for such a massively useful plugin. If you're already using pytest-html, you have pytest-metadata already installed, as pytest-metadata is ...
Static as a Server(opens in new tab)
You wouldn't download a site.
RSC for Astro Developers(opens in new tab)
Islands, but make it fractal.
233: pytest-check - allow multiple failures per test(opens in new tab)
pytest-check is a pytest plugin that allows multiple failures per test.Normally, a test function will fail and stop running with the first failed assert. That's totally fine for tons of kinds of software tests. However, there are times where you'd ...
Functional HTML(opens in new tab)
Tags on both sides.