Programming Sucks
stilldrinking.org [1]
Absolutely incredible, will fill some notes later
References:
[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Posts tagged: dev
All posts with the tag "dev"
308 posts
latest post 2026-07-21
Publishing rhythm
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And...
stvn.sh [1]
Absolute banger of a post, this is the time we are living in. Explain “are you afraid AI is going to take your job” to a non tech blue collar worker. Broken over promises, greed, and projects mismanaged by leadership who has no idea what the day to day work actually does and how critical it is.
I’m not quite in Sara’s position, but I feel something shielded by half of this working deep inside of a non tech part of a non tech company leading a very small rag tag team with get shit done attitude.
But I feel it, I see colleagues hit by these blasts.b I get clipped with shrapnel from some of the largest blasts. But nothing as significant as I see many others hit with
References:
[1]: https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp
[1]Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub
Mitchell Hashimoto · mitchellh.com [1]Found on HN: [1]discussion [2]
The GitHub tears post. I feel it, maybe not as much as @mitchelh, but I feel it.
References:
[1]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Red Squares — the GitHub outage graph
A satirical contribution graph: red squares track GitHub.com platform outages instead of green squares tracking commits.
red-squares.cian.lol [1]
yet another interesting visualization of github outages. These guys are getting raked over the coals. It really sucks to see. Not quite tears to my eyes mitchelh [2]. But it feels like a core part of opensource has been dying for a few years now and is now getting ripped to shreds. The central location for open source is becoming more fragmented and I don’t see a path to where it ever gets any better.
References:
[1]: https://red-squares.cian.lol/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939579
Desktop Crash 2026 | Nic Payne
PC Crash Desktop crashed days ago, apparently my primary drive has been going bad for a while and eventually it just died. live-booted to ubuntu server found re
pype.dev [1]
I’m taking this as a reminder to treat every machine like its about to catch fire, any machine with a user regularly using it already has the match lit. I need to go through and commit draft blog posts, dirty homelab [2] POC’s need to get out or get in, and not forever be in limbo. My efforts this year have been well intention ed to keep projects clean, on main, not dirty, but I think agents are making it worse before they make it better. I have some new ideas forming and old ideas for managing this have failed me.
References:
[1]: https://pype.dev/desktop-crash-2026/
[2]: /homelab/
markata-go now has web awesome integration for image compare. It renders a
nice web component with a slider to compare two images.
It’s done with a class wrapper around the image components.
::: wa-comparison
:::
Without markata-go’s web awesome integration, the above would look like:
<script type="module">
import 'https://ka-f.webawesome.com/[email protected]/components/comparison/comparison.js';
</script>
<wa-comparison>
<img
slot="before"
src="https://dropper.wayl.one/file/d628ffba-de18-4fff-91a8-700f037df119.webp"
alt="Grayscale version of kittens in a basket looking around."
/>
<img
slot="after"
src="https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/ca30665f-1a15-453e-aab8-221901c7df99.webp"
alt="Color version of kittens in a basket looking around."
/>
</wa-comparison>
Package Managers Need to Cool Down
Today's LiteLLM supply chain attack inspired me to revisit the idea of dependency cooldowns, the practice of only installing updated dependencies once they've been out in the wild for a …
Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net [1]
2026, finding the balance between fixed bugs and zero days. There is very unlikely ever a reason you need to be running bleeding edge packages in prod most package managers now support cool downs.
References:
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/24/package-managers-need-to-cool-down/
Cheng Lou (@_chenglou) on X
My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):
I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important f…
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com [1]
webdev twitter is blowing up with implementations of pretext text calculations. The examples are absolutely fun and ridiculous.
[2]
References:
[1]: https://x.com/_chenglou/status/2037713766205608234
[2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/350a368f-0e6b-4375-98d6-6303961c0d6c.webp
More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
blog.jim-nielsen.com [1]
I love the level of thought that Jim has put into these changes and making sure that urls don’t change. I’ve got a big change in flight to my main site and this is one of the reasons that I’ve been sitting on it so long. I want to make sure urls arent broken, redirects work as they should, and there are no 404’s from existing urls. Currently the new version only exists on a separate deployement https://go.waylonwalker.com/
I also added the ability to “shuffle” between posts. This is mostly for myself. I like to randomly jump through notes I’ve published in the past for reoccurring inspiration
Love this idea and have it on my new site already as well, and have really enjoyed using it by pressing it a dozen or so times over the course of a few sessions. It highlights that I have too many posts like stars and thoughts and I should do some weighting to main posts. mine is at https://go.waylonwalker.com/random/
References:
[1]: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/notes-site-updates/
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are" loading=“lazy”>
jack (@jack) on X
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
# [1]
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly ha…
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com
One of the well worded shitty messages I’ve seen, good severance, help, timeline to cut off coms.
we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.
Much better than the get rid of people cause AI can do the work. Honestly I feel this though. I was just talking with some colleages how do we divvy work in...
You Can Just Build Things
I don’t know if you know this, but the web is a beautiful platform that allows
you the freedom to create things and put them out there. Its not tied to four
major platforms. You don’t have to post your thoughts, ideas, and apps to a
platform, you can just make it. This is a beautiful thing that seems to have
been forgotten. I was inspired this morning from @scotthanselman’s
tinytooltown [1]. Looking through all of the tiny
tools that people have built for themself, as personal software, not answering
to anyone but themself, it was inspiring.
Agents have gotten a lot better, like seriously better. The ai bros that were ai pilled too early that said SWE is over in six months called it too early. It wasn’t time. Now since Nov 2025 we have had agents that can do some damn work. Proving the point some of the greatest devs I’ve ever looked up to have not written a line of code since. Not hype bros or someone not good at the craft, but seriously good devs leaning on it full time.
AI hype...
FFmpeg video crop
tools.simonwillison.net [1]
This was the inspiration for the next update in dropper that became a full clip editor. The one that I’ve long wanted, but forgotten about. It’s going to include this cropper, resize, image extractor, and trimmer.
References:
[1]: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ffmpeg-crop
Tiny Tool Town 🏘️
A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.
Tiny Tool Town · tinytooltown.com [1]
Learned about this one from the @stipete interview [2] @scotthanselman did on YouTube. This is proof that the internet is alive. It’s such web 1.0 nostalgia to see that people can just build things! Did you know that you can literally just build things and make them exist? You don’t need users, You don’t need a big platform, you can just make something into existance. It seems like something we have forgotten through web 2.0 where everything as become 4 major apps all linking to each other and trying to hoard all of the attention. Scroll through tehre are some really cool apps, probably nothing that has the polish you want, or is going to change your world. What these apps have more than anything you’ve probably used in the recent years, is inspiration. Its xyz, but the way I wanted, or with my little twist. And no one else has to like it but me because I’m the user.
References:
[1]: https://www.tinytooltown.com/
[2]: https://youtu.be/Wm7tsiJ1nIo?si=_qvZaR5SPWozBjrY
FancyGist
fancygist.com [1]
I saw this in @cassido’s newsletter this week and had to give it a run. I despise that there is no dark mode and it insists on burning my retinas 😤. But really this is an absolute beate of a web based markdown editor, I love the command mode to press slash and it just pops out in this whimsical animation ready for me to pick what I want.
Your browser does not support the video tag. [2]
References:
[1]: https://fancygist.com/
[2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/74f0ac1e-ac50-4939-8bba-4698a8043b25.mp4
Smaller and dumber
If I can make it smaller, I should.
daverupert.com · daverupert.com [1]
Important things to remember in the age of cheap code. More code, not always more better. More code mean, more risk, more maintenance, harder to change.
References:
[1]: https://daverupert.com/2026/02/smaller-and-dumber/
Is Ai Faster Yet
Is AI making us more productive yet, more faster yet?
Non-code # [1]
probably not
I’ve seen this question hitting all over the Internet lately, and often points
to people not writing code. Copilot turns prompts into emails, emails back
into summaries that look a lot like prompts. I think there’s a place for this,
making rambled thoughts sound more coherent, summarizing notes and meeting
minutes. All good stuff but does it make us more productive, probably not by
an amount that you can put $ $ behind, unless you are reducing headcount.
thats not what we are doing right???
Coding # [2]
with chat, probably not
When we talk about chatbots like gippity I think there’s a benefit to having
someone with jr skills in everything to talk to, someone who can read all of
the docs in an instant to get you some code snippet that might have taken all
day to research and get right, but more productive, probably not.
Agentic Coding # [3]
maybe
I’ve hit a stride with coding agents this year u...
trash (@trashh_dev) on X
loving the state of development right now
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com [1]
There are so many config files right now, glad to see some standards coming in around Agents.md, but so much is still specialized to a whole host of tools that have not been standardized on yet.
References:
[1]: https://x.com/trashh_dev/status/2024476878015468027
I keep forgetting about the double gutter problem with nested containers. When you put padding on a parent and the child also has padding, you get twice the spacing you wanted.
The Problem #
.container {
padding: 2rem;
}
.child {
padding: 2rem;
}
Now your content is 4rem from the edge. Not what I meant at all.
The Fix #
Either remove padding from the parent or use box-sizing: border-box and plan
for it. I usually just drop the parent padding when I realize what I have done.
dax (@thdxr) on X
finally got around to setting up an always on opencode server so i can run sessions on any device from anywhere
takes a few minutes - showed it off here
X (formerly Twitter) · x.com [1]
I tried this flow [of running an opencode server on tailscale] on day one of getting opencode, I wanted to prompt from my phone while were were running lights at the theater. It kinda worked, but the ui was really bad on phone, hard to use and the experience overall–it felt buggy. Happy to see they are making improvements and it might now be ready for some real use.
https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/9065fcb2-5e40-479c-967e-498bc9bb6a4f.mp4
References:
[1]: https://x.com/thdxr/status/2017691649384620057
What Your Coding Tool Says About You
- open code - libre free as in beer and speech
- Copilot - corporate 9-5er
- Cursor - You sip on Philz coffee with your macbook
- Claude Code - Agentic Workflows or Bust
- Jetbrains - I didn’t know you wrote java
- Vim/neovim - definite neck beard
- VsCode - What else is there?