Thoughts

This talk about live store really made me think about database transactions in a new way. They are talking about live-store, and the complexity of distributed applications like a notes app with the ability to go offline and continue working. The complexity of resyncing each instance is not simple, conflict resolution accross all the possible installs that may or may not even be online is a really hard problem. They go deep on discussing an event driven paradigm that is driven off of a log of events and how this changes how we deal with databases. Using the event log as the source of truth we can do things like forget about database migrations, we can replay all of the events onto a new database. Its very interesting to rethink in terms of a log system that speaks in terms of understandable events (not table operations) as the source of truth for an application.

I need to find this podcast, was DHH this animated through the whole thing?

You don’t need a mentor. There’s no secret sauce left inside anyone’s head any more. It’s all been tapped, bottled, tweeted, and shared a million times. Sample some of that, but also guard your ignorance. You’ll lose it soon enough.

It takes work, one on one hand holding is a shortcut. Sometimes one that we need. Sometimes we need to level up quick, hence why your job might pair you up with someone for the first few months, but it is not something you need, you can figure shit out on your own with hard work. These days we have things like gippity to bounce ideas off, and you can generally get the sense of the direction the average of the internet it was trained on. Always add your own experience and make a choice for yourself.

The object storage (S3-compatible) platform MinIO created a bit of a stir this week

I had not heard about this before it came in through selfh.st. I use minio a lot, and did not know there are so many great alternatives out there for it. I might be looking into some of these options such as garage.

Its hard to tell from this article what mino dropped, but luckily for me it seems to be all ui related. I use the UI for debugging/feedback/sometimes learning, but at this point I’ve got good flows for setting up new access keys, buckets, and everything with the cli.

I suffer hard from NIH, I’m cheap, I like building things, I hate reading the docs, the perfect recipe for some bad NIH. I really like DHH’s take here. If no one builds anything new we get stuck with the same old shit. I think theres a lot of things that as far as my use case is concerned feature complete and needs no more. I would just build with it or on it, but not re-invent. It’s a slippery slope.

Jim Nielsen fetches his hacker news ranked articles for his home page.

this post by Jim Nielsen, lead me to this commit where I found that he was including posts of his that wound up on hackernews. I really like this idea and might take it, even though i have very few HN linked posts.

I really like the idea of Jim’s Eternal Links, and really want to take it for myself. To expand here I want to be able to look for common places for rss feeds, and be able to scrape out rss feeds for sites that I tend to link to often. Also if they have something like a /blogroll it might be a good place to find new great people to follow.

Maybe we need a little more friction in the world. More things that merit our time. Less things that don’t.

I can resonate with this post, less friction feels like it leads me to thinking less, having less skin in the game, understanding less, feeling less fulfilled. Vibe coding is a new trend of 2025, it feels like the future, but it does not quite feel like the present yet. It’s riddled with errors and I only get frustrated when it doesn’t work. I like having some friction that leads me to think and pay attention. There might be a future where this is not required for some things like coding up crud apps, but that does not feel like today.

Some of the best things from the old internet are still preserved with RSS. Content is shared via simple files, which means the slow-loading, ad-stuffed and tracker-filled clutter of the modern internet are mostly absent.

There aren’t any algorithms. RSS readers are wonderfully dumb. There’s no AI sifting through content to find whatever will outrage you the most. You just get new posts and mark them as read. It’s a calmer world.

With RSS I follow lots of people writing about normal people things. People blog about getting back into playing the drums, a fun book they just read, a tough problem they’re working through and the other day to day things of life. This type of content tends to get buried on social media — it doesn’t get the clicks and sell ads like fear and outrage do.

I feel like a curmudgeon, but i feel all of these things. I dont think that the new web is completely terrible, what is terrible is that the options of an algorithm ran by companies with differing goals is seemingly the only option. RSS still works, its fantastic, I personally love it, but theres only a small fraction of the internet that it reaches both ways. Few people have a reader, even...

This is a very interesting cli, its so simple. I stumbled accross the gi command awhile back and was like pfft, I dont want to install something for that. Didn’t even realize that you don’t install it, its just http. Their install instructions lead you to putting a curl funtion in your bashrc.

function gi() { curl -sLw \"\\\n\" https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore/api/\$@ ;}

This now has me wondering “What else can build like this?”

linkarzu has a way to navigate his entire mac using a hyper key. Everything looks so tight and polished, also a lot to remember! Lucky he has a system of mnemonics that make it easy to remember. His setup is very Mac focused using mac only apps, so this would not work for me, though I’m sure I could get something similar on linux. He did mention Kanata which is cross platform.

I use a far different system that is fast loose and easy. On every system I run I have 9 workspaces that let me put 9 applications, I can easily move apps to different workspaces and have a side by side if I need. The core of what I do is terminal, web browser, and chat. Those go on workspaces 4,5,6, whch are home-row keys. If I’m running obs, that is on 8, steam goes on 1. but I have some freedom to move. Sometimes 2 will be an image editor or a video editor, sometimes something else all together, but I can quickly go to each app.

I do like his layered approach. I run a 42 key keyboard so things can get a bit cramped quickly. And when thinking in mnemonics you only get 26 letters in the alphabet, but prefixing these with another layer this number goes up exponentially. Sublayers sound sick to be honest.

Oh, I feel this. I go through the effort of removing dum ai comments so the ai looks less ai.

you’re not allowed to write comments in your code anymore, because if you do everyone will just think it’s ai generated.

This has me wondering if I need to really learn more patterns, data structures, and algorithms. This looks particularly useful when trying to combine several objects that you dont have full control over and make them behave similarly.

wow looking at how this is done kinda draws me towards jekyll a little bit, I did not realize some of the similarities that it has with markata.

css if() just landed, I’m struggling to understand what I an do with this that I can’t do with something as old as classes. I can get it if I don’t have control over html creation or js to add classes. The example that Una shows includes data that could directly be a classname with a set of styles in css rather than this crazy css variable unpacking out of a data attribute and an if statement.

Allen Carr1 on quitting smoking: [Carr] recommends working to really notice and internalise that disconnect [between what we want and what we enjoy]. He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness.

I can appreciate the restraint here, theres something about the mindfulness behind it all.

I rolled out the blogroll today, nothing pretty, but is one single page of the rss feeds I follow.

Markata got a shout out part way through the latest episode of LNL, I will go back, re-listen and take some of the feedback. His thoughts on Markata were interesting. On one hand it really is a thing for me that works for me, and as a person with too many side projects I don’t have the focus to really give it polish. On the other hand it really confirms why listen to podcasts, news, finger on the pulse, opinions and how often these guys are wrong, they are not the expert they probably look at 6 things like this a week. He said that it was some sort of javascript thing, that maybe he could fix or customize with javascript if he wanted, kinda shocking, I thought maybe I accidentally added node modules or something dumb, nope, I have a whopping 1.4% js. So most of the comments were plain wrong. I get it he probably peeked at it for 30s and realized it wasn’t the thing for his problem. At the same time I should probably do a better job at marketing what it really is, cleaning up the docs and demo.

Such a great message right now. I feel like everywhere I turn is negativity, especially social media. It feels like so many things are trying to divide and create hate. “This” is what we should be doing with social media. There are a lot of elements of “there are two ways to have the biggest building in town, tear down all the bigger buildings, or just build the biggest fucking building”, If you want to be successful in X then surround yourself with others successful in X. This is a catalytic skill that everyone needs to have in their belt.

Great conversation with Billy Basso the creator of Animal Well on the code architecture of Animal well. It’s all hand crafted C++. He talks about early games he tried to build being heavy in oop, and really got lost in oop. Animal well is very flat, there is no inheritance, just lists of entities that all implement similar methods in their own way. Layering and order of entities becomes very important. Its crazy how much he had to think about hardware and MS build being very helpful with this, but needing to know all of the console apis.

This is great, beautifully captures a modern backend view of https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/. I honestly resonate with almost all of this. I have found myself in more trouble than help when trying to fully vibe out a project. It never refactors, it leaves it shit everywhere, it mostly does what you say, until you get to something that seems easy, so you try to do it yourself, but you break its brittle piece of shit into pieces any time you try to touch it. AI coding help is great, mcp seems like it really has some game changing abilities, but hands of vibe coded crap aint there yet for me.

I did not realize half of this, and it took me at least 4 watches through this to catch everything.

k8s-monitoring requires setting imageregistry and pullsecrets twice

Bugs exist when your test-enforced implementation fails to match the behavior described in your documentation. Without documentation a bug is just undefined behavior.

This is quite an interesting thought, so does this mean that, none of my undocumented side projects have bugs? no I think there is still some implied behavior that naming things covers. a function get_bucket_contents implies doing something wtih s3, getting stuff from your local filesystem or crashing would be considered a bug. I think the argument here is that if I start mining bitcoin when you call get_bucket_contents and I have not documented it that this is a feature not a bug. If I were to take this a step further, now do I need to document that this does not also start a bitcoin miner? maybe this is more of an unwanted feature than a bug, I’m convincing myself more and more.

So many small details go into making hollow knight such a great game, but it starts with such good controls, every thing is so fluid and predictable. I knew about coyote time, but not some of the other details that Juniper covers, such as hang time, and faster decent than jump.

Excited to hear this story, they have so many key players in the trailer this will be fantastic.

Interesting take on kubernetes from a front end perspective. All valid arguments to me, and really the answer to any do you need to any specific implementation of tech is probably no. We got along just fine before k8s ever existed and you still can, but its really nice in a lot of cases. If your skills lean toward backend or infrastructure I encourage you to give it a try.

There are a lot of beginner friendly k8s distros that you can setup with relative ease, kind and k0s are great for single node, If you want multi-node k3s is what I generally use. If you want a very lightweight OS that you only interact with through an api, and has a very small attack surface talos is an amazing product.

Internal, on-prem, self hosted. If you are trying to avoid the cloud for cost, rules, regulations, red tape, kubernetes is a great option to manage your container workflows yourself without needing to have a cloud budget, get approvals and sign offs on running...

Just listened to this as I am really starting to get into grafana and feel like there isn’t a mountain of setup this time around realizing how much of my stack is brand new. Drill Down and Alloy are both new and key to my setup. The Ai integrations at the end sound wicked good, I will be interested if you can do similar things with an MCP vs how much proprietary stuff needs grafana cloud.

Ultimately though a business needs a product. Textual has always been a solution in search of a problem. And while there are plenty of problems to which Textual is a fantastic solution, we weren’t able to find a shared problem or pain-point to build a viable business around.

I can totally see this. Finding a marketable business idea is not easy, working in the developer space where everyone wants to do it themselves is no better. Textual specifically I could see, I really wanted to build things on it as it came out, I had ideas, it was hard to use at the time and changing, so I took a break, got busy with far too many other things, and really I ’m good with rich most of the time.

I daily use k9s, its absolutely amazing at what it does and appreciate that I could build something like it in python, its just hard to justify the time investment for the things I tend to work on.

Which is why Textualize, the company, will be wrapping up in the next few weeks.

...

So it’s back to plan A: taking a year off. I plan on using this time to focus on my health–something I haven’t prioritized while working as a CEO / Founder of a startup.

Wish you the best Will, you have given us textual and rich, and from what I can tell left it in some great hands.

All I can say for certain is that I would like to write more. Writing scratches many of the same itches as software development, and it is a skill I’d like to nurture.

Go get em Will, write to your hearts desire, and resist the urge to make an SSG company this time.

Now “too much magic” is not the same thing as “bad magic”, although they are often conflated. Bad magic is when the implementation details leak out from the level below. This can manifest itself as cryptic errors that reference the magic’s implementation.

Dang Strong takes against markdown here with a strong push for bespoke content models/structures. This idea is completely foreign and wild to me. I get it that markdown has its issues with flavors, add ons and what not, but overall its mostly transportable, its a skill that works most content sites and writing tools. I am so far on the other side that I seek out tools with markdown as an option and lean away from wsiwyg tools with specialized data formats on the backend.

I’ll end with, I’m also a dev that creates very simplified content and maybe seeing the backend of a site with lots of custom fields would be very eye opening for me.

Last year I attempted to do some newsletter-style link aggregation… that good intention imploded spectacularly. But I switched to Obsidian this month and now I have a better system for aggregating links (post on that coming later). Inside this issue you’ll find some games, some homelab server hardware, some AI discourse™, some musical instruments, and more.

This hits so close to home, I even went through the effort of making a weeknotes script, one weeknote post. I also was inspired by obsidian but it didn’t work out for me, so my script uses data from markata.

Do you remember regression models from college: given some data, you find a best fit line that allows you to predict Y given X. At the end of the day, ChatGPT, and LLMs in general, are the same thing as the regression model – it’s just that ChatGPT is the largest and fanciest model we currently have to model language and information.

I really am coming to the idea of calling it a “word calculator”, this seems to be the most succinct description of llms that the lay person can comprehend and relate to.

ChatGPT does not hallucinate or become unhinged

I think Steve goes much deeper on this in his intervew on fafo.fm. They describe it more as a pleaser or “yes man” essentially all the companies that are building these models want to give the “best” answer, better than their competitors. With this comes the risk of it being completely wrong, they are designed to always give an answer.

...

I’ll triple down on the link-blog chain here, see this one going around all over this week and finally had time to read through when it hit my rss reader via Chris.

It should come as no surprise that nearly every vibe-coded app on the Internet struggles with security issues; look no further than the vibe-coded recipe app that leaks its OpenAI keys. Every time one generates code by prompt, they create a new stillborn program; vibe coding is the art of stitching together their corpses into Frankenstein’s monster.

Damn, that is a strong statement, stitching together the corpses, strong statement here. The OpenAI key thing feels kind of obvious to me, every set of docs, blogs and examples on the internet need to be runnable for people to learn and try out new tech easy, putting secrets in the wrong place is easy, putting them somewhere that you can decode them without sharing them is hard team specific, app specific, and so nuanced to your architecture that its rarely...

...

Under 2000 everything is happy, green field. Any decision you have made is relatively easy to back out of (barring you making a library with downstream users), but as you go, regret kicks in. Regret we didn’t make that pydantic 2 upgrade earlier, as new features become more apealing. Regret that we chose sqlite for simplicity, speed, agility, and now we might need robust and distributed. Regret that you chose a front end framework, or to have a front end at all to a backend problem. Regret that you put 6 layers of abstraction on your db early on and now that you understand the problem you want different abstractions, but all of your endpoints deeply depend on the current one.

Vibe coding will not save you, it will only make these wrong decisions for you without the context that you have. You will hate it’s decisions more because you had no input into some of them.

“Gradually roll out your releases to a small group of people”

~ roughly what prime said (I’m listening live)

This really hit home with me, tests can be so good at making sure that we dont repeat bugs and that laser focused things work, tests are generally small and focused, but this does not replace some sort of integration testing. These days very few things are written as a monolith, and hence there are a lot of interactions that really need to play well together accross various systems.

They call out Crowdstrike here, which took down the world blue screening critical windows systems everywhere in 2024. It was revealed that a small changed was rushed through and skipped critical rollout paths since it seemed like a small change. Crowdstrike also runs at a super low kernel level of access and a small memory bug can kill the system.

I’m trying to level up my sre game. I’m trying to set up grafana dashboards for everything and it is such a wide surface area. It’s never just one thing you have to have 3 or more things hooked together in order for the data to flow.

I’m really getting not invented here vibes, and thoughts that I can just build this myself. Not grafana and it’s scalability necessarily, but small components of observability.

This is a really great guide to setting up kubernetes monitoring with helm, it uses loki as a log datasource and alloy as a collector of kubernetes logs, events, and nodes. The charts are setup really well to start collecting logs from all your kubernetes pods.

Really helpful article to getting tempo datasource setup in grafana, this enables you to see span and trace data within grafana. This data helps debug and work through issues that you might come into with performance and need to see the timing of requests along with logs.

Steve is such a great listen, the neurospicy 🌶️ rambles this episode goes on is so relatable. I feel like I really missed out on some great takes on intellij vs neovim, but got some really great knowledge about vector db’s, embedding, text compression, similarities to vector algegra like infinite craft.

Just popped open infinitecraft and I’ve definitely played this with my kids before, super fun, just could not remember the name of this one. I do remember an android one as well that is alchemist or something like that, which we have also played a lot.

This episode really got me thinking about the difference between HA and DR and my approach to each one. They talk about it from the perspective of a cach cow kind of app rather than a homelab or internal tooling, but think of HA as 9’s how many 9s are we willing to pay for, tink of DR as dollars how many dollars will we loose during the period of recovery. So much more in the episode, a lot of talk around cloud vendors and what they give you vs a purpose build platform with HA and DR in mind.

Astral is doing great things in the python industry. They are disrupting entire categories of tools with extremely fast, easy to use, and feature rich alternatives that make it really hard to keep using the incumbent. So far I am seeing no signs of evil, sometimes with such a disrupter there is some sort of downside that make it hard to want to do the switch. In the interview they even mention things like leaning on lsp so that it works across all editors rather than building out vscode integrations that work for most developers. As a neovim user I greatly apreciate this.

ty, has a playground running at types.ruff.rs. You can edit code in there and see what the type checker results would be in browser. This looks good, excited to see it running in my lsp.

Here is an example where a Optional may not be defined.

Checking for existance before using it resolves the issue.

Astral is working on some great things around python, they have created a high standard for python tooling built on rust that works really well, runs fast and covers everything in the space it resides in. ty appears to be their linter coming soon.

This is madness that Wes Bos made this with manifold.js and no openscad! Yes, I have these stupid brackets everywhere, yes, I hand model my own brackets. No I don’t do it enough. I don’t like that these model generators like openscad cannot make fillets and chamfers, but I appreciate the heck out of the speed and automation you can make iterations of things.

Link to the promo video. https://bsky.app/profile/wesbos.com/post/3lo4h7unk6s2i

Chris hit me where it feels about 10 minutes in. He said he has not been writing on his site as much lately and how hard it is to get back in. He mentions having a baby idea of a post, but then having the thought do you really want to come back from a long break with this!

Momentum is a b**** when you got it you cant stop, and when you don’t you can’t stop.

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

How is usability and it doing the thing I paid for it to do a selling point?? Any time I’ve touched a windows machine in the past 7 years has felt awkward, I have no idea where things are now, but they look so much worse.

Interesting how confidently he says we can easily go to the top. really makes you wonder what we the normies are leaving on the table by using these general purpose models and what could be achieved with really tuned in models. Could I make an automatic blog tagger more accurately, maybe smaller, maybe tuned so well it runs fine on cpu?