Today
- I’ve had “AI usage statements” in the back of my mind ever since I read Ethan Marcott’s blog post sharing a round-up of his favorite ones. I didn’t consider writing one for this site, since it had the smell of status-signaling. Like a quasi-political declaration of allegiance to...
- I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at...
- Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect some part is AI about someone I don’t know: how can I tell how much of it is? And how much time and effort do I want to invest to...
- Many others have covered the manipulation of colour in CSS. This is me documenting what has worked for me, practically, 'in the wild'. It is a common requirement to need a variant of an existing colour. Think about the borders for a visual pod/component; it may have a background...
- My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is …
- Tasting History with Max Miller is must-watch YouTube for me. Miller is a wonderful storyteller, and his show melds interesting history lessons with period-appropriate recipes. As it turns out, he’s also a fan of board games. His new game is now live on Kickstarter. If you...
Yesterday
- Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll...
- Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate! John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface...
- Some people think that LLMs should not be used in technical fields like programming or mathematics, because those fields are actually art. True or not, this…
- I live in Ireland, and avoiding rain is a national pastime. Sadly the best data we have, which comes from Met Eireann the national meteorological service, is delivered in a pretty low quality app that makes it hard to use and understand. To fix this I built the app Rainy.ie It’s...
This week
- When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can compromise on — what can be slow…
- Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet. First, some background. Since Mac OS X 10.5 in...
- Most collaboration problems between teams are interface problems, not relationship problems. Clear ownership, inspectable priorities, and a clear process for new work fix them....
- Tech companies structurally depend on writing to serve as evidence, in the same way that Bitcoin depends on proof-of-work hashing. However, in the last few…
- If AI is so great, why aren’t we seeing an explosion of new, amazing software products? If anyone can turn their idea into working software with coding agents…
- From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software. Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc. We need all these disciplines to make great,...
- Persistent models have a persistence problem. It’s been a bit since we’ve added a new context failure mode, but the increasing persistence of frontier models has brought this fail to the fore. This one I call Context Inertia: Context Inertia is when the model commits to a...
- One of my favourite things in the Python standard library is the ThreadPoolExecutor. It is a very simple way to run a bunch of tasks in parallel, such as converting or repacking a whole bunch of image files from one format to another. You write a pure function that takes two...
- Ramp and Stripe built platforms for non-engineers to build internal websites and tools with, and both are taking off in those workplaces. I expect more companies to do the same....
- When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how...
- JPEG XL has now landed in all major browsers, so I figured I'd take a closer look at what it's good/bad at compared to other formats. Conclusions I'll go into full detail, with examples and benchmarks, but for those of you who don't have the time, here are the headlines: For...
- Every few months someone declares that management is dead. Big Tech is in the middle of a Great Flattening, and there are companies that have a single Director managing 80 engineers and a fleet of agents with nobody in between. I think it’s the opposite. Management is becoming...
- The proposal period for Interop 2027 closed in late September, which means the Interop team is now in the process of working through all the proposals and ultimately deciding which will be taken on next year. Part of that process is looking at “developer signals”, which is a...
- Building a slide template starts with three foundational choices — colours, fonts and layouts. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe covers the basics of color theory and how to build a reusable palette, the essentials of typography, including serif, sans-serif, handwritten and monospace fonts,...
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