Today
- Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be…
Yesterday
- Herman's blog Home Now Projects Blog 22 Oct, 2026 People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules. It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as...
- Git had too many performance problems at 30,000 PRs per day, so Anthropic built its own. I talked with the team, including asking why they didn’t open source its new system, ‘Scion.’...
This week
- 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...
- 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...
- 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,...
Last week
- 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...
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