March 2026

Time for another monthly post sharing some of the IT discoveries that crossed my path lately. Below you'll find a mix of articles, links, and resources, some of which tie into my current activities and areas of interest.

Some thoughts

Associate Cloud Engineer Certification

While I don't use Google Cloud heavily on a daily basis, it remains my cloud provider of choice. I received a discount to renew my Associate Cloud Engineer certification, so I spent a few evenings refreshing my knowledge. The exam itself took me 50 minutes to answer the 50 questions and pass. It was a fun experience!

Google Associate Cloud Engineer — View my Credly badge

Handy - Offline speech-to-text

I wanted to try out a speech-to-text tool and found this really cool option that is open-source and works completely offline. I use it here and there and it performs surprisingly well, even in Polish.

cjpais/Handy on GitHub

Articles

The Hidden Math Behind Every Decision You Make — And Why Most People Get It Wrong -

This isn’t a math lecture btw. No calculus. I promise. This is about 6 mental models that changed how I think about literally everything – and once you see them you can’t unsee them.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity – Terrible Software

We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here's how to fix it.

Repurpose your old Kindle

Hacking an old kindle to display bus arrival times

Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours

The author shares insights on the differences between theory and practice in web crawling, the impact of modern web technologies, and the importance of politeness in crawling. The article also reflects on the future of web crawling, especially in the context of dynamic content and AI-driven scraping.

The Reason Most People Are Terrible Communicators (And How to Fix It)

Being right doesn't matter if nobody understands what you're saying.

Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules. ◆ Truffle Security Co.

Google spent over a decade telling developers that Google API keys (like those used in Maps, Firebase, etc.) are not secrets. But that's no longer true.

The Developer’s Guide to Secure Job Hunting in 2026 • placementist

Is your technical task a malware delivery system? The 2026 candidate's guide to secure job searching.

The Self-Hosting Revolution Powered by Mini PCs | TerminalBytes.com

How mini PCs are enabling a quiet revolution in self-hosting, making it practical and affordable to own your digital life

Scaling Postgres connections with PgBouncer — PlanetScale

PgBouncer is the perfect pairing for Postgres's biggest weakness: connection management. Tuning it just right is important to make this work well, and here we cover everything you need to know

Productivity

2 Hours of Focus Will Put You in the Top 1%

Three ways to find focus time that don't require waking up at 4am.

AI

Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

The car wash test is the simplest AI reasoning benchmark that nearly every model fails. We tested 53 models through Opper, first once each, then 10 times. Only 5 passed consistently.

OpenClaw - Personalny Asystent AI

AI generated summary

A detailed guide on setting up OpenClaw with security configurations, SSH keys, and Docker deployment, using Google Gemini as an AI model.

Andrej Karpathy's 630-line Python script ran 50 experiments overnight without any human input - The New Stack

Andrej Karpathy's AutoResearch ran 50 AI experiments overnight on one GPU. The design pattern behind it applies far beyond ML training. Here's how it works.

So where are all the AI apps? – Answer.AI

Despite claims of increased productivity due to AI tools, the data shows no significant increase in the overall rate of package creation or updates post-ChatGPT. However, there is a noticeable increase in update frequency for popular AI-related packages.

Anthropic Courses

Browse all Anthropic courses

Slow down to speed up - by James Stanier

Why AI makes the slow phases of work more important, not less.

A Unix Manifesto for the Age of AI | LinuxToaster

Taste is the only thing standing between us and entropy. A manifesto on composable AI, Unix principles, and the architecture of restraint.

The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.

Jazzband - News - Sunsetting Jazzband

Jazzband, a cooperative experiment started over 10 years ago to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software projects, is being sunsetted. New signups are disabled, and project leads will be contacted before PyCon US 2026 to coordinate project transfers.

GitHub - jarrodwatts/claude-hud

A Claude Code plugin that shows what's happening - context usage, active tools, running agents, and todo progress

GitHub - garrytan/gstack

Use Garry Tan's exact Claude Code setup: 23 opinionated tools that serve as CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, Doc Engineer, and QA

GitHub - HKUDS/nanobot

🐈 nanobot: The Ultra-Lightweight OpenClaw

Python

Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty

Concerns about the strategic risk of a single company owning key Python infrastructure are addressed, with a focus on the possibility of forking as an exit strategy.

Tools

GitHub - cjpais/Handy

A free, open source, and extensible speech-to-text application that works completely offline.

GitHub - HKUDS/CLI-Anything

CLI-Anything: Making ALL Software Agent-Native. Contribute to HKUDS/CLI-Anything development by creating an account on GitHub.

Cloud

Bucketsquatting is (Finally) Dead – One Cloud Please

For a decade, I have been working with AWS and third-party security teams to resolve bucketsquatting / bucketsniping issues in AWS S3. Finally, I am happy to say AWS now has a solution to the problem, and it changes the way you should name your buckets.