Month summary — October 2026

Unix and Linux systems (including Mac OS X and other POSIX compliant systems) have a (relatively) simple system for controlling access to files and directories.

In this post, I’m going to share ten career traps thoughtful people often find themselves ensnared in.

Our analysis of 111 airline websites confirms what travelers already know: they are agonizingly slow, but straightforward performance optimizations could change that.

Buying a used ThinkPad is one of the best value propositions in computing, provided you know which models have legendary keyboards and which to avoid.

What you need to avoid is this deathbed regret that you’ve pursued something that someone said you should want instead of what you really want. When you choose the thing that you are most into, that means that you need to optimize for that, and be willing to let go of the others.

With AI, we can hack together a prototype first and let the machine help us extract the specification later.

I’m excited about how AI is changing how I work, it has made me more productive and able to get more things done. I’m also frustrated by how much low-effort content is being generated and sprayed across the internet.

In software development, we collect anti-patterns to recognize common traits that lead to poor outcomes in our software. I thought it would be helpful to do the same for software blogging, so I’ve catalogued the most frequent mistakes I see from beginner bloggers.

An attempt to answer the age old interview question “What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?” — covering everything from keyboard interrupts and OS syscalls to DNS, TLS, and rendering engines.

When you configure PgBouncer, you need to choose a pooling mode. This choice clearly affects how connection sharing works and, in turn, performance. It also affects which database features will work.

Type a handle into a signup form and a green tick or a red cross appears almost before you stop typing, checked against a billion names. It isn’t one clever database query. It’s a debounced client, a Bloom filter that answers ‘definitely free’ from memory, an index for everything else, and a unique constraint that has the final say.

So, I “cut the cord” in a different sense, ditching streaming services for self-hosted Jellyfin. Over the course of the next year and a half, Jellyfin opened the door to self-hosting many other services, reducing my dependence on cloud service providers, and providing a welcome stability.

The fastest way to get things done is to forget the finish line.

Most decisions are two-way doors, meaning you can easily reverse them. But some decisions are one-way doors—you can’t take them back.

Career debt is the accumulation of obsolete skills and missed opportunities, a quiet tax on your future professional mobility.

Having time for everything isn’t about fitting more into your day; it’s about ruthlessly eliminating what doesn’t matter and fiercely protecting your slack.

With AI, you can trivially produce six pages, no critical thinking required. But that writing process, as described (and prescribed) by Bezos, used to guarantee that the author of a memo would have done the necessary thinking before asking for an hour of everybody’s time. That guarantee has gone.

A six-page memo worthy of an Amazon presentation would take at least a week to write. Nobody spent a week on something they didn’t care about, so the fact that a document existed at all told you something about the effort that had gone into it. That world has gone. Why? Because now that writing is essentially free, it has lost its underlying value.

Modern digital tools make it easy to “capture” information from a wide variety of sources. We know how to snap a picture, type out some notes, record a video, or scan a document. Getting this content from the outside world into the digital world is trivial.

With people moving to AI note takers it feels like the “it’s all in the textbook” approach is being adopted en-masse, but where the textbook for every topic writes itself automatically. Textbooks are great, but notes are great too!

In 2019 I wrote more than the previous 5 years combined, at least publically.

I don’t care. If I wanted the feedback of an AI, I would have prompted it myself.

Principles for designing evals and hillclimbing against them without fooling yourself, and how the claude-api skill’s build-eval and hillclimb commands put them to work.

The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Cursor and beyond.

Spotify, native and fast. One lightweight Rust app for your whole library, local playback, and Spotify Connect on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

tinyjs is a tool for building desktop apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, weighing in at a mere ~6 MB without the heavy Chromium overhead.

An ebook reader application supporting PDF, DjVu, EPUB, FB2 and many more formats, running on Cervantes, Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook and Android devices.

Current AI alarmism does not go far enough. The idea that the tech industry can effectively self-regulate is insane when facing threats like catastrophic cyberattacks, bioterrorism, and rapid mass job displacement.