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It honestly feels like it’s been way longer than six weeks since my last Weekly. This winter has been defined by lots of travel for me. All exciting and fulfilling, but not all energizing. It’s hard to find a rhythm without routine! Last month I asked Devin to migrate my site way from SCSS. Without any additional prompting it used Netlify previews attached to the PR to visually diff my production site with its branch. $30 and an hour late....
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LLM-assisted programming has crossed the chasm . Across the IndieWeb I see skeptics either being won over or at least acknowledging the changes to our shared craft. Adam Levanthal calls the feeling Deep Blue . There’s little doubt that programming is undergoing an industrial revolution. Where we go from here is more up for debate. You Are Here (Marc Brooker) On the first road we can see this as the end to a craft we have loved. ....
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Another batch of links, coming your way! While I’m a little sad this weekly didn’t follow on the heels of #29, I can’t complain too much. I spent some time working on a new side project! I’m working on my own little algorithmic newsfeed prioritized by what I think is most important. I subscribe to a ton of RSS feeds that all publish on different frequencies. I want to make sure that infrequent publishers are never drowned out by more freq....
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Welcome to Weekly 29, six days after Weekly 28! Crazy how that works. I’m back in the Pinboarding habit, which means we have a full and fresh newsletter this week! Distributed Systems Why Strong Consistency? (Marc Brooker): Distributed systems engineers often talk about the how and skim over the why . I appreciated Marc’s explanation of why strong consistency is a useful property of a database as a user even if it might be diff....
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Colder weather means November’s the first month with two newsletters in a long while. Let’s hope I can keep up the pace as we head into the holiday season! Comment on “Thinking about Thinking with LLMs” (Simon Willison): When I submitted my most recent blog post to Lobsters I was not expecting Simon Willison to say he “couldn’t agree more”, but it was certainly a high point of my blogging career so far! His comment mentioned B....
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Happy November! I spent the weekend visiting friends in Cambridge, MA and am on an Amtrak train back to New York. We’re a bit past peak fall-foliage season, but I’m hoping for a good view over the water between Providence and New Haven. Data Infrastructure TernFS — An Exabyte Scale, Multi-Region Distributed Filesystem (XTX Markets): It’s not often we get a comprehensive peek into distributed systems of this scale. My main takeaway: ....
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Welcome to The Weekly, back from summer vacation! While I did miss posting I’m still not beating myself up about getting out of the routine. I’m currently on a flight back from the VLDB conference in London. I had a really great time! The papers were interesting, I got to catch up with a a handful of former coworkers, and I even gave a talk in our sponsor slot on what I’ve been working on at my day job! More than anything, though, it was ....
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Welcome to this month’s Weekly! I’ve been putting in some work on other parts of this site. I launched my book review section that I mentioned last time and seeded it with some books I’ve read this year. I’ve also freshened up the site design a bit sprinkling in some more sans-serif. I’m starting to think about writing up the last installment in my nix-on-mac series, covering nix modules and splitting out a flake into mulitiple files. I....
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It’s once again been another month since my last update. I hope you find some interesting reads in this issue, though! I’m trying to read more this year, and I’ve been working on a new section of the website for small book reviews inspired by Tom MacWright’s Reading section and Arne Bahlo’s Library . Building it has been my first real forray into “vibe coding” with Cursor. The experience has been pretty great, and I was able to get a s....
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I hope everyone’s had a good month! I might need to figure out another time to write these posts if my weekends start getting busy again. I watched Severance S2E10 last night, and my I’ll keep my spoiler free review to just numbers: 9.5/10. From the Webring The Secret Ingredient? (Alex Kaplan): I’d bet most of us drink coffee every day without thinking much about what goes into a cup. I learned a ton from this post and really enjoyed ....
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I hope everyone’s been having a good February! This week’s Weekly is more of a Monthly, but I hope you enjoy the articles all the same. I had a lot to say about these, so it’s quality of commentary over quantity of posts this time around. My LLM codegen workflow atm (Harper Reed): I’m still trying to figure out where LLMs fit in my workflow. The post emphasizes how fast-moving this stuff is: its guidance “probably will not work in....
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I can’t believe I’m relishing the weather today when it’s just above 40 degrees. But that’s how it goes deep in the heart of winter in New York. Weeks like these make me think of this xkcd and how the weather extremes here in the summer and winter are pretty close to the worst of both worlds. Oh, well! The buildings look pretty at night at least. This is a short Weekly this week. Let’s get on to it! An explosion of transitive dep....
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Hello again! I realized I messed up my automated email schedule up a bit and last week’s newsletter was sent out this evening, a full week late. Sorry for that! As an apology to my O(10) newsletter subscribers, you’ll see two posts in 24 hours — going forward the newsletter will get sent out Monday mornings rather than Sunday evenings to account for any late editions. What I’m listening to Normally I write this post in a coffee shop where....
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It’s an edition coming in right at the buzzer this week! I had a really fulfilling day today — went to the first session for a new book club this morning and hosted friendly low buy-in poker with some friends in the afternoon. I’m feeling good about the time I’m spending with people I care about so far in 2025; I hope to continue it through the rest of the month! Cursor : I tried out the Cursor editor for a bit this weekend and it ki....
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Happy new year! I just posted my 2024 year-in-review post over on the other part of this site. It was fun to sum up the year, and I’m excited to see where 2025 takes me! On to the links: From the webring Tips for New Open Source Maintainers (Robert Lord): A post written in 2014 by a former coworker that found its way to the lobste.rs front page this past week. Like Daniel Doubrovkine’s post I shared last week, I really wish I ha....
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Is it even worth talking about what weather is and isn’t “unseasonable” anymore? Turing Machines (Sam Rose): Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of my favorite books and I’m fascinated by computability theory. Sam’s Turing machine simulator was characteristically amazing, but I wish there was a bit more of a look into complexity theory and the progression from regular expressions to Turing machines rather than diving straight into the deep....
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It was the first snow of the season in New York City last night! Today the sun is shining, so we’ll see how long it actually sticks around for. I’ve got fewer articles than normal this week in the newsletter — I spent more time than normal reading actual, gosh-darned novels! Taking even more inspriation from Arne Bahlo I might start writing up longer reviews of books I read. Books A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge): This was a ....
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I took a vacation this week, so I’m writing this weekly with more of a laid-back attitude. Product Design Sometimes the product innovation is the distribution (Matt Webb): An interesting story about how Moleskine “hacked” into bookshop distribution and what it can mean for tech businesses in general. Ink & Switch : This independent research lab / design studio has put together some really thought-provoking proofs of concept. Just ....
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Happy Saturday! After sending off last week’s installment I finally finished up and published part 3 of my Nix-on-macOS series . This was sitting in my drafts folder for a long while and I’m happy to have gotten it out there. I have some more ideas for posts in the series to write, but I also want to start thinking about other series and topics I can explore. Writing on writing Always. Be. Blogging. (Nate Silver): Always interesting ....
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Hey there! I hope everyone has had a great past six months. Life comes at you fast and when the weather got warm I found it harder to keep the routine of writing every week. It’s getting cold again, I’m back in my coffee shop, and will still be aspirationally calling this series “weekly” to try and keep myself motivated to write. Anyways, I’ve got less than I expected saved up in my Pinboard, but it’s enough for a Weekly, so let’s get to ....
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May the Fourth be with you! It’s been a while again, but I’m here with some more links, and also a bit of a longer reflection to start off the Weekly today. Coffee in Mexico City I spent a week in Mexico City last month. In the morning I would walk around Roma Norte, the neighborhood I was staying in, looking for an espresso to start my day. At one point I found a coffee shop that just really spoke to me: I walked in, smiled, and was exci....
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Happy Saturday! It’s April, I just finished doing my taxes, and I’m excited to share some links with you all this week :) Memory managegment madness To add on to the Algoilia article about malloc_trim from the last newsletter, I have two more to share: Garbage Collection for Systems Programmers (Matt Kline): I’ve been learning the lessons in this article the hard way over the past few weeks at work, and Matt sums it all up amazing....
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Hello again! It’s been too long since I’ve published a newsletter. Routines are hard to build, but I do still want to try to make writing a weekly habit of mine. Luckily I haven’t been publishing because I’ve been keeping busy offline, so I can’t complain too much. But anyways, on to the weekly! From the webring September, 2022 (Aryav Pal): Some poetry to start off this weekend: I find Aryav’s writing somehow both vivid and vague in....
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Apologies for the delayed weekly this week — it may be Tuesday, but it’s still the same content you’ve come to appreciate and expect! Personal updates I’ve got a new homepage ! I’ve been wanting to start over with my homepage for a while and I’m very happy with how it turned out. I took inspiration from a few new places around the web, but it still feels like my own. I posted the second installment in my Nix on macOS series last ....
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It’s a snowy day in New York City! Nice day to post up in a warm and cozy café to watch it all go by. Open Source Paying people to work on open source is good actually (Jacob Kaplan-Moss): Anyone who believes that American capitalism properly rewards people for even just the economic value they provide to society should take some time learning about open source software. How to sustainably fund open source contributors is undoubtedly ....
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I spent some time over the past week tweaking and improving this site. Not all the changes are live yet, but every post now has an OpenGraph preview image to go along with it. I got a lot of guidance from Arne Bahlo’s post on how to generate SVGs in Astro and a lot of inspiration from Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s preview images . I find frontend development to be a creative outlet where I can still write code without feeling like I’m doing so....
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Happy February! I had a high school teacher of mine call month #2 the F-month: a month so terrible it wasn’t even worth naming. While February does tend to be the coldest month here in New York, there’s still plenty to take advantage of — It’s always easier to find tables at my favorite bars when the weather’s bad outside :) Software jj init (Chris Krycho): A great deep dive into jujitsu and how its mental model draws on and differs....
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I have Lobsters and Hacker News blocked on my devices because I’m way to prone to refreshing those constantly. I rely on my RSS feed that I’ve curated over the past few years which also includes some other curators like Simon Willison and John Gruber . I’m thinking about how I can still discover new authors without scrolling on autopilot, especially on Lobsters, where I find the submissions to be really high-quality. Maybe these weekly....
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Happy Sunday! It was a short week this week, and I didn’t do as much reading as I would’ve liked. I did, however, finally start getting content I enjoy out of my YouTube recommendation algorithm: who could’ve known the Like button was useful for something? From the webring Teaching is DAG-building ( Peyton Walters ): Teaching is hard. It’s also difficult to pin down exactly what separates exceptional teachers from the rest. Peyton has....
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Why limit myself to recommending blog posts? It’s a multimedia weekly this week! How to Discover Your Own Taste : The Ezra Klein Show is a staple of my podcast rotation, and I thought this was a really thought-provoking episode that was a good one to listen to as the 2024 kicks into full gear. This newsletter is already part of my starting to cultivate my own taste more consciously — independent curation is how we fight back against th....
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I hope everyone had a good first week of 2024! I set some New Year’s resolutions this year (like I have in the past ). We’ll see how they stick — I’ve tried to make them vague enough that they’ll be difficult to objectively “fail” at, but only time will tell. Anyways, on to the links: Flakes aren’t real and cannot hurt you : This was one of the best technical posts I’ve read in a while. I mentioned in my post that Flakes were the ....
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I find a lot of cool articles around the internet, and inspired by some other weekly links collections I’ve come across recently, I thought I’d start my own little bloglet. This week You don’t need analytics on your blog : A good reminder for indie bloggers out there to remember why you’re writing — chasing higher audience numbers can be demotivating and futile if you’re writing for your own enjoyment. Emacs From Scratch, Part 1: ....
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