links (96) (2026-01-17)
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
PEP 658 went live on PyPI in May 2023. uv launched in February 2024. uv could be fast because the ecosystem finally had the infrastructure to support it. A tool like uv couldn’t have shipped in 2020. The standards weren’t there yet.
Tokyo has an order of magnitude more restaurants than New York or Paris, and the disparity in retail stores is probably similar. Small business is the lifeblood of Japanese cities — and, in many ways, of the Japanese middle class. This might be partly cultural, but at least some of it is the result of deliberate policy. Tokyo has an order of magnitude more restaurants than New York or Paris, and the disparity in retail stores is probably similar. Small business is the lifeblood of Japanese cities — and, in many ways, of the Japanese middle class. This might be partly cultural, but at least some of it is the result of deliberate policy.
10 quality lessons from almost three decades of software development
Don’t treat flakiness as technical debt to be addressed later. Treat it like a production failure that requires immediate attention.
Nobody knows how software products work
Why are these features complicated? Because they affect every single other feature you build. If you add organizations and policy controls, you must build a policy control for every new feature you add. If you localize your product, you must include translations for every new feature. And so on. Eventually you’re in a position where you’re trying to figure out whether a self-hosted enterprise customer in the EU is entitled to access a particular feature, and nobody knows - you have to go and read through the code or do some experimenting to figure it out.
Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One
Before LLMs, “perfect software” was largely a myth. For most of us, the effort required to build exactly what we wanted was simply too high. So we rented other platforms. We begged or waited for features. We accepted friction and exploitation - limitations, ads, data stealth - as the rent.
On a whim, I ran Claude with access to the debugging tools I’d been using and a minimal prompt: “find something interesting.” It immediately did a better job at pulling in what it needed than the pipeline I was trying to tune by hand, while requiring much less orchestration.
Build your embedding from your Stars, Compare and discover popular people with similar interests, Generate a Skill Radar, Recommend repositories you might like.
50 things we've learned about building successful products at PostHog
Small teams (6 people or fewer) can build great products, but they need to be given autonomy to set their own goals, prioritize their roadmap, pick metrics, talk to users, and ship code fast.
Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you would see that his approach is actually O(log n).
It's hard to justify Tahoe Icons
In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.
But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.
And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.
1986 memo from Ford Motor Company
Here is a copy of the 1986 memo from Ford Motor Company design engineer James Moylan to his boss proposing that the fuel gauge indicator include a symbol noting on which side of the vehicle the fuel filler door is located. Mr. Moylan passed away in December of 2025 at the age of 80.
What I learned building an opinionated and minimal coding agent
So what's an old guy yelling at Claudes going to do? He's going to write his own coding agent harness and give it a name that's entirely un-Google-able, so there will never be any users. Which means there will also never be any issues on the GitHub issue tracker. How hard can it be?
To avoid the ranch’s property, all Brad and Phil and the others had to do was move around like a checkers piece. They’d start on public land and then make sure to stay on public land, by crossing into new squares diagonally, at the corners where all those public squares touch... The resulting five-year legal battle...
A 15th century recipe for a giant egg
Take a funnel, put it into the opening hole of the bigger bladder and pour the white of the eggs on top of the yolk within the bigger bladder, so that the bladder is filled. Tie it up, put it into the pot and let it boil once more. The white of the eggs will boil around the big yolk, and there will be one big egg.
The 7 most influential papers in computer science history
#1 “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936)
Stack Exchange Questions Over Time
<a graph>
Add yourself to so called slashpage (https://slashpages.net) directories. I discovered a lot of personal blogs over the years from those.
Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.
Please enable CORS for your RSS feed
Not having CORS set up for your RSS feed means that browser-based feed readers won't be able to fetch your feed to parse it (without running a proxy).
You can't design software you don't work on
Large shared codebases never reflect a single design, but are always in some intermediate state between different software designs. How the codebase will hang together after an individual change is thus way more important than what ideal “north star” you’re driving towards.
I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game...
What matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.
If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.