Posts

Look, I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area long enough to know that “sunny California” is a reasonable approximation, but it is also a myth. We’ve got microclimates that change faster than JavaScript frameworks, marine layers that stick around like bad technical debt, and the general disappointment of expecting 75°F and getting fog instead. So obviously, I built a bureaucratic form. Because nothing says “California” quite like filing paperwork to express dissatisfaction with the weather. ...

Look, I know what you’re thinking: “Another dev scratched their own itch and now they want to tell me about it.” Guilty. But hear me out, because this particular itch has probably been annoying you too, and the scratch is genuinely useful. The Problem Nobody Talks About Here’s the scenario that broke me: I push a PR, immediately run gh pr checks --watch, and… it bombs out with an error because GitHub Actions hasn’t queued anything yet. So I wait. I run it again. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. And when it finally does start showing me checks, I’m staring at a list of job names with no idea whether that 3m 52s I’ve been waiting is normal or a sign that something’s silently wedged. ...

I’ve always liked the idea of backing into parking spaces, but for most of my life I didn’t think much about my motivation for this. After a while I decided that backing in was a sign that I wasn’t a procrastinator. The procrastinators pull straight into places because they’re not even thinking about the potential challenges of backing out later. (Sorry to throw shade on the procrastinators. My snark could be genetically linked.) Viewing the people that pulled straight into spaces as procrastinators satisfied me for decades, yet I always felt like it wasn’t thought through as well as it could be. Despite the philosophical hand-waving, I kept up my tendency to back into parking places. Through the years I’ve learned a few things that might be more convincing. Welcome to a journey through my confirmation bias. ...

Zip Files are Everywhere I grew up with PKZIP. It was a huge improvement over ARC files and other file formats that were supported on PCs in the 80’s and 90’s. Open source implementations of Zip have been available in Linux since the early days. In modern times, tools like 7-Zip provide a popular and friendly interface into the contents of these files. Hopefully this history is already familiar to you since I’m not going to focus on the usefulness of Zip to users, but how often developers have turned to it. ...

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in modern America are not departures from our founding principles but rather the fulfillment of ideals articulated by the nation’s architects. While the practical application of these values has evolved over centuries, the philosophical foundation for DEI can be traced directly to the words and vision of America’s founders, including George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration’s Promise and DEI’s Mission Thomas Jefferson’s most famous contribution to American political philosophy appears at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence: ...

Introduction I really enjoyed reading The evolution of Lua, continued that I learned about thanks to this Hacker News thread. This is a great perspective on the long-term (15 year) evolution of the Lua programming language. While discussing language evolution is not completely unheard of, it is rather atypical of the discussion we usually have around programming languages. Most often you’re only concerned about the syntax or features of a particular language version, usually the latest one. Sometimes you might look at release notes to see when a feature was introduced or a bug was fixed. Our day to day needs don’t often benefit from a longer term perspective. ...

Is anyone in my network looking for work these days? One of our family members works at Vocal Media. They’ve been very happy with their role, so I hope this Senior Software Engineer role could be worth your time to check out. It sounds focused on the data warehouse from the job description. So you don’t have to worry about me competing with you. Feel free to comment on this post or DM me if you’re actively looking for something now.

Artificial Intelligence I had fun putting this together with Galaxy.AI. It is amazing to me how easy it was to get a result that I’m very satisfied with. Galaxy.AI One of the reasons I went into so much detail about Galaxy.AI in my linked-in post about this is that they were offering a months worth of credits for writing a review. I didn’t have to pull any punches, so I was happy to share how’s it been working for me. ...

Subject: New Complete Example: DNSControl → CoreDNS Container with Automated Testing Howdy DNSControl Community, I’m excited to share a comprehensive example repository that demonstrates the complete workflow from DNSControl JavaScript configurations to a production-ready containerized DNS server: 🔗 Repository: https://github.com/fini-net/fini-coredns-example fini-net/fini-coredns-example Public Coredns with dnscontrol example Go 2 1 github.com What This Provides This repository showcases a real-world implementation of: ...

Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done. The Long, Painful History Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils. That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything. Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then… ...