- 2026
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"My blog now uses Claude Opus 4.5 to compute the current year for the copyright footer!" Peak 2026.
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The internet by the numbers; reminds me that PostHog has a long way to go to reach web-scale relevance.
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Radical Swiss watch design from Hodinkee.
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The font wars have reached the federal government.
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My brother wrote this! It's about emergent periodicity in the collective synchronous flashing of fireflies. Science is cool.
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On the "boring stack" of seed-stage management.
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Justin Duke (Buttondown) on product refactoring.
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TechCrunch's tally.
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Airbnb's UX pivot, told through one photo.
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How a fake sneaker problem sparked a $4B marketplace.
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Deep analysis of Meta's acquisition of the AI wearable startup.
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"The way AI is driven is maybe the most effective tool at exposing idiots I've ever seen."
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On AI systems that feed off others' infrastructure.
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The case for small models in agent workflows.
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Andrej Karpathy's year-end LLM review.
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TkDodo argues tooltips are a UI antipattern.
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Contrarian takes on popular software design patterns.
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Steve Yegge on his multi-agent workspace manager. See also: [steveyegge/gastown](https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown) and [steveyegge/beads](https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) ("memory upgrade for your coding agent").
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Dan Abramov's latest, on social/collaborative filesystems. Always thinking different.
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Deep technical dive on making LLM inference deterministic across batches. Essential reading if you're building on top of LLMs.
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Utsav Mamoria on building a life of the mind.
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Fernando Borretti making the case for putting yourself out there.
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Chris Arnade's Walks the World.
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The title says it all.
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Freddie deBoer on the state of cultural criticism. Also his follow-up: [All Kidding Aside, I Find the Creative Arc of Stranger Things to Be Quite Sad](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/all-kidding-aside-i-find-the-creative).
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More Sam Kriss.
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Sam Kriss continues to be one of the most interesting writers working today.
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Phil Haack's reflections on his first year. Phil's a coworker and friend, and this piece is both honest and inspiring.
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Cate Hall on effort and self-deception. One of those essays that sits with you uncomfortably.
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"Rapidly went from 80% manual coding to 80% agent coding." This is the signal. When Karpathy says the workflow has flipped, pay attention.
- 2020
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Resonant and beautiful.
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I also found this piece on Hystoria -- I think the overall conclusion reaches a bit, but I did appreciate the data-driven approach to attempting to quantify intelligence across multiple axes.
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got me thinking about [Veblen goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good) and [Giffen goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good): to what extent do we overvalue surface-level things because we're trying to recreate the intrinsic value of the thing that we're imitating?
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h/t @lethain for recommending this piece: it's a well-written deep dive into the meta work that goes into writing a technical book. In Martin's case, his book is wildly successful, so it's an inspirational (if aspirational) read.
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Nathan Larson is an excellent technical writer and someone who I've been fortunate enough to work with on some of my technical pieces in the latter half of this year. His year in review is particular interesting because it's so metrics-driven; I'd encourage any data junkie to check it out :)
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Contract management software tools are becoming more and more mature, and this tool is following that trend: it's a CLI that lets you generate arbitrarily complex contracts with minimal inputs needed!
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Haskell has type inference, which is a useful feature when coding but sometimes makes it more complicated when code reviewing to see which types are being used if you're reviewing a part of the code that doesn't directly reference. This tool basically does the same thing as most IDEs do, only in the browser. Super useful!
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I love Snoyberg's Haskell posts; his deep knowledge and passion for improving the language come through in every post, and they're full of detail and insights. One of the bad parts he references in this post is pattern matching, which he has a follow-up post for here: [Pattern matching](https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/pattern-matching/).
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Crime coverage is terrible -- it’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve. And because it so rarely meets the public’s needs, it’s almost never newsworthy. If we weren't so addicted to gory details as a population, we'd have no need for it. We should get rid of it.
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This piece got me so mad.
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Any project where [Jacob Collier](https://twitter.com/googlearts/status/1339948535312130051) is involved is a good project IMO. But seriously this is an incredible bit of tech. I played around with it for way too long.
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I think this year is a sign of wild years to come, but until we have data for that, here's a picture history of the craziest year of my lifetime.
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Tech companies that are useful without being bloated and overwrought. Aspirational.
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I don't have enough data to make a comprehensive opinion on the Timnit Gebru situation, but from what I've seen so far it I'm definitely not siding with Google, especially not after reading the pathetic "apology" that stank of gaslighting. However, the paper that Timnit worked on is very interesting, since the main thesis is that much of our ML research is pointed at the _wrong problems_. It's worth checking it out in detail.
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This is an absolutely mind-boggling bit of photography, and I love how the photographer makes a point to talk about how the majority of these wild, transparent creatures that live deep down are mostly larval forms of adult animals that may look much more "normal" to our eyes. Larval forms of terrestrial animals are [super](https://www.nparks.gov.sg/nparksbuzz/issue-19-vol-4-2013/conservation/the-secret-life-of-dragonfly-larvae) [wild](https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/antlion-larvae-doodlebug-larvae), and it's cool to see similar bizarre appearances from aquatic larvae.
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This post is cuttingly sarcastic and calls out some folks that I know personally in the tech writing community, but I think it's more of an indictment of the people who buy these courses than the folks who make them. Really, I think it's mostly trying to say is that the author is frustrated by all the folks in tech who are taking advantage of less-motivated but well-wheeled technologists who are desperate for any edge on finding fulfillment and satisfaction that doesn't involve working hard or taking risks. Can't blame him.
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Haskell has a reputation both internally and externally for having-poorly documented libraries (it's the [2nd-most cited reason](https://taylor.fausak.me/2020/11/22/haskell-survey-results/) for folks' unwillingness to embrace the language). And I kinda get it; I personally think Haskell code does _read_ quite clearly once you've spent some time grokking functional programming. However, I also think that documentation and "here's what this code literally _does_" are two different things, and Haskell could certainly improve in the "documentation", i.e. "here's why we chose to implement the code this way, and what we imagined the use case that method/library is solving" category. That's where this blog post shines; Haskell has a excellent documentation toolchain, and I think that when it's done well (Mercury's codebase, for example, is one of the better-commented ones that I've seen), Haskell can have as good of documentation as any language -- frankly, I think it can be one of the best, since the language itself does such a good job of explaining the "how" that the comments need only focus on the "why".
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This paper attempts to answer the excellent question: "just how well do we understand the diversity of species in our biome?"
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This paper examines bias in word embeddings, and how that bias carries forward into models that are trained using them. There are definitely some dangers to be aware of here, but also some cause for hope as we also see that bias can be detected, measured, and mitigated.
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Performance, like most things in software engineering, is a tradeoff, but for folks who are interested in considering potential opportunities for speeding up TypeScript apps, this wiki outlines many concrete steps that developers can follow to do that.
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I love Sourcegraph, have used it at previous companies, and deeply resonate with the problem they're trying to solve.
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I'm lucky to have the privilege to be as insulated from Covid as anyone else in this country, and so each week I try to read something to keep the direness of the pandemic as close to the front of my mind as possible.
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I don't use TikTok because I waste enough time online as it is but I after watching some of these videos I get how people can spend so much time on it. Creeps me out.
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) got me feeling this kind of way: [Exasperated Exuberance](https://themargins.substack.com/p/exasperated-exuberance)
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I've always read for pleasure. Ever since I could read, it's something I've always enjoyed doing, and I end up reading between 20-30 books a year just because I can't help myself. This article makes an interesting case for the value prop of reading, which I found interesting, especially since I don't really care about it. I read because I'm curious, because I enjoy the feeling of losing myself in a book, and because I honestly can't help myself. But, if you're the type of person who chooses their hobbies based on how these hobbies will benefit them, I'm all for encouraging folks to read more. To wit, here's my favorite except from this piece: "reading is not about getting outside gains. It’s primarily about taming your inner demons and finding comfort in your own skin. Once you start accepting yourself the way you are, eventually, positive consequences will follow."
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Cool read on the value of language servers in improving overall developer experience. My favorite line: "Linting, typing, always-running-compilation and other forms of write-time checks and optimizations are not new. In fact, when dev teams write unit tests and lint rules, they are essentially creating their own bespoke language server for their own app. What's new is that giving realtime feedback is now a responsibility shared by frameworks. This standardization increases productivity both when starting a new project and moving between projects."
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My favorite line: "In short, if you’re in search of generalizable knowledge that compounds exponentially over time, then blub studies looks like the crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff. So it’s easy to see why people give up on understanding all the blub they’re surrounded by, except what they need to get the job done. But for me, the opposite attitude has been more productive. Computers can be understood—even if it’s hard and takes a while. Blub studies is more generalizable than it seems, and has its own way of compounding over time, too. That makes it a lot more useful than you’d expect."
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Well-researched and thorough essay taking aim at some of Paul Graham's rhetoric and his history not following through on language design concepts. Spawned some [Twitter])(https://twitter.com/ztellman/status/1336046099207864320) and [HackerNews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716) drama, as expected.
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Some findings from the 2020 State of Haskell survey that extracts some additional insight from the data by clustering the respondents into various categories based on their Haskell usage and experience and analyzing the responses of those clusters.
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What happens after you go past Senior? Will Larson, CTO of Calm, has been interviewing Staff-plus engineers across the industry for his new book, Staff Engineering. This is his first full-length interview podcast episode!
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Slow and stable works for a business if everyone is on the same page.
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My favorite paragraph: "When these libraries were built, about a century ago, they needed people to take care of them. Andrew Carnegie had given New York $5.2 million, worth well over $100 million today, to create a city-wide system of library branches, and these buildings, the Carnegie libraries, were heated by coal. Each had a custodian, who was tasked with keeping those fires burning and who lived in the library, often with his family. “The family mantra was: Don’t let that furnace go out,” one woman who grew up in a library told the New York Times." New York has so much cool history and this piece does a great job of conjuring up the historical context around a cool New York attribute.
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Jonah Weiner writes this hilarious newsletter on fashion, culture, and general media-elite navel-gazing, and I loved this week's interview with Lorde. I'm a big Lorde stan and it's not surprising that this newsletter's interview with her was so cool.
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[Photo quiz: This is an experiment about how we view history](https://pudding.cool/2020/10/photo-history/), [Why are K-pop groups so big?](https://pudding.cool/2020/10/kpop/) Big batch of projects from one of my favorite online newsletters: The Pudding. My mini-descriptions will not do any of the links justice -- check them out!
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Fantastic follow-up to [this piece](https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/11/01/names-are-not-type-safety/) by another excellent Haskell engineer.
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Is there anything more terrifying, and at the same time more useful, to a database vendor than Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen? As the abstract of this paper wryly puts it, “experience shows that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim.” Jepsen captures execution histories, and then examines them for evidence of isolation anomalies.
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DB migrations are a common operation when database changes are needed to accommodate, say, 3rd-Party API changes. This is a useful guide on how to do these DB migrations in a type-safe way.
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This is cute!
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and [psql command line tutorial and cheat sheet](https://tomcam.github.io/postgres/). More useful PostGRES tools. My workplace is a big PostGRES shop and I'm sharing the things I've been reading.
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I used to use lighthouse for my site, and while it does some things well, I've since upgraded to a new tool -- the reasons in this article aren't the reason why, but they're funny.
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The author transparently lays out his work, projects, and ROI for a bunch of side hustles that he'd done over the last 6 months. Engaging read.
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Interesting perspective on reframing the role of a senior engineer to focus more on mentorship and guidance and less on actually churning out code and owning features. In my experience, this is the best way that senior engineers can maximize their value.
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Long read on how being good at your job can often lead to not being recognized as such because many workplaces measure and reward the wrong things.
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Fascinating read on the overlap between state-run economic engines and the exploitative policies of certain big tech companies that mirror them.
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World-class piece from Ben Thompson on why it's no longer easy to make the new Facebook or Google.
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PostGRES is probably my favorite open-source technology and it's amazing to see how many good resources there are to learn about it. This link visualizes every part of the PostGRES stack and explains what it does.
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I love reading about exploits and this one was a thorough writeup (complete with a video) and an engaging read.
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Long and technical read about how some languages ban recursion to ensure programs "terminate". While that's technically true, its usually irrelevant.
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One of the trickiest challenges of getting started effectively with Scala can be managing the various different dependency versions. While I prefer [coursier](https://github.com/coursier/coursier) for dependency management myself, many of my coworkers like SDKMAN and this post provides a thorough overview of using it.
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Another excellent read from Julia Evans about how to explain things well. Some of her techniques include (1) write true explanations (as compared to ELI5-esque ones) (2) only use visuals if the visuals are easy to understand (3) tell a relevant story and (4) have a specific audience (explanations are not one-size fits all).
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In the same spirit of the previous link, this one is a story of someone who did successfully accomplish the very difficult challenge of building, scaling, and selling his technology business.
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and [Holy heck this is hard](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8ebe864174). Hackernews is mostly a great thing to read if you're interested in cool content but the comment sections can be a a total cesspool and the first link is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how any time someone does something cool and shares it with Hackernews then there's always a bunch of folks who think it's _super edgy_ to just dunk on it. And the second link is a reflection on how hard making and scaling a product independently is really difficult.
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I think a lot about the effect of ML on music generation and this article does a decent job summarizing the current state of AI music generation. Worth checking out Google's [Magenta Project](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/), too.
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Specifically, I liked the question of "how would we reliably and safely get every American $10 every week?"
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This is the best thing I read last week. Absolutely captivating content about (among other things) how well-moneyed startups are weaponizing government programs that were intended to help small businesses.
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Standard read on how to set up a Haskell dev environment. I've been reading a lot of these lately as I've been trying to find the best way to run Haskell on my machine and the approach outlined by this author works well for me so far.
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Another cool application of Haskell that, while not as battle-tested by Mt. Production as the Facebook applications are, still does a great job of showing an area where Haskell is an exemplary product fit. TL;DR, Haskell is a world-class language for writing DSLs.
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Again, another great post from Facebook engineering when they were solving problems that no one else was worrying about. Back in 2017 the engineering team at Facebook had a problem. They needed a table store to power core control plane services, which meant strong guarantees on durability, consistency, and availability. They also needed it fast – the goal was to be in production within 6 to 9 months. While ultimately this new system should be able to take advantage of the latest advances in consensus for improved performance, that’s not realistic given a 6-9 month in-production target. This paper describes what Facebook did to solve this problem.
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Troy Hunt's exploit write-ups are always interesting and this one was a particularly egregious bug.
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The Kotlin compiler is smart, but sometimes you understand your code better than the compiler. With the use of Kotlin Contracts (a new compiler feature), you can transfer your knowledge to the compiler by specifying the effect that the invocation of a function produces.
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this is good actually; the smaller improvements are indicating that our views on what constitutes "good design" are starting to converge, which means that there's less instability in how we approach UX design.
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A great example of learning in public by a guy named Timil in London. I'm currently working through his notes (and the source material) from the [Spark Course](https://timilearning.com/posts/mit-6.824/lecture-15-spark/).
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Honestly, this was one of my favorite reads of the week because it's an thorough and detailed writeup of how Facebook solved a technical problem in the perfect way by using Haskell. One my current gripes with Haskell blogs (I'm still pretty new to learning which ones to read, so bear with me) is that many of them focus on small, one-off problems and don't make a case for why Haskell is the best tool for an enterprise use case. This post does a great job for that, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's curious about why Haskell matters for enterprise software development.
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Another excellent criticism of some of Haskell's warts from the prolific Snoyberg. If you're interested in critiquing programming language design choices, especially for a language as carefully designed as Haskell, you'll likely enjoy this read. Rust fans probably will, too ;)
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Often tutorials and books are overly generic, leaving it up to the reader to wade through all the tools and styles available to a language on their own. These articles are meant for a user who is comfortable with a language in its REPL (if available) or building individual modules, but may not be comfortable taking the step to producing an application or library that is ready to be consumed by others or deployed to production.
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As someone with a lot of backend development experience who hasn't worked as much on building a pretty frontend to match, this app platform speaks to my soul.
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A pragmatic approach to designing software. Good content to consider when code reviewing or writing your own code.
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My graduate school friends likely know this stuff already, but as someone who is trying to read more papers for fun, I got a lot out of this piece, which profiles several academics providing tidbits of advice on how to read papers effectively. A big consistent theme: have an engaging task (note-taking, highlighting, writing) to do alongside the paper read to encourage active engagement with the material and prevent eye-glazing.
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Grab a coffee for this one. Probably 2. Dijkstra is one of the pioneers of computer science as a discipline and this is a detailed profile on his life.
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Another excellent technical deep dive on accidental misuse of the `newtype` keyword to attempt to provide type safety that only ends up providing an alias. It's long but excellent.
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Julia Evans tipped me off to this excellent read from Lara Hogan about how to effectively drive your career even in a situation where your manager isn't providing the support that you need. I know a few of folks who have been in this situation and I think anyone who's struggled with their relationship with their boss would get something useful from this piece.
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As the world shut down this spring, The New York Times dropped the paywall to its What To Cook collection. It was a sign of goodwill to the millions of people stranded at home looking for a culinary project — or just some comfort food — but it was also a timely ploy to lure more subscribers into NYT Cooking, the paper’s standalone recipe storehouse and home kitchen guide.
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Inspiring profile on one of the most inspiring guys in tech. I'm not really a Go or K8s user but I have big respect for Kelsey's work and work ethic.
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I found this incredibly relatable; it talks about the foundational component of "fun" and how the quarantine has denied us one of the critical factors, which is spontaneity and the freedom to push ourselves outside of our comfort zone. With caution being espoused so liberally in these pandemic times, fun is clearly suffering.
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This was written a while ago, but I only found out about the author this week (an economist named Jason Harrison), and I thought this was an interesting analysis of why recessions tended to lead to "Great Inflations" due to the policies put in place by the Fed, rather than recessions being a result of significant supply-side shocks. It's a nice contrarian take to classic macroeconomics and worth considering.
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Interesting perpsective on the heuristics and hard metrics used by Pariss Athena (the founder of Black Tech Pipeline (BTP)) to calculate the best time for her to quit her day job and focus on her passion project.
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I love blog posts like this one that take common industrial software engineering challenges and employ fundamental CS concepts to solve them.
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As a software consultant, I don't bill my clients for the time spent thinking in the shower, but this post convinces me that maybe I _should_ ;)
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I really needed to read this post this past week. I've been spending a ton of time lately working on my side project and I've found myself burning out at both my day job and my side project. Despite the title of this post: this blog doesn;t encourage readers to quit their side hustles, but simply asks them to consider if the opportunity cost of working on a side project is worth the tradeoff of excelling in their existing day job. Many of us tend to write off the benefits that come from doing your day job well.
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This piece challenges the reader to think about the difficulties of clock synchronization in distributed architectures. Makes for a great read when coupled with [this podcast from Signals and Threads](https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/).
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A report of running a virtual hackathon at ScalaMatsuri Day 2 Unconference.
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Deep dive into the details of Helios, a distributed, highly-scalable system used at Microsoft for flexible ingestion, indexing, and aggregation of large streams of real-time data that is designed to plug into relationals engines. As an ingestion and indexing system, Helios separates ingestion and indexing and introduces a novel bottoms-up index construction algorithm. It exposes tables and secondary indices for use by relational query engines through standard access path selection mechanisms during query optimisation. As a reference blueprint, Helios’ main feature is the ability to move computation to the edge.
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Another intense read about intense subject matter, this piece is Scott Galloway at my favorite -- he gets deep to the human element of a reader question and dispenses sage advice on how to deal with the passing of a parent. Having lost my Grandmother recently and gone through both my own grief and the secondhalf grief of my parents during this time, this piece rang especially true for me.
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This piece was a fun read on decidedly not fun topic topic. I'd never heard of this author before, but his candor in writing about such an intense topic drew me in and makes me want to read more of his writing. Definitely worth a read if you need a refresher on things to be grateful for.
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Just trust me.
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Fascinating read on how to decode censorship patterns used by the secret service when redacting public information, and then applying those decoding techniques to decode the Ghisliane Maxwell deposition.
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Delete your Facebook account.
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You should listen to this [Reply All](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd) podcast before reading this piece :)
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I'm pretty new to the blogging game but even I recognize the importance that good SEO can have on getting my posts in front of a wider audience. This article provides a great summary on low-hanging SEO fruit for your blog or website that can be tackled without making any major changes to your content production flow.
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Dan Luu is a great writer and teacher of industrial software engineering and this repo is a cool collection of postmortems published by a variety of different industries. If you work in operations at all, postmortems are an unfortunate but vital part of the job, and this cache of postmortems makes for great inspiration when it comes to designing and implementing a postmortem process.
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and [Signals and Threads: Language Design](https://signalsandthreads.com/language-design/). Signals and Threads is my favorite podcast in tech right now: Ron Minsky is an engaging and enthusiastic host and he has a plethora of incredible engineering talent at Jane Street to pull information from. This weeks podcasts covered my two areas of programming interest: language design, and machine learning, and I especially enjoyed both of them.
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and [Generic IOApp alternative](https://alexn.org/snippets/2020/10/15/generic-ioapp-alternative.html). Alexandru Nedelcu is an excellent Scala engineer and prolific writer, and these two pieces are great foundations (with plenty of example code) for understanding how to build pure IOApps and effect runtimes using Cats and Cats-Effect. If you're interested in pure FP for Scala, understanding this is the equivalent to a 101 course, and Alex makes it really easy to grok.
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Sorting is one of _the_ classic problems in computer science and this paper provides some interesting benchmarks for a new type of ML-driven sorting algorithm that significantly outperforms RadixSort on a massive (1 billion item) dataset, and that performance _includes_ time to train the model. This is a pretty exciting result for anyone interested in sorting data at a large scale.
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This paper is a wild ride into the world of true "edge computing" as it outlines some of the interesting approaches used by semi-autonomous micro-satellites that work together to send information to space to earth with limited bandwidth.
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Just trust me.
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The answer, of course, is because the "simplest" things are the things that require the least amount of assumptions, which are some of the hardest things in the world to actually find.
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I loved this link! If you've ever wanted to improve your poker playing skills (and, by extension, your betting abilities) through a grounding in first principles, Avi Rubin's course provides a thorough overview of how you can do that (the only thing to really do after, of course, is practice).
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Humans can only live in a comparatively small range of climates on the planet, and I find it interesting to see how we've pushed those boundaries throughout human history. If you find that interesting, too, you'll probably like this.
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Sam Halliday (@fommil) is an excellent writer and very knowledgeable about FP, especially Haskell. I recommend this piece for anyone who's looking for some guiding principles about being an effective industrial engineering team with Haskell (or for anyone who _wants_ to be an industrial engineering team with Haskell).
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The Observer Effect is a new site I've found that does longform interviews with tech leaders. I enjoyed this profile on Spotify's Daniel Ek, I love how much Daniel empowers his team around him to make good decisions and how that empowerment frees up time for him to focus on the future (he mentions that he's currently focused on 2025, which is crazy to think about).
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I recommend this to anyone who's looking to level up their communications game (which should be almost everyone -- good communication skills are absolutely worth their weight in gold in tech). The Pyramid Principle is a tried-and-true McKinsey practice for effective communicating complex topics.
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Aphyr has written several hilarious posts about tech interviewing that are as technical and brilliant as they are entertaining. Each one is a treat to read. Here's their newest :)
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This is a bit of a biased article but I work on the mu ecosystem at 47 Degrees and my Haskell coworkers just released an excellent addition to the library. This piece is a good complement to the Sam Halliday article because it talks a lot about the practical benefits of using mu with Haskell to build a modern distributed microservice without adding too much complexity.
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Wix has a great engineering blog, especially for Scala-related work, and I recommend this guide to anyone looking to write an open-source library in Scala and doesn't know where to start. (I'm also writing a blog post about getting started in open-source, so stay tuned!)
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I'm still trying to understand this piece (and the [original talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7drE24geUw) about [Conflict-free replicated data types](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type) from Martin Kleppmann), but it's exciting to see all of the breakthrough happening in distributed computing, since I'm a big believe that the future of software will continue to be distributed.
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I write a ton of content on VSCode (including this blog!), and it's pretty amazing to see the dominance of this editor among developers in the last decade. VSCode is a great example of how powerful an editor can become when a powerful company focuses on the right things and aggressively innovates on them.
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I'm really into strongly-typed languages, so this piece was a fun read for me to challenge my assumption that strong typing is _always_ a good thing for a programming languages. The major takeways from the author are that the 3 major benefits of type systems in a language are (1) type inference, (2) type soundness, and (3) sum/tagged union types.
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This website is an experiment from Dutch privacy researcher Tijmen Schep that tries to codify how normal your online profile is based on ~20 key demographics. It's pretty shocking to see how much data is colected about you in the process of browsing the internet, and this piece is a sobering reminder about all the privacy many internet users willingly give up to be online. If this subject matter interests you, Schep has another site that I recommend checking out: [Social Cooling](https://www.socialcooling.com/).
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A story of two young women and growing up in Las Vegas in the early 2000s, told through stories on the party line. I'd never heard of party lines until [this podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/p-line/id1522337888?i=1000485162923) from California Love, and now this is the second story in less than a month I've read about them. I missed this train as a kid, lol.
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This piece makes the case that the high valuation of Snowflake is largely due to strong performance in the following 5 metrics: (1) Growth (2) Net Retention (3) Net Promoter Score (NPS) (4) Average Contract Value and (5) Net Loss. At my old company we frequently measured our success against these 5 metrics as well, as we ended up with a similar result to Snowflake where we were acquired at a valuation that about 10x'd our revenue. Our numbers weren't as insane as Snowflake, but these metrics seem like a pretty good gold standard for a SaaS company valuation.
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Honestly I liked this post because it validated my experience at my previous company as a senior engineer who "couldn't get anything done".
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A quick read that talks about the "seeking circuit" that many of us manufacture when we open (and save) a bunch of browser tabs.
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This is a really nice (haskell) tutorial by Andres Loh, Conor McBride, and Wouter Swierstra that is demonstrates minimal implementation of Lambda PI (STLC + dependent types). It's only 30 pages but really clean and easy to read. If you like Haskell, or even just formal verification, you'll have fun with this. The progressions goes as follows;
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Scala 3 represents a massive paradigm shift for the Scala language and this post lays out some of the best new features that the latest version will introduce. Among them are:
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This is a Haskell post, but the idea that functions that return nothing (i.e. perform side-effects) are a code smell is an important idea that I think is worth considering in _any_ language.
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A fun counterpoint to my post last week on "My Favorite Rust function", this piece explains why Rust's `std::ops::Range` type is full of confusing features. As a language designer, it's fascinating to think about how users will interact with programming languages and posts like this are a good reminder on the things that improve language ergonomics.
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Kotlin is a interesting language for a lot of reasons, but one of my favorite attributes about the language is that it was designed for industrial programming -- meaning it's optimized for large codebases with many users that grow over time. As a result, one of the things that it needed was an optimizing compiler so that compilation time didn't become untenable as the codebase grew. This blog post from Jetbrains outlines many of the tradeoffs that they considered when designing Kotlin's optimizing compiler, and is a good read for not only compiler nerds, but any engineer who has to think hard about tradeoffs.
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Okay honestly I haven't read this yet but I love everything in the title so just trust me on it I hope.
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Fascinating on the precariousness of middle-class life through the lens of Lifestyle Blog Trump voters.
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Just trust me. TBQ is the coolest, edgiest, and most accessible lit quarterly I've found on the internet.
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I'm really digging Om Malik's writings lately; last week I posted a piece on Brunello Cucinelli, and this week I went into the archives for a great read on Jenna Wortham, who's NYT podcast (_Still Processing_) I've been loving during the pandemic. Non-technically, totally fun read.
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This piece is an excellent summary of the relationship between virality and "earned audience" that comes with creating conflict online. My favorite quote: "Whether you’re an individual writer looking to boost your profile or a private-equity fueled global fast food conglomerate, everyone is being trained in the easiest of hacks. Stoke conflict. Be kind of a dick. Go at someone. If there’s no one to go at, build a strawman. Or just subtweet no one. Whatever you do, structure your communication in a conflict or the feeds won’t listen."
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A lot has been written on how the woeful American response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one of the areas that almost consumers can relate to is that it seems as though we have a shortage of _everything_ when it comes to shopping online. If you, like me, are curious as how how these shortages came to be, you'll find this piece interesting.
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The thesis of this piece is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but basically it comes down to "we need projects to fail so that bureaucrats can relax about their projects failing and maybe address project management with a more realistic scope instead of holding on to success at all costs".
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This week's Scott Galloway goes after Palatir, and makes the case that Palantir is an over-valued, over-hyped government services company who's only skill is in losing money at a more impressive rate than the US government itself.
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One of my big hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to learn more about (and spend more time working on) side projects, and I found this guide helpful. It's a bit too thorough for the types of projects I'm currently doing, but it's comprehensive, and I recommend it for anyone who's interested in marketing their side projects and doesn't know where to start.
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I don't really know much about OS design but this piece was really exciting to me because the ramifications of what's being proposed (an operating system optimized for networked distributed systems, aka a DatacenterOS) would be incredibly impactful in modern computing, especially in open-source.
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This is my new favorite meta-article on reasoning about program logic. Whether you're a declarative, imperative, or functional programmer (or any composition of the 3); I imagine you'll get value out of this piece.
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I hadn't heard of this concept before but it's an interesting classification of languages. Personally, I think it's a pretty arbitrary distinction, but at least it got my thinking about how to categorize different types of programming languages.
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Oh god why didn't the JVM ever care about optimizing tail recursion.
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This is the personal website of the aforementioned Github page! Of course it's one of the coolest personal website I've stumbled upon.
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In reading about parsers in Scala I stumbled onto this guy's Github portfolio, which blew my mind. You owe it on yourself to check out this body of open-source work.
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When researching the author of the previous post I noticed they referenced this article when it came to classifying different types of programmers. Personally, I don't think anyone fits into a neat box when it comes to programming styles, but this article is a fun read if you enjoy pieces that make you look internally and classify yourself.
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I'm working on a lot on parsers at work, so I've got tokenizing on the brain, and this post was a great deep dive into a great Rust function for tokenizing (a function that I learned about in Bodil Stokke's [post](https://bodil.lol/parser-combinators/) about writing a parser in Rust!). If you're interested in Rust, parsers, or even just clever programming in general, you should check this post out (and Bodil's too!)
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Liam O'Connor is a programming languages researcher in London and they just released a really cool-looking theorem prover that, unlike many automated theorem provers, comes with a graphical component for the visually oriented. I recommend anyone who's interested in theorem proving or formal verification to check it out.
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I love fashion and I've always been into Brunello Cucinelli, but I never knew how philosophical or interesting the man was. I kinda stumbled upon this link by accident but I couldn't stop thinking about it all day that I read it.
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My weekly Margins piece, and this one is a doozy. It focuses on the Oracle/Walmart/TikTok deal the absolutely bare-faced the crony capitalism that it entailed. I wrote about Scott Galloway's Crony Capitalists piece a few weeks ago and it's interesting to see that same terminology cropping up a few weeks later in a different context.
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On the heels of Alejandro's post about the theoretical benefits of refinement types is this post from Gordon Rennie at OVO Energy that goes through an example of how to use refinement types to safely and elegantly handle input validation, which is a problem that is the scourge of many a web developer but, as Rennie argues in this post, is trivial to handle if you use a language that supports refinement types like Scala.
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LMAO so I know I just got off my soapbox talking about why simple Haskell is best, but that doesn't mean it's not worth understanding some of the strong types in Haskell so that you can take advantage of them when you code. In this post by my coworker Alejandro, he walks through the benefits of understanding rudimentary types in Haskell and how you can ultimately use dependent types to prove things to the compiler, which leads to writing code that is free of (software) bugs by definition
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This week I read a lot about the "pragmatic" Haskell, which the concept of writing Haskell code that (while maybe not as powerful or fancily-typed as possible) is readable, maintainable, and takes advantages of Haskell's static typing and ergonomics. There's this whole movement called Boring Haskell that's been espousing this concept for years, (see writings from [Fommil](https://medium.com/@fommil/simple-haskell-is-best-haskell-6a1ea59c73b), [Snoyman](https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2019/11/boring-haskell-manifesto), and [Matt Parsons](https://www.parsonsmatt.org/2019/12/26/write_junior_code.html)), but it's still a hard habit to break, especially for people who are drawn to Haskell because of all the type-level abstractions you get to do with it. In my opinion, this post is best-targeted at (a) someone who wants to use Haskell at work and needs some data to help their manager or director sign off on a project or (b) someone who works on an existing Haskell team that's struggling to hire developers with the necessary pre-requisite programming skills to write complex Haskell code.
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Tony Morris has written a bunch of intuitions on useful FP Algebraic Data Types over the last few weeks and I finally am getting around to reading them. I wish I'd read them earlier, honestly. If you're keen on trying to understand some genuinely useful FP concepts and their associated algebraic jargon, start here.
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If, like me, you live in a neighborhood where it seems like bougie construction is cropping up everywhere, you may sometimes feel that all new development looks the same. This story sheds some light on how some aspects of new development (such as the typefaces used) are exactly as isomorphic as you may think.
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Fun long read from the Texas Monthly that profiles a prolific businessman / erstwhile scam artist who committed the wildest insurance fraud in the history of Texas.
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The West Coast of the US is extremely on fire currently and it's incredibly hard to ignore; as of writing this my city has some of the worst air quality of all the major west coast cities. This piece makes the case that major media outlets in the US are refusing to acknowledge systemic climate change as a cause for these fires. This type of negligence makes many folks (including yours truly) pretty outraged.
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I'm not worried about AGI coming for my job as an engineer just yet, but it's still cool seeing software write an op-ed without any human input.
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This is the most fun vulnerability disclosure I've ever read. "Alex" is hilarious and their posts are both insightful and a great read.
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I read this a year ago but it came up again in my work Slack today and generated a lot of buzz. I like ErikBern's writing in general and this is one of the few pieces with a "Why X is Y" title that, instead of being a puff piece, tackles an ambiguous problem (project planning) with statistics. I recommend it for any engineer, but especially an engineering manager who's looking to improve their metrics around project planning.
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This piece discusses capitalism's impact in devaluing essential services through the les of American libraries. I recommend it if you're curious about how libraries work in the US and you want to get mad about how little they tend to be valued financially.
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This post is also on micro-optimizations, only this time on a higher-level: it outlines how to speed up an android gradle build. I recommend it to anyone who's familiar with Android and gradle and is looking to improve the speed of their builds through a few accessible micro-optimizations.
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The last in a series of 10 posts dating back to 2016 from the principal engineer on the rust compiler. The whole list is worth reading if you're the type of person who's curious about compiler technical details and micro-optimizations.
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My buddy [Jack](https://twitter.com/JFK_but_lamer) sent me this one and it's a great little post that showcases what remains my favorite application of Neural Nets: making trippy art in a programmic way. I'm hopeless at fine motor skills but I love that programs like this help people like me make art with nothing but computers and a little creativity.
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I love Thorsten's writings and this blog is a great koan about how cool programming is. Say what you want about tech as an economic or social system, a lot of us got into the industry because of the pure joy of programming, and this read helped rekindle some of that love.
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This is a potentially seminal paper from OpenAI that lays the foundation of AI-driven automated theorem proving, which goes a long way towards training AI towards writing software. The ramifications are exciting and terrifying.
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I'm into language design and it's cool to see the CSS working group being so transparent in sharing the mistakes that were made when developing the language. CSS is also a very different language than many other programming languages so the fact that many of the mistakes appear syntactic belies the fact that they are often related to the architecture. This list is also interesting to consider if you wanted to work on developing a DSL that transpiles to CSS, for example.
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In a world that seems to be heating up constantly, it's interesting to reflect on all the various times where humans moved to a place, set up shop to keep things cold, and innovated.
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Another awesome COVID-19 piece from Ed Yong, this one focuses on the idea of why it's so hard to feel like you have any stability in US (largely due to systemic gaslight by the institutions meant to protect the US citizens). Good read if you're feeling helpless and you want to assign a mental model towards the helplessness.
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I'm obsessed with AHP's _Culture Study_ , so forgive me if I post about it a lot. But this piece resonated with me because it interviewed actual people in Portland to get their perspective on what's happening there, which (of course), is much mellower than entertainment media wants us to believe. As a Seattleite who dealt with this same overblown crap when CHOP was happening, this piece feels vindicating.
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The best pop-finance you'll read all week imo. This piece attempts to explain what the hell the stock market has been up to during these last few months that's accessible for an everyman. I recommend it to anyone who's curious about why everyone is talking about stonks.
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Cool read on an internal project at Apple that sheds some insights into what work at one of the most secretive companies in the US is like.
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An introduction to threat modeling via a practical example: keeping your bicycle safe in a city. I recommend for anyone who wants a practical example for threat modeling (perhaps to explain to a non-tech-y family member or friend).
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So much of modern cloud computing is in distributed systems, and one of the killer apps of domain-specific modeling that many static FP languages do well is the ability to create programmatic DSLs (i.e. NOT yaml) to define complex distributed systems. This paper lays out a potential DSL design using that idea.
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This was written by my coworkers and is an example of a formal paper about industry-specific CS (in contrast with formal papers about more theoretical or abstract concepts). I recommend it if you're curious about microservice design using purely functional architectures, and I'm also biased because I work on the Scala version of this library so I think the work is personally cool.
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List of shell utilities (traditionally written in C) that have been re-written and improved in Rust. You'll probably like this if you're into system utilities or are a big Rust fan.
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More empirical analysis of software quality, this time trying to answer the hypothesis of whether very short functions are actually a code smell (one of my many pieces that challenges the "clean code" style of programming). I recommend it if you like reading attempted objective analysis of a relatively ambiguous subject.
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Tailscale is a cool company that is tackling the challenge of building a secure network without needing to rely on sysadmins for each intersection, and their blog is generally great. I recommend this piece if you're curious about the technical specifics of how networked devices actually connect with each other.
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The TL;DR is that online tools for things like JWT generation, diff checking, or anything else are access points for accidentally leaking sensitive data. The author encourages doing these operations locally as much as possible.
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This post outlines type checking and decidability in an accessible way. I recommend it to someone who's familiar with the concepts of type systems and can understand the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages but wants to learn more about the subtle differences across popular statically typed langages. If you're into compilers you'll probably like it :)
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"But what sticks out, when you dig in to the data, is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is. Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition".
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When paired with mynoise.net you can attain focus bliss
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You'll like this is you're either (a) a doomer neolib who thinks we're on the cusp of societal collapse (b) someone who enjoys dunking on doomer neolibs but you're curious what sort of content they read and share. I'll let you guess which one I am ;)
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Your weekly dose of gig economy dystopia.
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Creative project from Google Brain's magenta project that creates lo-fi beeps n boops using RNNs and provides a cute pixelated UI to boot. Not quite robust enough to have running in the background during work to try and flow to, but definitely good for spending a break to play around with it.
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Play around with your COVID-19 risk level! If you're someone who likes extrapolating risk from incomplete data sets, you'll probably have fun with it. This is a reminder that I am Not A Doctor.
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I recommend this piece if you want to get some data on what the fuck is happening in international finance.
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This post inspired me to set up automated processes to share my learning publicly in a consolidated location.
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As an aspiring independent consultant this is a great watch.
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Patrick Collison writes some great posts on the big questions he's chewing on. Inspirational stuff.
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This piece speaks to my soul: it's a quick read on a best practice for async communication. Reminds me of [nohello.com](https://www.nohello.com/).
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Click bait title aside, this post makes a compelling case for being cautious about aiming for efficiency at all costs.
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A cool read that attempts to answer the question of "which parts programming language syntax is good and which ones are bad?"
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and [A Solver for Reachability Modulo Theories.](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-45.pdf)
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Technical deep dive on writing a parse combinator in Rust from scratch. I recommend it to anyone who's into parsers, programming language, Rust, or any combination of the three.
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Fun read on the actual cost of adding automations.
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I recommend this for anybody who wants to learn more about Formal Verification but is intimidated by some of the methodologies and jargon (i.e. me).
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Chilling piece on the state of political discourse in the US.
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The story of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat at Google. The least gloomy thing I've read in the last 5 months.
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This article interviews a bunch of higher education workers across the country to paint a worrying picture of higher education's response to COVID-19 in the US. Solid doomscrolling content.
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If you're super over GPT-3 FUD and want to read an empirical study about GPT-3 that isn't just full of bombastic takes, this is a good read. Despite the title, it's not really a hit piece on GPT-3 -- but it does lay out some specific edge cases where GPT-3 fails.
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I recommend this article if you're curious about the affect that WFH has on the stock market
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If you're looking for some well-reasoned words on why you think the US is bungling things on a massive scale but are pro-capitalism and you can't understand why it's not working in the US, you might find this piece insightful.
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Silvia Botros talks about the specifics of succeeding as a senior Individual Contributor.
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Incredibly inspirational post on blogging, writing, speaking, and embracing the public growth that comes therein.
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This post focuses on how to telling logging machinery which portion of the log can be safely discarded to avoid runaway disk storage.
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A bunch of good takeaways from marketing not just Haskell, but any non-mainstream technology.
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TL;DR it's more of the same from the above post, just 9 years later.
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TL;DR Google treats its employees better than its customers and that's why Amazon ate Google's lunch in the cloud platform space.
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An very thorough read on performance engineering within the context of sled, an open-source DB written in Rust.
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Fun Tom Scott Project that compares things and shows you how you did against others.
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PDFs on the internet are still a rough experience and the author encourages alternatives to them.
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Like the above link about learning in public, the author encourages using blogging, speaking, presenting to open-source your knowledge as well as your tech.
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Ponderous and thorough deep dive of Kuaishou.
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I loved all of the specifics that Troy Hunt goes into about running a massively successful open-source project.
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I use Google all the time and this post is a summary of some useful heuristics on how to Google more efficiently.
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This piece helps shed some light on why you feel disenchanted about working at the same place for a while despite enjoying your day job.
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(an oldie but goodie). There's so much software out there that just hasn't been made well and there's many reasons why (and this post explains a bunch of them) but it's still sad.
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Just trust me.
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(this is my 3rd _Margins_ post in as many weeks; if you like pop finance you should just sub to them already)
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Traveling in the time of travel bans.
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Oatly probably doesn't care agbout your health.
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How to build a tech giant. Also scares the shit out of me.
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Deep dive on TikTok. One of the most interesting reads on TikTok that I've ever encountered. Scares the shit out of me.
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Technical deep-dive written by one of my coworkers on the oft-maligned Scala collections library that makes a case for how effective the library is for solving common programming problems at work.
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Amazing post about applying ASTs to represent code as data and query it as such.
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Positive news about the improvements in energy efficiency and how these improvements benefit cloud computing.
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I recommend this piece if you've ever wondered how big tech companies seem to get hacked so easily.
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I recommend this piece if you're interested in the power that capitalizing on fortuitous impact can have on a food brand
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I mean, we knew this already.
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It's a newsletter about newsletters across the internet! V meta.
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Scala has some notorious bad actors in the open-source community and this read is a great overview on how to deal with it. Relevant for any community who has struggled with powerful but dangerous influences.
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Tech often provides large incomes to younger people who have little experience with making tons of money; this post helps a lot with understanding how to make the most out of that money.