Bookmarks from 2026
196 bookmarks from 2026
“Gravity is worth asking about.” – Unsung
A blog about software craft and quality
Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust - Stack Overflow
The tools themselves are new and their capabilities are in constant flux. If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. But it also points to a flaw in how you use that tool, the process aro
How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed
Differences between “essential vocabulary” lists, 1953 vs. 2023
Convergence Is Not Enough
Getting into trouble with data representations in Automerge.
Running DOOM on our Custom CPU and Going Viral | Armaan Gomes
I get kidnapped by the MIG while adding DDR3 to our CPU
Claude Is Not a Compiler - exe.dev blog
Claude Is Not a Compiler
Meet the Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data Into a Video Game - exe.dev blog
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
AI Model Token Cost Benchmark | Playcode Blog
If you build with an AI coding agent, your workload is basically TypeScript - and that's exactly where the model tokenizer gap is widest. The same TypeScript file becomes 1,178 tokens on Claude's newest tokenizer versus 681 on GPT-5.x's o200k: 1.73x more, before a cent of price d
The truth about being a manager
I vividly remember most of my own journey into engineering management over the years. Throughout my career, I’ve also mentored several people taking the step from engineer to engineering manager. It’s a challenging and often lonely journey, and here are a few truths most new mana
Matt’s Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped The Web
The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.
You can't unit test for taste
I’m building In the Long Run where runners do virtual runs on famous routes around the world. The app tallies up your Strava mileage and plots your total distance as progress against country- or continent-spanning routes. The intention is to provide long-term inspiration and moti
Why I Stopped Arguing With People
I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the
Fixing a kubelet Memory Leak in Kubernetes 1.36 | Blog | HeyOnCall
How I tracked down a tiny Go lifecycle bug in Kubernetes kubelet which leaked a context on every startPodSync.
I discovered a large-scale malware distribution on GitHub
This is the story of how I found 10,000 repositories on GitHub that distribute Trojan malware. They are all from different contributors, have different names, and are not forks of other repositories. But they share a common pattern, which is what allowed me to write a script to f
I hate compilers
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
Loop Engineering
You don't really need to be good at prompting anymore. The thing to get good at is the loop that does the prompting for you. It's five building blocks plus s...
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
I Didn't Become a Developer to Review AI Slop
AI makes PRs cheap, but trust is still expensive. Why developers are stuck reviewing endless AI slop and how automated code review can fix the bottleneck.