Web Spy: The Personal Web Crawler I Never Released
I built Web Spy - a desktop app that crawled and cached websites for offline reading. This was before HTTrack, before Pocket, before Instapaper. Never shipped it....
Those Old Programming Books
Dog-eared, coffee-stained, held together by stubbornness and nostalgia. The programming books from the late 1970s that started a 45-year journey in technology....
When Microservices Make Sense
Microservices succeed when you have the right prerequisites: team scale, deployment independence, scaling needs, and operational maturity. Here's how to tell if they're right for you....
C Was the Last Good Language
Why modern languages prioritize developer experience over runtime efficiency. The trade-offs we accepted and forgot. Where Rust tries to have it both ways....
What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
Mutation Testing Primer: Finding Real Bugs
Mutation testing answers what coverage can't: do your tests actually catch bugs? Learn how to use mutation testing tools to find the gaps in your test suite and write tests that genuinely verify corre...
Why AI Can't Count the R's in Strawberry
LLMs confidently say strawberry has two R's because they've never seen letters—only tokens. This tokenization blindness predicts where AI will fail....
Speaker Diarization: The Hardest Problem Nobody Talks About
Why Zoom transcripts attribute quotes to the wrong people. The cocktail party problem isn't solved - it's hidden. Multi-device synchronization as a workaround....
Write Your Own Build Scripts
Build tool complexity has gotten out of control. A 50-line shell script often does the job better than any framework....
Programming Before Google: When You Had to Actually Know Things
Programming in the pre-internet era meant libraries, magazines, and BBSs. The struggle was the education - deep reading because you couldn't skim, memorization because lookup was expensive....
Code Review Is Broken
Code review as practiced by most teams is a bottleneck that provides less value than we pretend. Small PRs, distributed reviewing, and time SLAs can fix it....
My First Computer
1977 was the year everything started. The Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET created personal computing. What it was like to be seven years old, wanting one desperately....
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