BlogDB

October 2025 Book Reading List

It must be the end of an era. For the first time in over seven years, I read no books to either my son or my daughter.

Call Off Your Dogs

This post discusses recent laws banning social media for adolescents

Call Off Your Dogs

This post discusses recent laws banning social media for adolescents

On having heart surgery at 32

Author’s note: this is a departure from topics that I usually write about. It’s not related to tech, learning, or anything I’ve written about before; it’s my personal experience going through heart...

Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLIII 〜 NewsELEC

Welcome to the 253rd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal and its short-form writing sister publica...

alttab is fantastic

I use Linux, Debian to be exact, and moved from XFCE to use i3wm over two years ago. I’m very happy with my setup and I don’t see me making any changes –unless is moving to Sway when I have to use ...

The Generati

A post about students using generative AI in class

The Generati

A post about students using generative AI in class

The Medici Method

Florence’s leading medieval family turned a banking career into political power and paradigm shifts in art and science. Their methods hold lessons for philanthropy today. The post The Medici Method...

NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 7 — Marginalia Poetry

DAY 7. Marginalia PoetryMarginalia are the notes, arrows, grumbles, doodles, and side-whispers readers leave in the edges of a text. In medieval manuscripts, scribes glossed, quibbled, even sketche...

Refactoring English: Month 11

New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developer...

The rewrite dilemma in software engineering

Rewriting software can be tempting, but understanding the hidden value of accumulated fixes and system stability is key to making the right decision.

NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 6 — Misheard Prayers

DAY 6. Misheard PrayersThe term mondegreen was coined by writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Harper’s essay. As a child, she misheard the ballad line:“They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray / And laid him on ...

Re: Chiseling: The Art of Polishing Vibe Code

Re: https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling Hi Pat! Oh so thrilled to see you got your personal site up and running plus a freshly minted blog post. For the reader: I know Pat from when we both worke...

You Should Write An Agent

Some concepts are easy to grasp in the abstract. Boiling water: apply heat and wait. Others you really need to try. You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. T...

NovPoWriMo 2025: Day 5 — Inventory of What Remains

DAY 5. Inventory of What RemainsAn inventory poem catalogs, lists, and tallies. Unlike the bookish errata/corrigenda, this one lives in the material world, what’s left behind when someone leaves, w...

Zürich and Vaduz

I wasn’t quite sure if I should put this post on this blog or my personal one, but since it is about two people who have been important in my life as well as being involved in open source I figured...

How systemic inequities lead to internalised ableism

For a long time, whenever I was failed by a system in supporting my needs, I internalised it as proof that something was wrong with me. These weren’t isolated incidents but a pattern that reinforce...

Leverage Event Driven Ansible to reduce your automation reaction time

Running a Volleyball club with N8N

Running a community sports club can easily turn into a juggling act of emails, spreadsheets, and schedules. In this article, I share how we used n8n to transform the day-to-day operations of our LG...