BlogDB

The Tiny Book of Great Joys

If you are interested in how I over-engineered the process of making a tiny book for my wife, using AI, a pen plotter, a 3D printer, and a lot of time, you are in the right place. The book is title...

AI Tools Suck and are Amazing

Love Hate

☕️ Infinite Chef CUP Update - OUT NOW 🥤

Our in-browser cooking simulator, Infinite Chef, has received its first major update in half a year, including long-awaited features!

Use custom managers in Renovate

Mend Renovate is a wonderful set-and-forget utility that helps you keep your project’s dependencies up to date. It’s similar to Dependabot, only much better regarding automatic dependency discovery...

The case for sans-io

The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, suppo...

Blog Question Challenge 2025

I've seen this Blog Question Challenge going around for a while now, and recently Brandon was nice enough to challenge me! I have no idea where or why the whole thing started, but here we are. I th...

My son only wants to hear stories and I feel like a TV

Lately, my son has been obsessed with asking us to tell him stories. At first, I eagerly jumped on every opportunity to do so, but now I just find it tiresome. At the same time, I can't really say ...

Some terminal frustrations

A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked: What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you? 1600 people answered, and I decid...

Enhancing my Macintosh 512Ke

This is the second in a series of posts on my Macintosh 512Ke. In my first post I went over the history of how I obtained this machine, initial exploration and repairs over the years. My Macintosh ...

How I feel about Chinese New Year as an Autistic person

Chinese New Year is my most dreaded time of the year as a Chinese Autistic person. The holiday is my ultimate Autistic nightmare. I’d usually visit my aunt’s place, where all my relatives would gat...

My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Seven years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie foun...

Change font-weight based on the user's screen DPI

A lot of us as developers have hi-DPI screens, and we can easily forget to test the websites we build on low-DPI screens. One common issue I noticed is that thin font weights can be hard to read on...

Announcing Last.played

The public release of Last.played a widget maker to show off your Last.FM's latest scrobbled track anywhere images are embeddable.

Lean in to the graph when writing resolvers

Designing great resolver functions in GraphQL is quite unintuitive. Giving consumers the ability to describe their desired response payload means it’s possible for consumers to access fields via su...

Upcoming Events: CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp

The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness! I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem. These conferences alw...

Hypocrisy and politics in free and open source software projects

When our feelings & emotions go against what we think is best

For the past month or so, I've been trying to craft (for it is an act of craftsmanship) a morning routine for myself. In an ideal world, it would look something like this: wake up around 5:20am (ki...

Parametric Subtyping for Structural Parametric Polymorphism

Recursive types, generics (sometimes called parametric polymorphism), and subtyping are all essential features for modern programming languages across numerous paradigms. However, structural subtyp...

Living and Working in a Bizarro World

Reflecting on trying to go through the normal day to day while the world burns around you.

Notes on Deepseek R1

DeepSeek R1 is a large language model which employs test-time compute to generate a response. Unlike many decoder-based models in the past which simply continue the given text (and may be fine-tune...