BlogDB

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...

Hypocrisy and politics in free and open source software projects

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...

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 past decoder-based models that simply continue the given text (and may be fine-tuned for co...

A Macintosh Story

This is the first post in what I am hoping a series of how I took my 512Ke “Fat Mac” and enhanched it to the state it is today. My Macintosh editing this blog post in MacWrite Releasing the Magic S...

Behold! The Barcode Scanner

Good morning

Woke up pretty early today, around 4:30 AM, and didn’t manage to go back to sleep. But all is good. I spent pretty much the whole time listening to Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythms of War, and it was aw...

Certificate Transparency in Firefox

Firefox 136 looks poised to enforce Certificate Transparency.It may be late, but combined with CRLite (and its other Web PKI progress), it may soon be the browser with the most robust Web PKI suppo...

It's time to move on

In the past few months, I started thinking about how I use social networks and the impact they have on my life. Today, I took a strong decision: it’s time to move on from Instagram, a platform that...

Special Edition — App Defaults, 2025 Edition

Special Edition — App Defaults, 2025 Edition TL;DR:Here are my "app defaults" for the year 2025! This blog post has approximately 250 words and may take 1 minutes to read. Inspired by @robb's first...

Tentative steps back into blogging

So yeah, hi. Hello. Ahem... Good to see you again! It's been a while, and I hope things have been going well for you. Not so long ago, my second son was born, and I stopped writing here. I kept jou...

Don’t use TypeScript’s string enums

I’ve written about TypeScript enums in the past, and back then I encouraged the use of enums with string values instead of numeric ones due to the improved type safety and debuggability you get. Th...