📖 Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't by Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010; via Robin Hanson). A blend of anecdotes and social science experiments that didn't replicate. The networking bits seemed fine. Everything else was kinda meh.
📖 Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (2013; via Iridescent Learning). It's interesting to see how work from home policies have ebbed and flowed since 2013.
📝 Why 98.5% of organizations have slow actions/checkout (Chris Goller / depot; via Changelog News). I'm hesitant to fiddle with the git internals, but the sparse checkout and partial clone sound like easy things to try. (Most of GitHub Actions were sped up by using uv.)
📝 Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate (Corey Quinn / The Register; via Changelog News). Hilarious take, but so true. It took me 7 years to be able to close a handful of student accounts (who had inactive emails after graduation) that were still charging my billing account, but whose EC2 instances were not visible to me because of AWS permissions issues.
📝 Game design is simple, actually (Raph Koster). Clickbait title aside, there are twelve compact and useful design lessons each of which is a whole world unto itself.
📝 The Case Against pgvector (Alex Jacobs; via Simon Willison). I actually got questions about picking an index for pgvector; the options aren't great and this article explains why.
📝 Claude Agent Skills: A First Principles Deep Dive (Han Lee). Very long, but informative break down of how Claude's Agent Skills works and how its different from function calling. I was particularly impressed by how the UI has to adapt between information being fed back to the LLM and information for the user.
📝 SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it (Jean-Pierre Bachmann / Jellyfin). In all the times I've gotten a SQLite locking issue, the solution has always been to retry a few times (until some other process releases the lock). But this article suggests a few other ways to solve the problem.
📖 The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (2011; via Shalev NessAiver). Sequel to The Name of the Wind. Patrick Rothfuss joins the ranks of several other fantasy authors in having an unfinished series. I ended up reading the rants of his fans and editors as well as counter points that authors don't owe readers books. This book was a fine sequel; not as great and a bit graphic at times.
📖 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (2007; via Shalev NessAiver). It's got stories-within-stories, sympathetic magic-as-physics, and a prodigy for a main character. What more could you want?
📝 Side project advice (Ned Batchelder). This reads like short & simple advice, but it is clearly hard-won and I should re-read this several times a year.
📝 Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines (Tynan DeBold & Dov Friedman / WSJ). Some of my favorite graphics depicting the impact of vaccines on mortality after being introduced. These are about a decade old and, unfortunately, vaccine hesitancy / avoidance is going to make mortality go up again.
Until ~2015, GitHub Pages hosted over 2 million websites on 2 servers with a multi-million-line nginx.conf, edited and reloaded per deploy. This worked incredibly well, with github.io ranking as the 140th most visited domain on the web at the time.