Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)
Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them
Everything your mentor wants to say but HR won't let them
Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas. Home . Site Map . Subscribe . More at expLog . — Kunal
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
Emacs 31.1 adds a slew of quality-of-life features. It retires its quirky unexec dumper; there are general improvements to tree-sitter, including a much-wanted auto-installer for grammars; and much more.
[I shared this note with my team earlier this week, and am posting it here as well. I hope it is interesting or helpful for others working on building product in the age of AI.]
An archive of this year’s insane timeline of hacks few people are talking about
Friendly articles and tutorials for front-end web developers. ❤️
Traditional Wayland compositors have a monolithic architecture that combines the compositor and window manager into a single program. This has the downside of requiring Wayland window managers to do the significant work of implementing an entire Wayland compositor as well.
Effective writing for software developers
I am forced to leave Google with 2026-08-31 because of the deal with the US Department of War, which is incompatible with my ethical principles.
ZCode silently uploads full Git history to the cloud; this post provides a block rule and source review — checkpoint claims fall apart against the code.
I made a Game Boy Color game that renders images in real time. The player controls an orbiting light and spins an object.
AI commoditizes anything you can specify. It can't (yet) commoditize what requires ongoing operation.
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
A couple months ago we had a post, This paper in Management Science has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it. It’s fatally flawed, and the scholarly community refuses to do anything about it. which was about…
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook [1] . It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!
In 2014 I wrote http_build_url, a temporary PHP polyfill for AOL's CMS. Twelve years and nearly 20 million installs later, I'm deprecating it.
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too. He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up.
I want to share some thoughts on my recent experience with OpenClaw. Over the past year, I’ve been actively using Claude Code for development. Many people believed AI could already assist with programming—seemingly replacing programmers—but I never felt it brought any revolutionary change to the way I work. Sure…
One of the biggest questions I get at Drop-In Time at the library (besides "what is taking up all my cloud storage?") is how to disable or avoid intrusive AI that shows up where people don't want it. This is a guide for people who would like less intrusive AI in their tech environment. Maybe you lik
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
and why communication is so important
Guillaume Técher — Personal website
Working with AI is less predictable than traditional software. That makes leadership skills such as context, clarity, and feedback more valuable.
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care