Posts

The general consensus is that AI code is bloated, repetitive, non-idiomatic. A study of more than a thousand Reddit and Hacker News threads poetically called what we are seeing “An Endless Stream of AI Slop”. So when I started my latest project, I kicked it off with an admin-editable homepage. That decision forced me to build user registration, login, auth, and sessions right along with it, the necessary plumbing to wire it all up. There’s nothing in our PRD about a CMS. An editable text box just happens to be a simple feature to review on its own, and building it requires all the same auth logic the real product needed anyway. I deployed it to production and reviewed every line before the fun features got a single prompt. Okay, I reviewed most of the lines. Well, I reviewed some sections. 😁 ...

I don’t normally write about recipes, but I made this one and a few friends asked me how I made it, so enjoy. I grew up on cholent and other Eastern European gruel-like stews. My mother would simmer a pot of beans, potatoes and meat for at least 24 hours, until they’re one soft, uniform mass. I loved it. My wife does not, and she’s never warmed to curry either, which meant my goal of eating more plant-based meals kept stalling out. Every high-protein bean dish I tried was either a delicious nutritious paste, or an Indian-style curry, and nothing I found brought joy to our table, until this! ...

Since the cost and effort required to create video has been dramatically decreasing over the last few years I’ve been using it more and more to explain system architectures. To show the impact it can have I took some time to document my hobby project - https://marketfinder.us. The way it harvests the data (pun fully intended) is interesting, and has lots of checkpoints and observation opportunities that make this type of system something I can operate solo. ...

Recently I caught up with a colleague who was one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with. They were also the hardest person to promote. The CTO’s pushback to my request came in one sentence: “They were never in the war room.” The CTO wasn’t wrong about the facts. They were never in the war room, because their systems never warranted one. Everything they shipped was resilient against the failure modes we had, documented well enough that other teams and users could answer their own questions, and boring in the way that well executed systems are boring. On top of that, culturally, they made the people around them better, quietly, without ever boasting about it. ...

That’s Slonik up there in the storyboard image, a friendly PostgreSQL elephant sitting behind a desk under a neon “OPEN FOR BUSINESS” sign, watching a line of AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) shipping containers wait their turn at the door. He was going to star in a video about Azure Private Link. He had a co-star, too: Ricky the Raccoon, our hacker, who shows up first in a hard hat with a jackhammer, then in a top hat and monocle, and finally in a fedora and trench coat where he’s figured out how to spin up his own Azure VM and walk straight in through the “Allow public access from any Azure service” checkbox. There was a circus tent, somewhere in Act 2, representing the entirety of Azure’s customer base flooding through that checkbox like a carnival. ...