Is Plur1bus secretly about AI? Officially, no, but that didn't stop me seeing shadows of GPUs in almost every scene. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

AI coding tools either feel magical or incredibly frustrating. A recent experience left me feeling very glad I still know how to code. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Beyond Palindrome! Two men enter, reten nem owt.

CI/CD has been top of mind for me for at least the last couple of years. Now coding assistants are starting to be adopted widely, I'm wondering how the SDLC might change to keep up. Will we be using centralized CI systems 5 years from now? open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

My Apple Watch told me it was 49 degrees today. Lies. I should have looked at my phone before I went out in 17 degree weather without a hat.

I think the Fallout series just invented a new trope: Gory Discretion Shot Fakeout

Iain M Banks's Culture series totals around 1.4 million words. At 750 words a day, that would take 5 years. They were released over a period of 25. Planning and editing are a lot more work than I thought!

The final part! It's been a month and a half since I started working on a Git-backed REST API. High time to wrap it up and answer the dang question already! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

With all this generated code, PRs feel like the bottleneck. Then again, thinking back to my teams before AI, they already were! A PR written in 1 day took 3 or more to approve. So we added linters, shifted left, all that good stuff. We need all that more than ever now.

Wait, you’re telling me that that Chinese robot they’ve been showing off is called the T800? Holy Torment Nexus, Batman.

My git-backed REST API is performant and can even handle concurrent requests, but is it production ready? Here's how I went about making it stable. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

I write fairly regularly, but always feel like I don't read as much as I should. Looking back over the past week, I've read a bunch of articles, so why do I still feel like I'm behind the curve? Subscriptions. (thread follows)

I just learned about NOC the whale. Incredibly creepy until you hear the recording. Then only a bit creepy.

After 18 months working on Ocuroot, it's time to move on. I've had quite a ride but there's no better time than a new year to make changes and try something different. This post goes into why things didn't work out, what I learned, and why it was totally worth it. www.ocuroot.com/blog/winding...

Someone had too much fun

Started on a just-for-fun project yesterday. Rendering all the buildings in NYC in 3D. opendata.cityofnewyork.us has a ton of great data sets, including this building data! Learned a ton about optimizing scenes. Had to get creative with reusing and grouping meshes. #buildinpublic

Squirrel footprints on the scaffold! Magical.

This take is a bit outdated now. At its core it is still true, but lots has happened to improve LLMs as fact-retrieval tools, and I think they’re generally very good at it provided you, the operator, have your head screwed on and do the work to verify.

The more I watch The Traitors, the more Alan Cumming sounds like Moira Rose.

If you're a typical Git user, you may not have heard much about Git trees. They're a key part of plumbing, but don't often show up to the end user. So here's my overview. Don't worry, this particular tree won't leave pine needles all over your carpet! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Low budget horror movie concept: haunted cootie catcher

Watching “The Holiday” with my wife. We put it on as background but forgot how much we enjoyed it. Now gripped. Cooking can wait.

My bones are so brittle, but I always drink plenty of…

Given chocolate drinks weren’t sweetened until the 16th century, Judy must have spent 800 years making some bitter-ass cocoa.

Good grief this might be the most beautiful video I’ve ever watched. You’ll need to have some idea of how LLMs work internally to follow along, but the findings of the papers presented in this video are incredible. youtu.be/D8GOeCFFby4?...

Hear me out: Mobile Zoot Suit Gundam

Can you use Git as storage for a REST API? Over the past few weeks I've managed to get something that works and is even kind of performant. This week I've been trying to handle concurrent requests. Let's see how well it fares when things are busy! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

GitHub announced they're going to charge for self-hosted runners. I can see the why, given they still run the control plane. There's still benefit to self-hosting if you have larger runners, but with the other price cut, it's potentially a big change for some. resources.github.com/actions/2026...

Part 2 of my attempts to back a REST API with a GitHub repo. After seeing painfully slow performance with the CLI, I went a little lower-level and started messing with the server protocols directly. The results were surprising, in the best way! open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Git is great for storing code, and maybe the occasional image or two. It also makes it easy for teams to collaborate and deal with fine-grained changes. But could it be used as a more arbitrary data store? open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

How did a terrible movie like “The One” end up with a sound track including “Down with the Sickness”, “Bodies” and “Last Resort”? Incidentally watching in 2001 it was the first time I heard at least one of them.

"AI slop", "slop bowls" and now I'm seeing "slop" used as a generic description for a not good thing. We've reached peak slop slop.

Now we're past the extra-long weekend, getting down to a fun little side project with Git. More updates tomorrow. #openstandup #buildinpublic

When working with IaC platforms, there's usually some infra you need to configure to get them working. With Terraform, you need somewhere to keep your state, for example. How do you configure this infra? Are you stuck doing it manually, or could you automate it? www.ocuroot.com/blog/iac-boo...

Watching some older sci-fi movies. Is the main character getting drunk/high and watching home movies while acting out their side a common trope or did Minority Report just rip off Timecop?

Some thoughts on the recent run of internet-breaking cloud provider outages. Are they symptoms of a change in the industry at large, or just a run of bad luck? open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

Breakthrough! Addressed most of the bugs and got all the end-to-end tests passing...most of the time. Just a little flaky error handling to deal with. #openstandup #buildinpublic

Bit of a bug whack-a-mole yesterday with concurrent Git interactions. Feels like I'm close, but imagine I'll uncover a few more shortly 😅 #openstandup #buildinpublic

All across the land, teams fiercely debated the pros and cons of bypassing a CDN. Calculating bandwidth, weighing the chance of a DDoS. Then Cloudflare came back up and it was all moot. They'd also forgot that they're using Workers pretty heavily.

Getting down to business with handling concurrently running tasks. Yesterday I enhanced some tests to catch duplicated work. Now that's failing reliably, I get to fix it with some locking! #openstandup #buildinpublic

Over the years, I got into a narrow routine when using Git for day-to-day development. Now I'm building tools around Git, I'm discovering all kinds of features I'd never noticed before. Here are my favorite three. www.ocuroot.com/blog/things-...

After a few dead ends, tangents and experiments, I've got the worker model in a decent shape. It's making me realize I need a better way of configuring the list of source repos. Methinks v0.4 will include some breaking changes. #buildinpublic #openstandup

Ok, I'm really starting to like this style. #buildinpublic

Took a detour last night to experiment with pixel art for icons. Watched some videos, got the Aesprite trial and threw together a few ideas. There's something really satisfying about the precision you can get at 32x32. Now to pay for the full version and build some UIs! #buildinpublic

Had a low social media week or so while visiting family in the UK. Somewhat refreshed and moderately jetlagged. Back to work!

Queueing theory can be incredibly useful, but potentially dense for those of us who aren't mathematically inclined (myself included), so let's look at the basics in as simple a form as we can muster. open.substack.com/pub/thefrida...

At first, it might be tempting to put all your infrastructure into a single Terraform module for simplicity. But as you scale, this approach will start slowing you down in various ways. Here's what can do wrong and how you can address it. www.ocuroot.com/blog/big-ter...

I just realized that planes "land" because they touch the land. I'm 41.

The real impact of AI: phishing messages that look like Bootstrap sites.

We went out to vote this afternoon and two hours later we’d voted, got coffee, sat in a public garden, saw two free concerts and spied two red tailed hawks sitting on a church. I love living in the East Village!