Not a bad drawing despite the engine being completely wrong, but the labelling is a joke.

I'm thinking longer for a better answer.

AWS has the Monday morning blues. Half the world is struggling to operate because their SaaS is down. At least I'm back to running a local dev environment now. In my Lambda days I'd be twiddling my thumbs.

Define your musical taste in eight artists Yes Pink Floyd The Beatles King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard Sly And The Family Stone Cardiacs The Zombies Geese

I've these collections of interesting nuggets. The ones on how AI is pretty much all of US growth at present is particularly notable. The crash, when it happens, is going to be very painful! www.derekthompson.org/p/the-25-mos...

Today's discovery is tmux alternative Zellij zellij.dev Pretty much better in every way. Written in Rust (of course).

Do I know any IBM MQ experts I can ask some questions about how to write high performance clients? Event better if you've used the IBMMQDotnetClient library.

Is this my dream job? If only I could write!

So after a two and a half year stint as a full time Node engineer, I'm back coding in C#, but now on Linux with Rider as the IDE. It feels like a warm old familiar place. Rider is a pretty good experience so far. JetBrains certainly know how to build an IDE.

Several years into using z-shell I discover that ctrl-XE opens the current command in nvim (or whatever you've got set as your default editor). I wish I'd known this before.

My Grandfather (highlighted) with his class, training to be a lieutenant in the Royal Navy at HMS King Alfred (yes that's now the swimming pool) in Hove during WWII. CC @eaterofsun.bsky.social

So I think I get the memory allocation model in Rust: everything goes on the stack, unless it's some kind of smart pointer like Box<T>, or Rc<T>, or also Vec<T> and String. Just been reading Ch 15 of the Rust Book: doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-00...

Not a huge fan of the Rust closure syntax. I imagine there's a good reason for using pipe instead of brackets for the argument list. I suppose at least it makes it clear that this is a closure rather than a function.

It's beyond me why I haven't thought of Googling "Rust for C# Developers" before, but when I did it turned up this rather excellent document: microsoft.github.io/rust-for-dot...

I grew up in a commune. I had a great time as a kid, but I think it's a fundamentally unstable arrangement. The reason you see so few of them is because they rarely last.

The Rust debugger in Zed is pretty intuitive for anyone who's used the C# debugger in VS. I've only used it on really simple examples so far though.

It's really interesting how Rust makes you think about memory allocation in cases that would never occur to me in C#. For example, If a function has a function return value it has to be boxed because you can't return stack allocated memory as a return value.

Interesting how Rust provides the `?` syntax as a kind of poor-mans `do` notation. Can one make it work with one's own types I wonder?

Unexpected mini-feature of Rust that I haven't come across in any other language: You can reuse a variable name in a new variable declaration and the compiler is fine with it. If it's in a new inner scope then the outer scope retains the original value too. I'm not sure I like this.

Just doing my bit: gracefullest ditziness fetishisms! www.avibagla.com/blueskydicti...

Why does this not surprise me. Extraversion by profession.

Very interesting blog series from @paullouth.bsky.social on higher kinded types in C#. He's kinda (see what I did there) made an `M a` out of a `K<M, A>`. It actually comes out reasonably smooth (but agreed that it should be in the language). paullouth.com/higher-kinds...

I've written about how you can avoid vendor lock-in when adopting an IaaS for SSO authentication. mikehadlow.com/posts/2025-0...

Building greenfield software is certainly fun, but it's actually quite a rare treat for most professional software engineers. The vast majority of work is maintaining and extending large legacy systems. If LLMs are going to help, very large context windows are a essential.

Inside my BMG Super. Construction is quite different from any other electric guitar I've seen. Very easy to access everything once you take off the scratch plate.

RIP Brummie Rock God Ozzy. A big part of my teenage childhood was spent listening to Paranoid. Still one of my favourite albums.

Time to limber up!

I just posted SAML Proxy in HN. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459...

I've been working on an open-source SAML Proxy. It's ready to take for a test drive. I'd welcome any feedback: github.com/mikehadlow/s...

Just a reminder that I'm looking for my next role. I've got 20+ years of large scale software dev experience in both IC, team lead, and architecture roles. I've coded primarily in C#/.NET and TypeScript/Node. Perm or contract, but must be remote. Based in the UK. mikehadlow.com for more details.

My little 1960s house is not pretty, but somehow it aces dealing with extreme weather. Very easy to keep warm in the depths of winter and now pleasantly cool inside (without any air-con) while outside is baking. Whoever built it knew what they were doing.

Oh, this is interesting, a new extension that turns VS Code into a PostgreSQL IDE. techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpo...

Good article in today's Guardian about the Initial Teaching Alphabet. A failed teaching experiment used at my primary school. It was totally bonkers.

This post tries to explain why I find language models exciting. But it doesn't try to persuade skeptics that they should agree. It's aimed more at people already working with AI, and its goal is to sharpen our collective sense of what the upside potential might be. #MLSky 🤖 🧪

ctrl-command-e is my new favourite keystroke in Zed, which toggles the LLM inline completion. The context makes a huge difference to how useful/irritating the completion is, so quickly being able to turn it on and off is vital.

Super fast alien approaching!

Near Brighton is a natural feature named after one of Spinal Tap's greatest songs.

I really enjoyed @kirkhamilton.com's latest Strong Songs podcast (which are always excellent), especially the section on music theory apps. Kirk, if you happen to read this, can I humbly also suggest my little open-source (free in every way) music theory explorer for guitarists, guitardashboard.com

Dylan is a master of technical public speaking (and an awesome guitarist). Highly recommended.

The power of SVG is poorly appreciated. Most modern browsers do an excellent job of rendering and animation, but it still seems like a minority interest. I've just been playing with creating a little animation while waiting for a SAML redirect, and it's so easy to create with a few lines of code.

Great article in the Guardian about one of my favourite bands: www.theguardian.com/music/2025/j...

Super interesting talk from Andrej Karpathy on AI, especially on how tools can expose affordances for LLMs. MCP is a good example. I really liked his model of the human/LLM loop. youtu.be/LCEmiRjPEtQ

Happy Summer Solstice everyone. It's Henge Time! www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAXz...

My new side project is live - @legacy-modernization.io I curated my knowledge of legacy modernization patterns into a website. I still have lots of content to add but the current version is hopefully a bit useful legacy-modernization.io #legacyModernization #architectureModernization

Just a reminder that I'm looking for my next role. I've got 20+ years of large scale software dev experience in both IC, team lead, and architecture roles. I've coded primarily in C#/.NET and TypeScript/Node. Perm or contract, but must be remote. Based in the UK. See mikehadlow.com for details.

I found myself writing this result merge function just avoid nested closures. It's not very pretty, but it does the trick. It would be cool if I could find a way to persuade the type system to give nicer names than "a" and "b" though.

Around a decade ago there was a website which claimed to calculate the hours and cost equivalent of an open source project. It wildly inflated the figures. One project I'd written was priced at millions with a multi-year development time, when I knew it had taken me a couple of months at best....

Discovering the limits of TS type inference today. Quite frustrating, but then again it's also probably a sign that I'm making things overly complex.

I'm currently working on an open source SAML Proxy. Hopefully it'll be done in a few weeks. In the process I've been evolving a new TS Result<T> type. Yes yes, I know there are already a bazillion out there, but even so, I might factor it out as library. Even if I'm the only one who ever uses it.

1/4 Some thoughts on TS interfaces: In C# (same language designer as TS), classes, interfaces, delegates, events, records, are all types. But there's no "type" keyword. You create a type by creating a class or an interface etc.