At the @spacetimedb.bsky.social hackathon last weekend someone built a system for monitoring CCTV camera networks. I was one of the judges, so I looked at their entry. Which means I can finally answer the age-old question, "Who watches the watchmen?" Me. It was me all along. 😁

I'm on my way to New York Tech Week to be a guest judge at the #SpacetimeDB Hackathon. Now if I'm a judge, I obviously can't enter. But I also wouldn't be able to go to a hackathon and not build *anything*, so I am currently on a plane devising a very detailed spec document to hand to the robots. 😅

I've been interested in Elm since I heard about it from @krisajenkins.bsky.social although I'm more curious about Gleam. I'm mostly into Svelte and I don’t really see a reason to explore other things right now but I hope I can find some time to build something with them for fun

Why does Workday have an "Add to Favourites" feature for expense items? Who has a "favourite" expense? 🫠 Ah, that $2.99 I spent on paperclips back in 2023 - those were good times. ❤️

The most interesting idea buzzing around my head right now is using structured languages to guide AI Agents’ reasoning, and it’s just one of the many exciting and nuanced ideas I got from talking with Henry Garner as we discuss his what’s-hot-what’s-not AI Radar. youtu.be/43lsrgkhJ8c

Prediction for 2026: We'll start to see the introduction of `cmd --skill`, which will be purely informational (like `cmd --help`) but will emit an up-to-date SKILL.md file for using the tool.

When you’re a humble salmon on a pilgrimage to visit the sky goats and the mescaline kicks in.

Asciinema is a fantastic tool for anything from terminal demos to full ASCII movies. 😁 This week Marcin Kulik talks about a project 14 years and 5+ languages in the making. We dig into terminal rendering, parsing quirks, and how a passion project can take on a life of its own. youtu.be/sHwWNFAjAxo

How do you connect the dots between a game engine, a database, a streaming system and an OS? Tyler C. joins me this week to explain how they're all connected, and to share some battle scars from trying to launch a Database (SpacetimeDB) and an MMO (BitCraft) at the same time. 😅 youtu.be/A9A8pptfz0Q

I’m not saying we can (or should) run LLMs on our phones, but text autocomplete is looking really bad these days. Like if I type in my first name, it doesn’t even guess that my surname might be coming. Even a Markov Chain could get that one.

I've been tinkering with a #jujutsu plugin for #neovim. If those two hashtags meant something to you, you've self-selected! Give it a whirl and let me know what you think. 🙂 github.com/krisajenkins...

When you press "Beautify This Slide" on Google Slides.

This is such a great idea - a simple tool for local code reviews. More and more I find myself reviewing code that was written by an LLM, and wishing I could comment on individual lines as I go the way I would with a github code review. This nails it. 🏆 github.com/agavra/tuicr

I do not want to see your kid's crayon drawings and I do not want to see your AI-generated clipart.

Terminal tip(s) of the day: `bat` is a great alternative to `cat` that adds syntax highlighting. And if you’re reading markdown specifically, `glow` is even better.

I've been trying out OpenCode with Ollama. I'm not expecting it to be as good as Claude, just that it will be available when I don't have internet access. But...fast, local and free is pretty compelling. You have to wonder how long Anthropic can maintain an edge that's worth their $100/month. 🤔

`jujutsu fix` is just so good. It automatically rewrites your commits as though you'd remembered to run the code formatter each time.

It's just occurred to me that the best Muppet movie (Christmas Carol) didn't have Jim Henson in it, and the best Jim Henson movie (Labyrinth) didn't have any Muppets in it. This has blown my mind. I cannot draw the Venn diagram for fear of ripping a hole in the space-time continuum.

Can you rewrite SQLite in Rust? Why would you want to? And how do you summon up an entire community to help make it happen? This week we look at a contender for the future of embeddable databases - Turso: youtu.be/1JHOY0zqNBY

Will this problem go away if I make tea? Yes. But will this problem come back after I finish the tea? Also yes. So...do we have plenty of teabags? I'm pleased to say we've got _hundreds_.

For background music to work to, I’m really enjoying the Stellaris soundtrack right now. And also anything by State Azure. #randomMusicSuggestions

This is an terrific 5-minute radioplay: They're Made Out Of Meat. Absolutely loved it. You'll want sound on. asciinema.org/a/746358

Gmail x 3, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter, Slack x2, Discord, and on and on. I've got 99 inboxes and I can't cope with 1. 🫠

Backend devs: you already have the data - now visualise it in minutes! At GOTO, @krisajenkins.bsky.social showed how Streamlit + Python lets you skip REST APIs & React and jump straight to interactive dashboards. 🔥

Can Google take on LangChain? Is Python the right language for building agent workflows? And is AI an opportunity for Google or an existential threat? Christina Lin joins me this week to discuss Agent Development Kit for building data pipelines that have LLMs in the middle. youtu.be/nMnQ63YkftE

AI has really improved my experience of using Nix. Sometimes I want a specific version of a package. And quite often I want a version that's just been released, and isn't in nixpkgs yet. Claude is fantastic at the boring legwork of writing and testing a custom overlay so I can get it right now.

AI generated art is art for people that don’t care about art.

Why is it that LLMs say, “You’re absolutely right! “ so often? I don’t mean why are they so annoyingly obsequious. I mean why that exact phrase, nearly every time, from all the vendors? From all I know of LLMs, it doesn’t make sense that they’d ever be so predictable. 🤔

Can we start referring to him as The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince?

How do you profile and observe your production software, regardless of language and tools, across all your machines? Mohammed Aboullaite joins me this week to dive into the Linux kernel, explaining how eBPF can profile and monitor software from the very root of the stack. youtu.be/sgzTo4dRU3w

Have you ever been frustrated by a git merge? That’s a trick question - of course you have. 😁 This week we’re talking about a tool that’s git-compatible, but completely rethinks the way we handle merging, rebasing and undo/redo: youtu.be/ulJ_Pw8qqsE

I’ll be spending the rest of the week enjoying the aofo! conference in Copenhagen. 😁 If you’re there, come say hi. 😀 #GOTOcph

It’s really surprising how often Gemini CLI will just stop. Just stop dead, like it’s dropped a message in transit and there’s no check-and-recover code. Come on Google, you’re suppose to be good at this. 🫠

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long while: www.lego.com/en-gb/produc...

I take great pride in devising the intros for my podcast, but this is the first time one's been turned into a heavy metal logo. Love it! 😍

How do you test software, if you want to be *really* thorough about it? To answer that question this week we're going as far back as the 8-Bit Nintendo, as far down as the CPU, and nearly as far up and away as Mars. Will Wilson joins me to explore how far you can push testing… youtu.be/_xJ4maWhSNU

Plenty of people complain about AWS' complexity, but could you build anything simpler, when every user wants something different? I'm joined this week by Anurag Goel to discuss the many challenges of building a hosting platform, including scaling to 100bn requests per month! 😱 youtu.be/SLDMHLImEys

Today I tried bodyboarding for the first time. It’s rather like being so drunk you try to sleep on the dinner table.

It’s a very short journey from loading PNGs onto a bird to carrier pigeons that can rickroll you over long distances.

How hard is it to write a billion-row-per-day database? Hard enough that its evolution has taken Paul Dix on a heck of a journey over the past ten years, figuring out everything from Time-Structured Merge trees to Go vs Rust to getting pricing models right the hard way: youtu.be/r4LkaPkxang

It’s July and I’ve just received a Christmas marketing email. #newpb

You know you've asked a good question when the guest makes this sound... 😁 (If you want to know what Paul's is about to explain, you'll have to tune in in a couple of weeks.)

Working on a new talk. I think this slide is going to be a banger.

Going beyond the hype of AI, and avoiding the cynicism, how is AI going to change the way we code? Zach Lloyd joins me with his bet on what agentic tools might actually look like, and how the terminal is the perfect jumping-off point: youtu.be/cwOrpH8feco

Amazon really put an astonishing amount of time and money into trying to make, "25% off toothbrushes and battery packs," into a national holiday. 😅 #primeday 🤷‍♂️

It's always fascinating when someone's really trying to get to the root of the problem, and Marty Pitt is trying to get to the root of a $500bn problem - systems integration. This week we're exploring TaxiQL, a system that goes beyond endpoints to look at data's very meaning… youtu.be/hXjnbehvDiQ

If you're using #Claude code a lot & you're using it in multiple tabs at once, you're probably hitting the same problem I am: tracking down which sessions are blocked waiting for user input. If so please take a look at this issue. I think it's solvable with a small change: github.com/anthropics/c...

Wow, I've just tried Google's Gemini CLI and it is a note-for-note copy of Anthropic's Claude Code. Brace yourselves for a massive lawsuit...

I'm on a big #ClaudeCode kick this week. This interchange felt really sci-fi to me: "I don't have enough information to answer that question." "Well, make a tool to get it!"

Bugs are an inevitable fact of producing software, so sometimes the best you can do is find them as fast as possible. This week on Developer Voices, Isaac Van Doren joins me to talk about bug-hunting techniques, from assertions & types, to making the most of Roc, Zig & SQL. youtu.be/VxD1rvEymAI