Reviewing some of my earliest web projects: they have a mix of Postgres, MySQL and Mongo. These days I just use sqlite for all my personal projects. It's really good at my scale and makes deploying very easier.

The author of rust-analyzer discussing how language features help or hinder fast IDEs. If you allow `from m import *` you can't analyse files in isolation, and it's even harder in Rust. matklad.github.io/2026/02/25/a...

My 3.5yo is learning to use a mouse, and it's super interesting. He's mastered clicks and drags, but he hasn't yet figured out lifting up the mouse when run out of mouse pad. That's a tricky case where you deliberately break the relationship between mouse and cursor movement.

I'm surprised there aren't more tools out there for starting a new project with some default config files. There's `cargo new` but it's Rust specific and very minimal. create-react-app is React specific. The only option I know of is cookiecutter. Surely it's a common problem?

Excellent series on Self, both the programming model and the tool chain. I love how opening an inspector on a value (e.g. nil) then shows a link to all occurrences of the value in other open inspectors! blog.rfox.eu/en/Programmi...

I'm experimenting with imitating window UI elements when showing code snippets on my website. What do you think? Do the familiar dots of the title bar help, or is it just confusing decoration? First image is the current style, the second image has the window UI.

I've started naming my servers digiocean1.example.com, digiocean2.example.com and so on. I wish I'd done this much earlier. I already have domain names for the actual deployed services, but it quickly gets confusing when you start moving things around.

I'm adding uptime data to my personal LLM bot. Does this information belong in the system prompt? That was my initial plan, but I'm thinking that a tool would be better. Tools let me see information provenance ("queried the uptime tool"). There's also a small caching benefit.

I've released difftastic 0.68! A smaller update, but still worth upgrading: * Improved Bash, C, Go, Lua, Nix, Perl, Python, Rust, Scala, Swift and YAML parsing. * Minor display and git compatibility fixes. github.com/Wilfred/diff...

Really elegant developer tool: Go's inline IDE feature is used with depreciation markers, so call sites are autofixed from OldApi() to NewApi() based on the implementation of OldApi. go.dev/blog/inliner

Are there any developer experience advantages for `x := 1` over `let x = 1`? A `let` keyword probably improves parsing error behaviour, and makes declarations more visible. := is more concise though.

What is the lowest resolution image that is still recognisable? I made a space invader craft project at one point and spent a bunch of time wondering if I had enough materials.

Writing type params with <> (e.g. List<Int>) seems the most natural to me: probably because I encountered that syntax first. Between C++, Java and TypeScript I think it's the most common too. List[Int] seems to be next most common (Scala, Python) but TIL Gleam uses List(Int)!

Agentic programming workflows rather remind me of genetic programming. The agent has a validation step that looks like a fitness function, and both run iterative trials.

I'm still not sure whether a language should include a "kitchen sink linter" like Rust's clippy or have a package oriented "thousand flowers bloom" linter like eslint for JS and TS. Clippy is delightful out of the box but eslint makes it so easy to have project specific lints.

Is there a good term for "after using this feature we realised that the best design is different from the current design"? In casual conversation I generally hear "bug" but there was nothing wrong with the original implementation.

I'm super impressed by how many lint rules can be implemented with just eslint's no-restricted-syntax and selectors. Example: { selector: "ExportNamedDeclaration[declaration=null][source=null]", message: "Add `export` directly to the function instead of a block export." }

There's something pleasingly self-referential about configuring an agent by talking to it. > Remember that [fact about data formats]. Agent: Noted. ... realise nothing happened ... > Write to your rules file that when I say "remember", I want you to write to the rules file.

Should lint suppressions be first class syntax or comments? Adding a proper metadata system (e.g. Clojure or Rust) is a big design space but it's clear which expressions are affected. Comments are much easier to implement but it's easy for users to get them wrong. Thoughts?

I enjoyed this article about personal project programming, but I particularly liked this definition: "Production code has a phone number to call when it breaks" hannahilea.com/blog/housepl...

One fun way of testing new AI models: take an existing codebase you have and just ask them to "review it and fix bugs". In principle this should find more issues over time as models get smarter. I've found a few bugs this way at least.

Cleaned up an old git repo of Ansible playbooks and it's amazing how much is just Docker now. Docker handles process supervision, centralises logging, and containers coexist without issues. It's nice when things get simpler.

After further playing with my LLM project, I'm surprised how hard it is to tune with system prompts. My agent kept saying "obviously" even though my prompt said "helpful, professional". Eventually I found that a "courteous" prompt gets "of course" which is better but not ideal.

I've been tinkering with an LLM interface with my calendar and it's really nice to use. "Delete my April trip" is a lot less fiddly than opening calendar, switching to the month view, scrolling to April and so on. I should probably build an undo as well though.

Today I learnt about "bypass charging", a phone feature where it can run directly off the mains without using the battery at all. No battery charging, less heat, less battery wear. Nifty. www.androidauthority.com/phones-with-...

I'm considering using WebP more: for example, my websites would load faster and browsers have supported it since 2020: caniuse.com/webp That said, GitHub just added support in August 2025, so I suspect I'd still find use cases that don't work yet: github.blog/changelog/20...

Test code is total: we require it to always terminate or it's a failure! It also typically has 100% line and branch coverage. I feel way less nervous about refactoring tests, you can always just run them.

I certainly see the appeal of an LLM system with full context and tool use (OpenClaw), but the lethal trifecta puts me off deploying it. I do like the idea of an agent with a heartbeat though. A bunch of nice cron-style workflows can be built on top.

Date of birth pickers are a surprisingly nuanced UI problem. What do you pick as the initial value? How do you allow users to easily move by large amounts (years) as well as small amounts (the exact day)? Defaulting to today and even allowing future dates is funny though.

I've written a website that archives all my posts/tweets/toots/skeets across different microblogging platforms! It's fun to be able to see similar posts that I wrote at completely different times. It also lets me edit links that have bitrotted. miniblog.wilfred.me.uk

When I moved back to the UK, I ordered SIMs for both myself and my wife. We ended up with consecutive numbers! It's really convenient sometimes.

An AI benchmark website that tries to run comparable benchmarks regularly to discover when LLM performance is degrading: aistupidlevel.info

Futhark's design is deliberately trying to stay simple to keep long term design sustainable. The author also has an interesting discussion of relative versus absolute paths in import syntax, and how relative paths can make local analysis easier. futhark-lang.org/blog/2018-06...

The vast majority of libraries have a single maintainer. Even if you weight by downloads, roughly half of downloaded libraries have a single maintainer too. opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-...

Show, don't tell: effective advice for writing for both LLMs and people! www.haskellforall.com/2026/01/prom...

I've been working on a search tool for a website with 9K items and a dumb implementation works just fine. I'd normally gravitate to a library or tool like elasticsearch (ES). Adding custom filters etc is trivial on handrolled code. I wonder what scale requires actual search infra like ES.

I see people advocating for writing a FAQ, but I really struggle to write one from scratch. The best FAQs are written as a response to, well, frequent questions. How do you populate the initial FAQ?

Wonderful post from the lead LLVM maintainer reflecting on how the project is run, the design issues in LLVM today, and opportunities to make it better: www.npopov.com/2026/01/11/L...

My default assumption is that external libraries are better than what I (or an LLM) would write in a v1. The extra effort to publish a project generally signifies that the author has spent a good amount of time on the problem. I end up prompting LLMs to prefer external code.

LLMs are great at style transfer, and this works surprisingly well for syntactic transformations too. I rewrote a small website's EJS templates to 1500 LOC of TSX with a oneshot in Claude. It took ~12 minutes, but it just worked. (TSX seems nicer than EJS for static analysis.)

It seems really odd to me that git uses 'cached' terminology for staging. For example, `git add somefile.rs; git diff --cached`. Caching implies state that you don't mind losing. There's very little state I want to lose in version control!

Are there any nice cross-platform ways to trigger a notification from a terminal? I've been using pushover.net but you need to use a browser and it's noticeably slower than the native options. (Pushover is great for mobile notifications though.)

Terminad is a really interesting approach to rendering markdown in the CLI. It deliberately doesn't render links, so you can always see both the link text and the URL. In a browser you have hover to see URLs, but not necessarily in a terminal. github.com/Canop/termimad

This feature in @developer.chrome.com's DevTools is so helpful. Every time I get stuck on a calc() or other CSS functions, I solve the bug much quicker with it. Thanks to everyone who worked on this! 👌

Should code completion offer private methods/fields? If the user chooses a private method, you can offer a quickfix to change its visibility. It's clutter though. I frequently find myself wanting fields that I haven't exposed yet, and frustrated that the IDE hides them.

Blogged: Devlog 2: The Importance of Sandboxing Exploring PL opportunities when you have a first-class sandbox. www.garden-lang.org/blog/sandbox...

Is there a good canonical name for autofixes, where a static analysis tool can apply a change to resolve an issue? Clang calls them fix-its, LSP calls them quickfixes.

I've realised that AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md solve two distinct problems: * It tells the LLM the conventions of the project, avoiding follow-up prompts. * It precomputes a summary of the project, saving a bunch of searches at the start of a session.

Igalia's post on self-hosting CI runners is a masterclass in build engineering. It shows dealing with weird API constraints, but still finding good designs. I also learnt that some CI systems use OCR on Apple's installers to automate! www.azabani.com/2025/12/18/s...

I've been experimenting with different pagination UIs. It's so common to have arrows, but I've realised they're redundant here. When you have the adjacent values as well as the final value, you don't need > and >> arrows too. Thoughts?