There are three rules of coding with agents: 1. Keep them away from bright sunlight 2. Never get them wet 3. Never feed them after midnight

AI isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets you to the thing. youtu.be/QeY_5n75zPM?...

Building a CLI is just repeatedly naming things, aka the hardest thing in programming

The pile of ethics books discarded on the sidewalk in San Francisco is more foreboding and ominous than I wanted to see

Started at "why is my WiFi so slow?" and now I'm recompiling the Linux kernel

Today's mini deep-dive was into the NTP Pool and now it's a life goal to someday run an NTP server www.ntppool.org/en/join.html

Chipping away at language tooling for the most annoying and esoteric config files I hate to love and love to hate github.com/MerrimanInd/...

One release is all you need

It's 2026 and I'm not afraid to say it to the whole world. Cancel me if you want, I have to speak my truth. Light mode is good and is the appropriate choice in many times and places.

I just switched my desktop environment from GNOME to COSMIC in minutes. Deleted a dozen lines of text, added a half dozen lines of text, and rebooted. NixOS is absolutely overpowered.

Happy year of the linux desktop (Like every other time this has been said, this post will age wonderfully I'm sure)

Why I'm (still) a Rustacean merriman.industries/why-im-a-rus...

I happened upon this blog post about why mid-century industrial design uses such interesting color palettes. I LOVE mid-century aesthetics and color palettes like this (inspiration behind the Merriman Industries brand) so this was serious Xander-nip. bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man...

A few days of late nights later and now I'm daily driving NixOS

Build Your Own Tools merriman.industries/build-your-o...

New entry to my Naming Hall of Fame: Electron! Electron was developed by the Atom IDE team and early on they called it 'atom-shell', as in the shell that they ran in. A shell is also the region where electrons can be found in an atom so the project became Electron, an homage to its origin.

Doing Advent of Code in Rust is 60% writing Nom parsers, 30% writing tests for your Nom parsers, and 10% writing algorithms to solve the puzzles

Happy Advent of Code 2 years ago AoC was one of the first "real" things I tried to do in Rust and boy was it a slog. Returning to the challenge now is a great showcase of how intuitive the language has become. My stretch this year is doing it all in the terminal with Helix! helix-editor.com

Love the way New Yorker drivers honk. They don't honk for victory or glory. They don't think for vengeance or justice. They honk for the sheer joy of it. Love of the game. You gotta respect it.

College replacement accelerators are morally equivalent to marketing gambling to teenagers

Does anyone have strong opinions on Matrix vs Zulip for open-source community platforms?

Adjectives like moxie and gumption are great and we should bring them back. The lack of good modern alternatives may speak to changing generational values and my nostalgia for American ingenuity and industrial spirit requires that energy as fuel.

Like compound interest, economies of scale are the immutably powerful force multiplier that dominate the limits of any function. Open source is the mechanism by which software supercharges the entire industry with collaboration at the broadest scale. merriman.industries/open-source-...

I would lovvve a good blog post on the idiomatic way to implement Rust embedded_hal 1.0.0 errors in a driver crate 👀 I'm muddling through it but the combination of traits and kinds feels like I'm missing the design intent. @diondokter.nl? @jamesmunns.com? @theembeddedrust.bsky.social Any takers?

If you wouldn't build software with it then we won't build hardware with it merriman.industries/how-to-make-...

WALL-E vs The World

PSA: @zen-browser.app is getting really good these days! The UI is getting more streamlined with every release and they've moved beyond just being an Ark-clone into their own opinion of browsing. Just good, clean, simple UI with the power user tools you need and no fluff.

I'm Long on Literature and Bullish on Writing merriman.industries/why-im-long-...

If you saw this video from @cmuratori.bsky.social and thought "surely a 2.5 hour long tech talk can't be a good use of my time" then I have to strenuously emphasize that there is absolutely no fluff in this one. It's a banger start to finish. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84...

In one of my many Rust-themed side quests, I'm now a charter member of The Rust Project's new official Content Team! We're creating content with and about the Rust Project. We assembled a crack team to conduct a series of interviews at @rustconf.com last week and we're looking forward to publishing.

tfw you get asked "why Rust in Automotive" and you have the recorded talk ready to go link to talk in thread

Python was not named after a snake but Monty Python, yet the ecosystem has adopted snake names (mamba, anaconda, etc). Similarly, Rust was not named after oxidation but mushrooms, yet the ecosystem has adopted corrosion names. Maybe we should switch to more mushroom names?

Who ain't a sucker for a well-written, extensive, and thoughtful \DESIGN.md or \ARCHITECTURE.md file. github.com/littlefs-pro...

Game theory, graph theory, AND state space?? This is Xandernip youtu.be/YGLNyHd2w10?...

What a whirlwind week at RustConf! I worked with the newly formed Rust Project T-Content team, both behind and in front of the camera, having some amazing convos. We continued the safety-critical Rust discussion at my first Unconf and then finished with a convo about Local First and CRDTs!

A reboot of The West Wing with Rob Lowe returning as President Sam Seaborn and getting Toby, Josh, CJ, and the whole Bartlett Administration back together to save democracy just might cure me.

Software is the only industry where I hear engineers making development choices based on their experience not the customers. It'd be like building a new car with a carburetor because it's more fun to engineer despite worse fuel economy and reliability for the user.

Growth and experience is realizing that there's a time and place for light mode

"Ultimately, the names of everyone who built the Torment Nexus will be engraved on the Torment Nexus, or possibly on a plaque below the Torment Nexus." Just don't build the Torment Nexus. buttondown.com/monteiro/arc...

If someone tells you that if you don't start using AI you'll lose your job, the truth is most likely that if you don't start using AI they'll lose their job.

Memtest86+ is the broken bolt extractor set of computers.

Has anyone started a social server for your city or community? Something running a combination of ActivityPub-based services to create a local alternative to big tech services? If you know of any instances like this send them my way!

I love how much the broader Rust community cares about safety-critical software! I feel seen

Stumbled into @jasmine.bsky.social's Kernel vol 5 launch party for joinreboot.org last night and boy oh boy was it a needle trip moment. Just when I was losing hope in finding the thread of moral imperative in the Bay Area tech scene! On to Open Sauce conf this weekend.

Now that we're finally USB-Cifying the world we need to name and shame proprietary connector formats that are holding us back from societal bliss. I'd like to propose a useful pejorative: DSC or Domain Specific Cable.

I'll be talking about Rust in Automotive at the SAE Silicon Valley meetup next week in Palo Alto, come say hi! I will go most anywhere and talk to most anyone about bringing Rust to the automotive industry. www.meetup.com/sae-innovati...

In this episode of @sdr-podcast.com, we're gunna found out exactly how many of our listeners have ever worked in safety critical industries, and whomst among us have opinions about requirements/code/test traceability tools :D www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f6R...

Now that I have a server running a personal streaming service I'm badly regretting not keeping any of the hard drives with the 30gb of MP3s I accumulated between the years 2006-2016 or so when I gave up and adopted Spotify ☹️ The tragic loss of youth and innocence manifests in surprising ways

I've been interested in right-to-repair initiatives and federated networks for years now but recently I've added FUTO and the local-first (shoutout @localfirst.fm and @localfirstconf.com) to that general area of obsession. It seems like we might take technology back after all!