🚗 Took some time today to get my car (Betsy II) a car wash and window cleaning. As a tall, fat man, it is a pain in the ass (specifically the inner windshield), but a clean car is very much enjoyed on the other side. I similarly keep my Red Dead 2 horse (Betsy III) clean and well fed.

👨‍💻 Updating my Erlang and Elixir tonight. Ended up switching my asdf Erlang plugin to this, which has prebuilt Erlang with all the OpenSSL and wx things included and just works. Neat. 📸 github.com/michallepick...

🎧 Happy Friday! www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FIS...

🔗 If there was a contest for the single most beloved person in the functional programming galaxy, Joe Armstrong would have effortlessly won the first prize. deprogrammaticaipsum.com/joe-armstrong/

🍿 A lot of “tech YouTube” reminds me of talk radio; like they have three hours to fill and they will fill it no matter the importance or quality of the content. If you just want some background noise while you fold towels, it’s fine — but please do not prioritize this consumption.

🤧 While I love having my windows open, the amount of pollen that has infiltrated my office in the last week is crazy. Just did a wipe down of the desk, but a proper office cleaning is overdue.

👨‍💻 Made some nice progress on my integration of Automerge (Rust Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type library) into my Elixir / Tauri app. Looks pretty clean at the domain context call site so far. github.com/zorn/local_c...

✏️ Potential Consulting Client Questions > Be deliberate about what questions you want to ask and what you are trying to learn from each answer ... it can be easy to fall into a casual chat that might be entertaining but not helpful towards the decision to be made. mikezornek.com/posts/2023/3...

✅ Today's goals: - Book reading time. (Rust book) - Continue working on integrating Automerge into my Elixir project. - Early dinner with my sister. - Evening journaling / video games (Civ6 or RedDead2 likely)

🍅 Today I learned… The 1893 Supream Court ruled that tomatoes are vegetables. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._... This came up in a Domain Driven Design book re: bounded contexts. 🤪

👨‍💻 Still early days, two weeks in, I'm enjoying Zed. Seems well put together and clean. Always some mental gymnastics rewiring my brain and keyboard commands, but so far feeling pretty good. zed.dev

Badger Badger Badger, also known as “The Badger Song,” is a viral internet meme and classic Flash animation from 2003 by Jonti Picking. #InternetHistory

✏️ New blog post: The Moral Struggles of #AI Coding mikezornek.com/posts/2026/5...

👨‍💻 Was reminded that Oban jobs do not run in a transaction. I recall a recent client project that had a custom worker who did, and it threw me a little debugging code in my current client project.

👨‍💻 Got Zed editor installed with Elixir Expert LSP (not the default, but want to try it) and some other small settings changes working. Will continue to tinker. Seems solid so far. One of the things I am looking for is UI stability. Cursor has this habit of breaking my UI norms month to month.

👨‍💻 Spent some time tonight working through the Automerge tutorial while watching the Phillies in the background. Want to refresh my memory as I'm considering using this for some experiments. automerge.org/docs/tutorial/

👨‍💻 My flow going back to VS Code has been to open projects from the terminal. This is in part due to how doing so improves chances the editor will see the proper asdf'd version or Elixir I want per project.

👨‍💻 There is a Nerves Meetup happening tomorrow. I don't do any Nerves stuff right now, but I might stop by to see what people are up to. #ElixirLang #Nerves nervesmeetup.eu/meetup/paul-... The archives are posted here: www.youtube.com/@NervesMeetu...

📉 Doing some post-tax-season review of spending, budgets, and coffers. More impactful in the moment since I am looking for more #Elixir consulting work as my current project has scaled down. mikezornek.com/elixir-consu...

👨‍💻 I pride myself on thorough code review, but when peers submit a 5k AI-generated PR, it is hard to review it with the same passion. I'd love to ask questions about naming choices or approaches, but there was no conscious thought behind the code's creation, just statistics.

🤔 Is there a blog post that was impactful to you relating to a developer's choice or non-choice of utilizing #AI for coding?

Flyers Fans Not Sure  Whether Gritty  Supposed To Be Eating Live Bird https://theonion.com/flyers-fans-not-sure-whether-gritty-supposed-to-be-eating-live-bird/

My current contract is winding down, and I'm looking for my next Elixir / Phoenix LiveView project. Ideal engagements would be in the 15–32 hours per week range. - Staff Augmentation - Technical Debt Cleanup - Platform Stability - Testing Enhancements - Documentation Refinement #ElixirLang

😢 File this under "we can't have nice things on the modern internet" -- my personal blog, which I host on Render as a static website, generates almost 10GB of monthly outbound bandwidth (which is over the incoming 5GB cap of Render's free / hobby tier).

✏️ I updated my Now page. What is a Now page? I like to think of a Now page as the things I’d share if you were an old friend and we saw each other and were asking, what’s going on? What are you working on? What are you excited about? mikezornek.com/now/

We did not know how good we had it.

Imagine how much harder to follow this test would be without PhoenixTest! 😄 conn |> visit(~p"/my-form") |> assert_has("select", label: "My dropdown", selected: "My value") |> assert_has("input", label: "My checkbox", checked: true) #ElixirLang

👨‍💻 My reaction to the CI agents posting in the company Slack saying I broke the build.

👨‍💻 Deleted 250 gigs of Docker volumes today after getting disk full errors trying to export an MP3. OmniDiskSweeper is a wonderful tool that can point you in the right direction for such things. www.omnigroup.com/more/

Harry Kalas with the Phillies’ 1993 Opening Day lineup

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

💜📘 The Elixir Book Club has chosen our next book! #ElixirLang Think Distributed Systems Our first meeting for the new book is Sunday, ## Sunday, January 25, 2026, and we will discuss chapters 1 and 2. Join our Discord to participate! elixirbookclub.github.io/website/

You'll note a new co-author on the cover, @aparker.io 👏 We have a stellar lineup of guest contributors, case studies, and deep dives. The material is almost entirely new (maybe 5-8% carryover from 1st ed?), and at least 40-50% longer. Books will be out by June, with preview chapters much sooner.

👨‍💻 Hot take: Keeping "soft deleted" entities in the database is never the right call. To enable entity restoration, serialize the entity and store it elsewhere. If they want to "undelete," then you take that serialized entity and put it back into the system.

📕 Just posted a ballot for the next book inside the Elixir Book Club Discord. #ElixirLang The ballot will close on Friday, and the first meeting will probably be on January 25th. elixirbookclub.github.io/website/

🚀 Today is the day 🚀 @hugobarauna.com and I are pleased to announce that Programming Nerves is officially in Beta 🥳 Check it out at programmingnerves.dev and see all the cool projects that you will learn how to build and program with Elixir! #MyElixirStatus #ElixirLang

🔗 pg_large_objects -- Elixir library for working with PostgreSQL Large Objects Seems neat. #ElixirLang github.com/frerich/pg_l...

❤️ Happy Friday to all those who celebrate. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FIS...

👨‍💻 React Native, Tauri, NativeScript, Capacitor, Flutter -- all tools to deliver cross-platform solutions on iOS that still rely on CocoaPods despite its upcoming death date. Hard to take any of these seriously for new work unless that angle is addressed. blog.cocoapods.org/CocoaPods-Sp...

What a great quote to end the last talk @exmexconf.bsky.social Thanks Amos King! #elixirlang

Happy Halloween folks! If you're looking for a way to make it memorable, you can grab a Manning book, say Elixir in Action, at 50% off this weekend 😅 www.manning.com/books/elixir...

✅ Today's Goals: - Sleep in - Full shave and shower - Wash bed sheets - Get some breakfast out - Clean up / dust the bedroom - Bit of client work (have a set of infrastructure PRs and other cleanup to get out of my head)

My team is hiring a front end focused LiveView dev. If you know of anyone with those skills hit me up.

✅ Today's Goals: - Extra-long sleep after being out on Sunday with family. - Catch up on email. - Client work: Get Android tablet running app and printing to new receipt printer. Look into some on-deck tickets. Check-in meeting at 5 pm.

👨‍💻 Been working through a chunky `phoenix_live_view` version bump on a client project for the last few days. So many duplicate DOM ID warnings. Also need to move a bunch of other things forward in the same push (Oban Web, Storyboard, Flop, etc.), each with their own little things to fix. #ElixirLang

👨‍💻 AppSignal (an observability platform I've used in the past and enjoyed) now has a free tier, great for those little side projects: www.appsignal.com/plans

🔗 Philly tool library is looking for a new home for its 5,000 tools and roster of classes The West Philly Tool Library has become an institution in its neighborhood over 18 years. It recently learned its lease wouldn’t be renewed. billypenn.com/2025/10/14/w...

✏️ #GitHub #Copilot and Unhonored Branch Protection > GitHub Copilot commits directly to `main` and ruins my night. mikezornek.com/posts/2025/1...

🐸 Frogs together strong. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw5z...

💰 With much gratitude, I share that I have regular client income and have removed the `looking for work` subtitle of my social name plates. I still have some hours available, but I'm just as happy to keep those to myself unless a well-fitted opportunity presents itself.