Creating a visual DSL to represent inputs, calculations, rules, computed outputs (intermediate or final) as a DAG. Was looking for prior art of Visual Excel but could not find it.

One of the harder problems in design is whether to remain specific or to become abstract. It's easy to see what it should have been in retrospect but near impossible to forecast. Making the wrong choice causes extra labor in a lot of places. Being specific usually means more typing, more code.

Somebody already made "is claude down or is it me"?

jsonquerylang.org ♥️ the simplicity

Integrating with 3rd party systems in your own system comes with its own challenges. Fundamentally, there's a choice on the table of how deeply one integrates, how much of the integration language we allow to rub off on our own. In my experience, the answer is very context specific and often boils

Knowledge crunching in a legacy context with a lot of manual tribal rituals is something else. My modus operandi is to attack the problem space from many different angles to form a mental picture and instill common understanding. Then, partitioning one flow at a time, iterating in each compartment,

Venturing into a new domain, a recurring model "candidate" is "simulation". The ability for end-users to try something before deciding on something, a small loop of multiple drafts before committing to an outcome, is perceived as valuable.

My beef with "modern" design and modeling techniques is that they've become the center of attention, not in the least by their proponents. If you can't concede that it is a means to an end and that what you are modeling is more important than your petty modeling technique, than I have no use for it.

In the 👁️ of the ⛈️

Modeling movement of money using double entry book keeping is as natural as it gets, once you wrap your head around it.

Chilly outside … 2026.

When you spot something in the wild that has @nick-tune.me written all over it ...

Exploring my options with UBL / PEPPOL ... XML is back! Trying out the new kid on the block, dotnet-xscgen github.com/mganss/XmlSc...

Watched Goodbye June …

That time of year where I have a little bit of time to work on the pizza takeaway site. Putting on my designer hat. No time like the present to procrastinate.

An interesting read ... www.iankduncan.com/engineering/...

Hearing Hermanos Gutiérrez pop up in Pluribus was a nice touch.

Figured out a clean way to embed Tailwind CSS CLI as an MSBuild task, executing it using mise.jdx.dev. Life without `package.json` and `NPM`.

More than 250 000 children disappear each year in Europe (source: missingchildreneurope.eu) ...

Wonderful sunset …

Just uploaded a PDF with tariffs into Claude and asked it to build me a type system and calculator that embodies the rules expressed in said document. It cuts down on the typing and shifts focus to verification (was it translated properly). In a way, I can now read the document, express tests, and

TUI DuckDB Explorer - github.com/tconbeer/har...

When your "standard" still relies on MDB files ... you might be hard-core, masochistic, why-change-if-it-works-lazy or a combination of those. My modernization effort is putting it in DuckDB, with SQLite as a pit stop.

Adopt a standard that expresses valid from / to shizzle but omits the calendar to interpret those in ... happy days.

New toy arrived …

Slow changing and relatively small datasets can be hard coded. Just recompile when a new one comes along (optionally keeping it side by side).

I'm looking at a dataset and it has a "valid until" column with the value "12/31/3999". Damn, some bold statement right there.

Deploying with Aspire to Azure has been riddled with obscure errors. Frustrating experience so far.

« Hunters » is growing on me.

Baker man is baking bread …

First time I'm touching SourceGenerators in C# ... well, some interesting design choices there.

Bought a new keyboard, Keychron Q6 Max. Did 7 years with the Razer BlackWidow Chroma V2. Not too bad.

I must have been living under a rock to only find out about OpenFGA so late in the game. Been using Ory Keto and Authzed SpiceDb (both Google Zanzibar clones) in the past but OpenFGA never crossed my path until I recently hit some Auth0 page on it.

Why is there no idiomatic C# library that does the same thing as Giraffe ViewEngine (regardless of the fact you can use it from C#), that is a HTML DSL expressed as a bunch of static functions? Guess that idea never took off and everybody is still enjoying Razor Pages or SPAs??

How are you doing today? I'm doing 200 OK and I got plenty more room under that rug.

Modeling the real world as software can introduce race conditions which do not exist in the real world: multiple people writing in the same book at the same time, when was the last time you saw that happen?

Started using Zed ( zed.dev ) with Gleam and Claude as an external agent. Snappy and smooth experience so far.

Been working with Typescript, Hono, Zod, and friends for the last couple of months. It was "interesting" but not particularly "enjoyable". I'm not the target audience for a language like Typescript - I'm too demanding and get frustrated really fast dealing with its shenanigans.

Picking up the Uno card game design again. This time made the cards, deck, discard pile and draw pile very explicit. Using Claude to explain the rules to me (🤞it trained on authoritative data). Fascinating to see where the type system takes you.

The Ubuntu snap store sure is taking its time to release .NET 10 GA.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MaY... ... simulation as a feedback loop is underappreciated.

Finished watching Death by Lightening.

Had fun with iconify.design today. The front-end life 🥸

Started watching Pluribus …

From now on we will refer to a tree as "an arborescent data structure"

Care and attention to detail is such a rare trait these days ... www.joshwcomeau.com/svg/interact...

I'm predicting the decline of a lot of paywalled websites with UI asset content (e.g. icons). It's become too easy to generate them on the fly using AI.

github.com/CtrlSpice/ot... simple enough for local dev purposes.

www.otelbin.io learn something new every day.

I'm a big believer in making any code base I touch more "introspectable", at design, compile and runtime (whichever makes more sense)