Michael Lynch Yesterday

Refactoring English: Month 19

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: I improved the website a bit, but it could use more polish. I adapted my chapter on design docs to a free excerpt . It did well on Lobsters and Reddit , but it flopped on Hacker News. I was surprised at how positive the reaction was to the design docs chapter. Generally, when I talk to developers about design docs, their main reaction is that they hate design docs and everything about them. The comments on my post were refreshingly supportive of design docs in general and my recommendations in particular. I got stuck for a while on the great AI blockade , but I pushed through by thinking more critically about splitting up large features and being less precious about code quality. In this case, done is better than perfect. June was the best month of book revenue since the initial crowdfunding launch. The increase in visitors was because of my excerpt about design docs . For the last few months, the Refactoring English website has listed my book as almost complete in early access. I was curious to see what the sales impact would be of going from an almost complete book to a fully complete book, so I looked at weekly sales: Marking the book as complete didn’t have an obvious impact on weekly sales, but what if I look at the daily averages? Okay, so there was a slight increase after I marked the book as complete. I was also curious whether Americans, in particular, bought at higher rates after I finished the book. I get email notifications every time someone purchases the book, and it seemed like more of my sales were from customers paying the US price, but I hadn’t measured carefully. I checked the data to see if that was true: Interesting! Completing the book had no impact on sales for customers purchasing with regional pricing, but customers purchasing in USD purchased at a 20% higher rate in the three weeks after the book was complete. I didn’t include sales after I published my latest excerpt because that obviously changes the numbers a lot, so let me treat that as its own category: But that’s always a little skewed because Americans make up the largest share of my readers. What if I normalize revenue per visitor? Oh, that’s a switcheroo. By normalizing per visitor, it flips the story. Now, it’s the Americans that buy at the same rate for a finished vs. unfinished book. The readers outside the US are the ones spending about 20% more per visitor on the completed book. I’m not sure how to use this information, but it did satisfy my curiosity. I’ve asked readers for feedback about my book in the past, and some readers gave enthusiastic feedback, but they were a small minority. I thought it would be fun and helpful to make a web-based feedback app that allows readers to leave notes as they read the book. It seemed like something I could knock out in a week or two. And now, two short… months later, I’ve got it up and running! A demo of my book feedback tool, where readers can leave me feedback directly in the book, and I can reply. My feedback tool has only been live for a few days, but it does seem to encourage readers to give more feedback. One reader just finished the book and cited the feedback app as one of his favorite parts of the experience, so that was neat. About once a year, I ask myself: where does all my time go? This question comes up for me whenever I’m focused on a project, but it’s not progressing as quickly as I expect. Here’s me asking myself this question a few times over the years: This time, I thought, “Maybe I should use a time tracking tool.” About 15 years ago, I tried a time tracking tool called RescueTime. I didn’t find it that useful, but I thought maybe I’d keep at it for a few weeks and see what happened. Then, I realized I was letting a random company collect data about every window that appeared on my screen, and I promptly uninstalled RescueTime. I was wishing for an open-source version of RescueTime, when I thought, “Wait, there probably is one.” And there is. It’s called ActivityWatch . It’s open-source and privacy-first. It records all your window and browsing activity, but the data all stays local to your machine. The problem is that ActivityWatch is way less polished than RescueTime. I couldn’t understand at all what the timeline was trying to show me: I couldn’t understand the timeline in the official ActivityWatch web interface. You’re supposed to assign rules to tell ActivityWatch how to categorize your activities, but I found that UI difficult to use as well: I found the categorization in the official ActivityWatch web UI difficult to use. I was about to give up on ActivityWatch, and then I thought, “Well, the data collection part probably works. What if I vibecode my own frontend?” So, I did , and it was pretty easy. I’m starting with a command-line tool, but I plan to expand it to a web app. To use my custom ActivityWatch frontend, I create a config file to categorize activities based on app name, window title, and/or URL: And then the output looks like this: So far, the data is interesting, but the biggest challenge is that it’s hard to categorize all of my activities automatically. For example, I can add a category for browsing Wikipedia, but am I doing it as part of legitimate work on my book? Or did I just go down a rabbit hole, and I’m suddenly reading about inventors killed by their own inventions ? Refactoring English had its second-best month of sales. I examine my sales numbers to see whether people are more likely to purchase a complete book as opposed to an almost-complete draft. I completed my book feedback tool. I’m trying a new tool to track my time. Result : Spent about three hours improving the website Result : Got 17.5k unique readers. Result : The tool is up and running. Finished the Refactoring English feedback tool. Made fixes to the Refactoring English ebook for consistency and EPUB compatibility. Made a demo video for Little Moments . I’m quite proud of the silly photos in this. Customers don’t care as much as I’d expect about the difference between a 100% complete book and an almost-complete book. Readers do purchase the finished book at higher rates, but the effect is pretty small when you control for number of website visitors. Pitch to 5 podcasts to talk about Refactoring English . Attract 30k unique readers to the Refactoring English website. Wrap up early access, and declare the 1.0 release of my book.

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fLaMEd fury 3 days ago

There And Back Again

What’s going on, Internet? This was meant to be the April wrap-up. It’s now the middle of July, so let’s call it the autumn-into-winter wrap-up and pretend that was the plan all along, lol. Autumn kicked off with Easter down in Martinborough and a batch of hot cross buns . I managed to get to three gigs in three months: MGK at Spark Arena , Split Enz at Spark Arena , and a solo night out for Home Brew performing Last Week at the Auckland Town Hall . I’m so happy I got to see Home Brew perform live, finally after all these years. Auckland has been really good for me being able to get out to gigs more frequently. More recently, this month we escaped a rainy afternoon at Kelly Tarlton’s . The following weekend we headed south to Butterfly Creek and spent the afternoon there. My first time visiting and really enjoyed it. It’s part butterfly sanctuary, part farm, part zoo, part adventure playground, and part dinosaur kingdom, lol. There’s a lot going on. We spent around 30 minutes in the butterfly house while my son stood super still in an attempt to have a butterfly land on him. So cute, but didn’t work out for him this time. Then finally the weekend just been we spent a long weekend on Waiheke for Matariki . We spent Friday on the beach, hot chocolate and fluffies at the beach cafe, late lunch at The HEKE, and a bus trip to Oneroa for ice cream. Saturday we spent the morning at the Ostend Markets, back to the beach, then back to the beach cafe for an early dinner and to watch the All Blacks Italy game. When I last wrote about books, it was all about reading eBooks again . Since then I’ve got through nine books, with only A Darkness Returns being an eBook. Highlights of these books were The New Girl and Leave Before You Go by Emily Perkins, Platform Decay by Martha Wells and the return to James S. A. Corey’s new universe The Faith of Beasts . I also read The Lean Startup , Blood Ties , Famesick , Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today but mostly didn’t finish these. The record shelf did some damage this quarter, 20 new arrivals. June was basically an Olivia Rodrigo situation, and each gig sent me home with its record: MGK’s Lost Americana, True Colours after Split Enz, and Last Week on pink vinyl after the Home Brew show. I guess the other thing with three months to cover is that I got through a lot of media. Highlights being Outer Banks . I wrote up seasons one and two and have since torn through season three and halfway through season four as I write this. Such a fun show. I realised as I started season three that this reminds me of the recent Tomb Raider games or the older Uncharted games which I loved playing. The other big binge was Hacks , all five seasons, 47 episodes. I had an absolute blast with this show. It was sitting there waiting to be watched for literal years and I finally sat down and blasted through it. Another standout was Tulsa King , got through the last two seasons quickly. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this show so much! The Boys wrapped up with season five. I think I was satisfied with how it ended? Yeah, I think so. I also got through Fallout season two quickly, can’t wait for the next. And also wrapping up was Euphoria which messily wrapped up with season three. This season was kinda bat shit, not sure whether I enjoyed it or not, but happy I don’t have to think about it any more. Keeping up with the weeklies and new seasons: House of the Dragon season three, X-Men '97 season two, and Power Book III: Raising Kanan season five. This season we’re really seeing Kanan turning into how we saw him in Ghost. I’m also slowly working through Only Murders in the Building season five with my wife and in-laws when we are able to sit down together and watch an episode. Eighteen movies since March. The highlights though. I caught Project Hail Mary at the theatre with my brother-in-law before it stopped showing. Finally caught up with The Fantastic 4: First Steps to make sure I’m up to speed with the road to Avengers: Doomsday. I was excited to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 as the first always had a special nostalgic place in my heart. Anniversary was an unexpected sleeper, I was not expecting what this movie ended up being after watching the trailer. Don’t Ever Stop , a fantastic documentary on Tony De Vit. This was especially good as a hardhouse fan and hearing legends of the scene talk about their interactions with Tony and memories of the origins of what became the hardhouse scene in the UK. The Drama was an interesting one, and to be honest I thought the other woman’s secret she shared was way worse than Zendaya’s. Locking a kid in a fridge in the forest and not telling anyone is wild. Get out of here. And the rest… Office Romance , Mile End Kicks , A Real Pain , Eenie Meanie , Carolina Caroline , Stone Cold Fox . I don’t think I watched any I didn’t like. The bookmarks kept flowing while the blog was quiet. The best of them are already rounded up in the May and June link dumps, so I won’t repeat them here. Check out the bookmarks page for even more. Around the web? I can’t remember if I shared this already, but I participated with issue 24 of the Ctrl-ZINE . Go give that a read! I also finally sat down with Manu to answer his People And Blogs questions. Manu has also hung up his hat since founding and running the series for the last few years and Zachary Kai has picked up the reins. You can find the archive here . James has recently started a new podcast, Wonders of Web Weaving which is 9 episodes deep as of writing. Catch up on all of them if you haven’t already, and if you keep listening you might hear yours truely in a week or two 😉 Website wise, there’s plenty going on under the hood while I prepare for the 2027 redesign. Really looking forward to sharing this with you all soon. There’ve been a few improvements around the site, but you’ll see most of the changes when I roll out the new design. I did sit down and refresh my 11ty and Neocities guide . I’m really pleased with all the great feedback I’ve received from this one, especially with all the people who have successfully managed to build a website using 11ty with it. Sweeet, laters 🤙 Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP , or send a webmention . Check out the posts archive on the website.

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A Working Library 6 days ago

Kraken

Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes an impossible discovery: the enormous specimen of Architeuthis dux, the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, tank and all. Things are about to get even weirder: he is interrogated by some very odd cops, attacked by a man without a heart, rescued by a disciple of a religion that believes Architeuthis is its god, finds himself in conversation with a statue in London, and soon learns that London itself is alive and full of viscera and leucocytes and more. The plotting is bonkers, with more twists and turns and magical intercessions than I could keep track of. But the language cracks delightfully, and there’s enough irreverence for all the gods and then some. As the story builds towards not one but two apocalypses you realize that the end of the world is always just about to happen—and always, there is someone egging it on and someone trying to stop it. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Kev Quirk 6 days ago

Extinct

Author: RR Haywood Genre: Sci-fi Released: 2018 Rating: ★★★★☆ The end of the world has been avoided—for now. With Miri and her team of extracted heroes still on the run, Mother, the disgraced former head of the British Secret Service, has other ideas… While Mother retreats to her bunker to plot her next move, Miri, Ben, Safa and Harry travel far into the future to ensure that they have prevented the apocalypse. But what they find just doesn’t make sense. London in 2111 is on the brink of annihilation. What’s more, the timelines have been twisted. Folded in on each other. It’s hard to keep track of who is where. Or, more accurately, who is when. The clock is ticking for them all. With nothing left to lose but life itself, our heroes must stop Mother—or die trying. Learn more on Goodreads ➡ I've really enjoyed this series - I'm a big fan of Haywood's writing, as regular readers will already know, I've read a few of his books . This one took me a little while to get through though; not because it was bad, just because I've had a lot going on at home, so haven't had much time for reading recently. Haywood recently released book #4 in this series, Rebirth, which I've already bought. But I don't know if I should take a break from the series. I have the Red Rising books on my Kindle and everyone keeps telling me how good they are, so I may jump over and start those. Any recommendations? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

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neilzone 1 weeks ago

Holiday reading, mostly from Standard eBooks

Sandra and I have had this week off, and one of the things I wanted to do was to catch up on my reading. All bar one so far has been from Standard eBooks . From Kobo , I enjoyed this account of someone who claims to have worked for MI5 (I’ve no reason to doubt this, but, well, who knows) carrying out operational (i.e. on street / in car) human surveillance. How much is true, how much is hyperbole, I don’t know, but it made for an interesting, often challenging, read. I finished the book - perhaps as the author had intended - with a question mark as to his suitability for the role. A classic, which I last read many years ago, “The Call of the Wild” is a pretty brutal book about the life of (fictional?) dog in north America during the gold rush. I suspect that there are various parallels with humankind, in terms of the way in which different people treat the dog, and the dog’s move from bored domestic comfort to a wild animal, but frankly - animal abuse aside - it was just a good, fun, and short book. I have read “Jurassic Park” before (better than the film, IMHO, and I think that the film is superb), but for some reason, I had not read “The Lost World” before. The story is, in essence, about some privileged white men exploring a dinosaur-laden plateau. The frankly appalling treatment by white men of the indigenous population seems to be a theme of the books I’ve been reading this week, perhaps because of the prevalent attitudes of the time in which they were written. If you ever wanted to read “Jurassic Park” in somewhat older English - which, I must admit, I find a joy to read - this is worth a look. I jumped in at book two of the series - Allan Quatermain Stories - rather than with “King Solomon’s Mines” . I should probably rectify that. The book is, in essence, a series of stories reifying a hunter, Allan Quatermain, and his adventures in “unexplored” Africa. Basically, he shoots a lot of animals, supported by a cast of indigenous servants. My goodness, I found “The Last of the Mohicans” incredibly tedious and long-winded. I should probably stick with it, as I like the sound of the precis, but still, the 20 or so pages that I read were just hard work.

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A Working Library 1 weeks ago

Hungrier than before

Near the end of The Tombs of Atuan, the wizard Ged is in the desert with a young woman, Tenar. They have escaped a great evil and are tired, footsore, hungry. They have no food and little water and are a day’s walk from either. Tenar, having seen some of Ged’s magic, asks if he can do something about their predicament: “Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly. “Hunting takes time, and weapons.” “I meant, with, you know, spells.” “I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.” “Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…” “Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.” Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan , page 155 Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop? What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion. And it’s not only AI, of course. A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same, books and movies and music created by marketing teams with quantified audience strategies but no fucking soul to speak of. AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real. Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

The Eye of the Heron

On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City. When a group of townspeople scout and find a good place for a new settlement, they tell the City of their plans to send some of their people north. But the councillors of the City—the bosses—refuse to let them go. Luz, a daughter of one of the bosses, gets wind of the council’s plans, and becomes angry: at her father for refusing to see reason, at the handsome but entitled man he expects her to marry, at the passive old townswoman who advises her to stop and think. But Luz isn’t thinking, she’s walking, towards her own freedom, and theirs. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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A Working Library 2 weeks ago

Two Cheers for Anarchism

In this series of short explorations of anarchist thought, James C. Scott proposes a “process-oriented” view of anarchism, or what might be termed anarchism by doing rather than theory. He sees anarchism especially in everyday practices of freedom and in the refusal to submit to higher, unjust, authorities: the foot-dragging, insubordination, desertion, poaching, sabotage, absenteeism, and so on which undermine empire and authoritarian rule often better than any mutiny can, and with less blood. And he sees that same anarchism in places of improvisation and experimentation that create conditions for living while also building know-how and solidarity: small, chaotic but fertile farms; mixed-used city neighborhoods; shopkeepers who answer to their community rather than a boss. Perhaps accordingly, the book comes together more as a collection of interconnecting parables than as any unified theory—not a plan but a collective and liberating practice. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Books: January to June, 2026

I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026. A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine. Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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iDiallo 2 weeks ago

I turned my prologue into a short video

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

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A Working Library 3 weeks ago

The Rift

Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up. When they meet, she first refuses to explain what has happened to her, where she has been all this time. But soon she shares a fantastical story of being on another planet, of other people and animals and continents so unlike our own. There are many kinds of rifts here: between the sisters, between their parents as they deal with the loss of a child, in Julie’s own life as it skips from one world to another. But these rifts aren’t only breaks or absences; they are also openings, places where something emerges into the world that wasn’t there before. Each rift creates two things where before there seemed only one. View this post on the web , reply via email , or become a supporter .

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

IndieWeb Book Club: July 2026

I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm . I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time. If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me a link and I'll be more than happy to link it here on the blog. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Michael Lynch 1 months ago

Refactoring English: Month 18

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers . Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: This has felt like it was a week away for six weeks, so I’m glad to finally have all the chapters done. This seemed like it should basically be a 2-3-day project, but I realized it’s more difficult than it seemed, especially due to the great blockade . Eep, I continue to neglect marketing, and the numbers are suffering for it. I was desperate to get the last few chapters of the book done, so I focused only on that rather than investing in any marketing. I’ve continued pursuing security bug bounties, but I’ve reduced my time on them. I’m not quite doing the 70/30 split I planned, but maybe like 60/40. The main vendor I’ve been working with paid me another $7k (bringing me to $17k total) for reports, but they’ve slowed down on processing reports, so I’ve mostly stopped searching for new bugs in their code. I submitted bugs to a few other programs to check if any are processing bug reports quickly, but none of them are: I’ve completed all the chapters of the book, which is a relief, but I don’t consider it officially “done.” I wrote the book over the past year and a half, usually focusing on a single chapter at a time. I haven’t ever read my own book cover-to-cover to make sure it’s all consistent. I want to do at least a few complete readthroughs before I call it done. I originally planned to continuously edit the book based on reader feedback. That way, when I got to the last chapter, the book would be pretty much done because the rest of the book would have had so many revisions based on comments from readers. In reality, I integrated reader feedback far less than I expected. I found it hard to split my focus between revising past chapters and writing new ones. If I spent a week revising old chapters, it didn’t feel like forward progress. When I added a new chapter, it meant that my public progress meter got a little fuller, which was motivating. Progress meter from book website The other reason I didn’t continuously revise is that I didn’t reach out to readers as much as I planned. Part of that is that I constantly felt behind on the book, so there was always a sense of, “I want to get this chapter out, and then I’ll invest more into reader outreach.” But even when I reached out to readers, it rarely impacted the book. The most common responses from readers were, “I like the book” or, “I haven’t started it yet.” When I did get detailed feedback, I wasn’t always sure how to integrate it. In some cases, I agreed with the feedback, so it was an easy decision. Usually, though, the reader would suggest adding something that I didn’t think was necessary. And that’s not to say the reader was wrong, but I’d want to see a pattern in reader feedback before I go against my intuition, and I wasn’t getting enough feedback to see a pattern. Now that I’ve completed all the chapters, I feel like I have more space to reach out to readers. I like the idea of Help this Book , a web app that allows readers to give feedback directly in your ebook, but I didn’t want to store all of my feedback with a third party and pay monthly rent. I saw that Julia Evans made her own reader feedback tool , customized to her products, and I thought that was neat, so I’m working on that. I’m working on a web app to make it easier for readers to give me feedback about my book. Overall, I’ve found that AI makes me more productive when programming. There are certain tasks like resolving git merge conflicts, debugging unfamiliar code, or making simple tools where AI is a clear win. I used to think AI was great at helping me start projects, but now I’m not so sure. I keep hitting what I call “the great blockade.” Six months ago, I’d give the AI agent a high-level overview of what I wanted and tell it to implement a basic v1 implementation. I knew the agent’s output would be messy, but it was just a prototype, so I could keep giving it feedback until it matched my programming sensibilities. It turns out that it’s harder than I expected to clean up a bad prototype. Once the prototype is bad enough, I have a hard time untangling what the code is even trying to do. AI seems to have a weird bias to justify whatever code is already present. If I tell the AI that a component seems confusing because it’s iterating over the same data three times, it just keeps insisting we have to iterate over the data three times because of X, Y, and Z. But it never questions whether X, Y, and Z are artificial constraints. This is the blockade. I get stuck trying to move beyond a giant wall of confusing code that AI constructed. If I don’t fix the core logic, the problem keeps getting worse. The code smells grow like fungus and spread throughout the codebase. I’m building on top of a weak foundation, and the AI just keeps duplicating bad patterns that already exist. Okay, easy fix: have the AI agent create the prototype in smaller pieces. Keep the AI on a tighter leash so it can’t go so far into the weeds. Instead of having the AI create the whole prototype, have it start with a welcome page. Once that’s reviewed and merged, add one simple feature, and so on. That works fine until I get to a complex chunk, like authentication. AI creates a pull request that’s 2-5k LOC of confusing code, and that becomes a huge wall. I can’t think of a way to break down the feature any further, so I’m stuck with this massive PR, another great blockade. Not only does a 4k LOC change take 20x as long to review as a 400 LOC change, but it also requires larger review windows. If I have a 20-minute block available, I can tackle the 400 LOC change, but if I have a 4k LOC change, I need 20 minutes just to build up context. To make meaningful progress on a 4k LOC change without wasting most of it on context friction, I need a 90-minute window, which is hard to come by especially for weekend projects. Here’s an example. For Little Moments , I’m doing authentication with magic login emails . And for several weeks, I couldn’t think of a way to break that feature down without introducing dead code or broken features. I can’t implement half a login flow. After several weeks of chipping away at a giant PR little by little, I realized I actually could implement half a login. PicoShare , another app I maintain, has a simple authentication flow. The app assumes a single authorized user, so authentication is just a passphrase, not even a username/password pair. Instead of a huge switch from no authentication to email-based authentication, I could go from no authentication to passphrase authentication. So, I got passphrase authentication working , but moving from passphrase to magic email logins was still a pretty massive PR that would take me weeks to review. After hacking on it over several days, I realized I could break it down further. Instead of actually sending emails with a login link, I could just immediately redirect the user to the link I would have sent them. That was still a 1.7k LOC PR , but it was more manageable than sending actual emails. And it reduced the actually sending emails part to a mere 1k LOC. The thing that makes me wonder if AI is a net positive on this type of work is that I know I would have spotted these opportunities to break down the problem had I not been using AI. I would never create a 4k LOC PR and then say, “Hmm, this is pretty big.” As the PR grows larger, it becomes more painful to work with, so I naturally see opportunities to break the change into smaller pieces. AI disrupts that natural feedback loop. With AI, there’s no pain in creating a 4k LOC PR because it happens in two minutes while I check my email. And I can easily give notes to improve the 4k LOC PR and feel like I’m making progress, but the big change makes it hard for me to identify what pieces can lift out into their own smaller changes. Now that I recognize how easy it is to generate huge, unmanageable PRs for complex changes, I can change the way I use AI to invest more upfront into breaking features down into tinier changes. I’ve completed all 22 chapters of my book. I thought AI made prototyping faster, but now I’m not so sure. Result : I’ve completed all chapters. Result : The tool is only about 40% complete. KeePassXC - I submitted an RCE to Zero Day Initiative on May 18th, but I haven’t heard any response. For KeePassXC users, this isn’t a zero-click attack or something that could compromise your database by just visiting a malicious website, so don’t get too worried. Cloudflare - I submitted a DoS / logic bypass via HackerOne on May 22nd. No response. Proton - I submitted one low-severity issue. They asked for a video proof of concept, so I made one on May 29th, and they said to wait to hear back. Published the last chapters of my book. Created a partial prototype of a book feedback app. Partially implemented authentication for Little Moments. Cut two new releases of PicoShare. Using AI eliminates the natural feedback cycle that motivates me to build software in smaller chunks. I think the solution is to work harder earlier in the lifecycle of complex features to break things down into smaller chunks and be more strict in checking the AI’s output. Invest at least five hours into improving the Refactoring English website. Attract 30k unique readers to the Refactoring English website. Complete my reader feedback tool.

Business Books Writing Julia

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A Working Library 1 months ago

A Granite Silence

In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again. Nearly a century later, Nina Allen walks along Urquhart Road, where Helen lived with her parents, and decides to write about her. What follows is a novel that plays with the notion of a novel; a true crime story that questions which crimes are “true”; a court drama that scrambles ideas of victim and perpetrator; and a speculative fiction narrative that is interested in when and how we speculate—and in what directions we reach. “Even as I try to restrict myself to the facts,” writes Allan, “I come to realize I will never stop being a writer compelled to imagine, and what if the spaces of my mind offer shelter to witches as well as detectives?” What if, indeed. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Unsung 1 months ago

Book review: Steve Jobs in Exile

★★★★☆ (as a book) ★★★☆☆ (for the purposes of this blog) There are as many books about Steve Jobs as there were Quadra models, but they focus mostly on two phases: Steve Jobs in Exile by Geoffrey Cain is a just-released, rare volume that focuses on the “in-between years” – starting with Steve Jobs founding NeXT and Pixar after his Apple ouster, and ending with him coming back to Apple under the absolutely strangest of circumstances. It’s a doubly interesting phase, both because we see Jobs maturing as a leader and actually learning from his many mistakes, and because the early technical NeXT decisions eventually became underpinnings for modern macOS and iOS. I do not see this as a book of new immense insight, technical depth, or design details, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t go beyond surface level. What I appreciated most was Cain not shying away from pointing at some of Steve Jobs’s mistakes: hiring wrong people he happened to like, almost driving the company to the ground through obstinance, inability to focus on things he considered uninteresting, and a profound dose of duplicity coming into the NeXT/​Apple merger. Other things that stood out: focus on people around Jobs, spotlight on Jobs’s disappointing moral flexibility around working with government (or befriending Larry Ellison, for that matter), and a really fun pizza ordering story that serves as a prelude to the Starbucks call during the iPhone 2007 keynote. Some learnings: The one thing I didn’t like about the book was that the few photos inside are only perfunctory; there’s a lot of chatter about a beautiful, symbolic NeXT lobby staircase, top-of-the-landline phones, and expensive chairs, but we never get to see them. Many of the photos are by Doug Menuez – which you can also see online – but the problem is that those photos are generally not that interesting. That aside, it’s still a breezy and entertaining read that filled in some gaps and provoked new thoughts. = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/book-review-steve-jobs-in-exile/1.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/book-review-steve-jobs-in-exile/1.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> #apple #book #book review #culture #next #review 1955–1985 – Steve Jobs befriending Wozniak, the early days of Apple, Lisa, and the Mac 1997–2011 – Steve Jobs’s “second act” at Apple, and the creation of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and so on Craft and taste alone are not enough; you can spend your talents and energy on things that don’t “matter” given some definition of the word. That could be okay if that’s a choice you make – “impact” is ill-defined and often overrated, anyway – but you need to approach it clear-eyed, which Jobs didn’t initially know how to do. Confidence, like everything, needs to be practiced, and focused, and influenced back by feedback and reactions. (Witness the negotiating acumen of a certain Jean-Louis Gassée!) It’s really hard to create a culture of hard and honest and deep conversations that’s also not a culture of abuse and toxicity.

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book

Four years ago, in the article What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die? , I wrote the following prophetic words: […] Which gets me back to this website. My intentions are to someday publish its contents in the form of a book, which can also be stored at the KBR [Royal Library of Belgium]. This allows the people dear to me to still have access to the silly stuff I write here. Two years later, I claimed that Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year of more than words. That means compiling a hefty tome to compress all these years of productive blogging into a single physical volume might be a bit more challenging than I initially anticipated. Yet not impossible. So the last months, I’ve kept myself busy by doing just that: turning this blog into a book! The book flipped open on the blog post 'Three Little GameCube Mods' from 05 December 2021. This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a , send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings? Luckily, it turned out all right. I call it Brain Baking DX: Blog Archives 2016 - 2026 and it is available at Amazon under ISBN-13 number 979-8197112897 . My first attempt yielded more than 500 pages and I couldn’t find a publishing service that was eager to print something like that for less than . At Amazon, the book costs… . And it’s globally available, should you be crazy enough to want a copy. Be warned, though: the book is mostly unedited , I created this mainly for myself. I sent out a few copies to friends but have no intention of setting up a marketing campaign let alone making money off of it. I intentionally set the price low and receive for every sale. Please do not buy this just to support me. So why a book? As mentioned before, I want my writing to be a bit more permanent than the fleeting medium called the internet. What happens when my VPS is blown up, my backups burned away, and my motivation to restore all this along with it? In Belgium every author of “proper” books (this is debatable nowadays… Is Brain Baking DX a proper book?) is legally obliged to deposit two copies to the Royal Library in Brussels, where the books disappear into the winding depths of the archive deep below the capital. Plus, I like books. I like flipping through this one and rediscovering old writings: it feels very different than clicking through the online archive. Also, since I like to add photos in my blog posts to help shape the atmosphere, preserving these mostly personal photos in the book makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when I flip through the book and look at them. Some of these photos are snapshots of my life as a kid, my old and new desktop setup, destinations I once biked to, etc. It’s a nice memento to have these included. Why Brain Baking DX ? What’s up with that? Most readers of this blog know that I grew up with a Game Boy and became a big retro gaming nut(case) because of it. The black DX cartridge editions transformed their original Game Boy release into the wonderful world of colours: black carts work with the original Game Boy and the then new Game Boy Color. DX was simply the “DeluXe” treatment to your beloved Link’s Awakening or Tetris . Funny, as Brain Baking DX might be called anything but deluxe: financial constraints prevent me from publishing this book in full colour mode and space constraints prevent me from simply dumping everything that I’ve ever written in here. Perhaps both are for the better. Still, in a way, a printed edition of ten years worth of Brain Baking blog posts can certainly be called deluxe. My method for compiling the book wasn’t as simple as throwing every Markdown article source file at Pandoc to compile a single . I didn’t want to preserve everything I post here: it had to be a deliberate, curated selection. Things I didn’t want in there include: After proceeding to make a first selection, I categorised these into major themes that became the parts of the book: parenting, journaling & writing, work, the web, technology, retro, video and board games, life & philosophy, food & cooking, and living in Belgium. Then I employed my usual Markdown/Pandoc/TeX magic and inspected the results. The front cover of Brain Baking DX. 600+ pages. Ouch. Now what? Maybe it is time to think about the layout: how do I want to present all this text? Clearly, a typical book layout won’t do. I turned down the font size, opted for a two-column layout, selected a more wide book format ( ) and squeezed everything I could out of those margins. As a last resort, I also allowed chapters to start on any page (as opposed to the right page only which introduces a lot of blank pages). I admit I might have overdone it a bit as the top margin is very thin, but all these changes did reduce the page size to a more manageable 470. After ordering a few copies for myself to inspect the result, I was afraid that the text would not be very readable, or the margins where the book would be glued would be too narrow. Fortunately, the end result is surprisingly pleasant to read. The cream paper Amazon provides is a nice match although the paper feels a bit too thin for my taste. Yet a hefty tome like this for is ridiculously cheap so I can’t complain. The fact that the book is printed in black & white does not work against the many photos and screenshots included. Additionally, because it’s Amazon, it allows the book to be distributed and printed virtually anywhere. My copies were printed in Brétigny-sur-Orge in France. Better than China! When you are selecting blog posts to be included into the book, you’ll notice recurring themes you wrote about. For example, I have wasted too many words on physical video game collecting. Instead of just pasting these chapters next to each other, I wanted them to “flow” better in the book so I did rewrite portions to better match the medium. Also, in many occasions, a new chapter (thus blog post) starts with a reference to the previous one. On the site, this is just a link, but on paper, you don’t want to print “in this article”. Speaking of links, a blog or website is an interconnected medium: how to approach this on paper? I ended up putting all LaTeX links in the margin footer on the same page but did a diagonal sweep to remove the excessive ones. On the site, a long link is just hidden behind a click, but on paper, an link to a long URL is not only ugly but will never be typed over or “used” in that way. Also, internal Brain Baking links usually start with —in the end, I decided to keep it that way as prepending everywhere would mean even more text wasted. I did make a note of this in the newly written introduction. Besides the “in this post” link adaptations (don’t do this—it’s also bad for accessibility in your online blog!), I noticed I also had to do something about the images. Because of the two-column layout, the wide figures such as graphs will be squeezed into a barely readable square. You can fix this by manually adding a to the ones you want to be displayed as a full-page spread ( ). But I made another mistake: in many posts, I write something and then add an image to emphasise the statement, ending in a semicolon to point to the image. Yet in a book, you never know precisely where that image will be included! In my future writings, I’ll take these things into account to more easily compile Brain Baking DX II in ten years. This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy. And also embarrassed as there are plenty of contextual and grammatical mistakes in solidified as well. I’m looking forward to revisiting the project in ten years! If you want to attempt something like this for yourself and don’t know how to approach this technically, drop me a line and I’ll be more than glad to help you out. Related topics: / archiving / By Wouter Groeneveld on 5 June 2026.  Reply via email . Research and topics regarding creativity & bread baking: I have other published books that delve into this. Monthly link sharing posts and other posts that are mainly lists or links. Technical posts on programming, coding, Hugo tips, etc. Design mistake posts. Overly negative posts. Anything that has the word “AI” in it (except my more elaborate commentary). Too short posts to be worthwhile printing. Too photo/screenshot intensive posts to be worthwhile printing.

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Fernando Borretti 1 months ago

How To Read More

The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen, it couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. — Philip Roth We’re halfway through 2026, and according to Goodreads I’ve read 80 books so far, fiction and non-fiction and textbooks, including such doorstoppers as Life and Fate (864p, astoundingly good). And I don’t feel like I’m trying particularly hard. I still have plenty of time to work and code and scroll. This isn’t normal for me. At some point, as is the case for many of us, the screen outcompeted the book , so that my average over the past ten years would have been on the order of three to five books per year. And I’m not a particularly fast or obsessive reader. Which is to say: if I can do it, so can you. Here’s how: And if you don’t know what to read, have some of my favourites: The Diamond Age — From Third World to First — House of Suns — The Invention of Morel — On the Marble Cliffs — The Rediscovery of Man — Satan in Goray — The World of Yesterday . Quit your job: working less than full time has freed up a lot of time to read and learn and do various other things. Read in public: if you put a number next to someone’s name, they will maximize it. Reading privately is solipsistic (if I stop, what changes?); reading in public, through Goodreads (which sucks, but it is what it is), makes it feel less self-absorbed, and more like I’m achieving something. You may call it performative, which is fine by me, as long as it works. Make a task: I used to start a lot of books, and not finish them, not because I would explicitly choose to stop reading, but because I’d forget about it. At the end of the day I’d see the book on my nightstand and go, oh, right. More generally: the most common way I fail to finish a project is I forget I intended to do it. This is solved by reifying the task : when I start reading a book, I make a daily recurring task on Todoist for it. Start small: this feels embarrassing (what kind of brainrotted maniac needs to microdose short books to build up to bigger books?) but it actually works. Sort your to-read list by number of pages. Reading short books generates evidence for the belief that you are the kind of person who can decide to read a book, and follow through. Reading five, six, seven-hundred page books feels vastly less daunting now. Parallelize: reading the same book for two hours is almost impossible. Reading four books, one pomodoro each, is completely doable, and I do it most days. Fraction: reading is a rare kind of activity where you can make progress in any arbitrarily-small chunk of time. A few minutes on the train are enough to turn a few pages. This isn’t the case for e.g. coding. You can take advantage of that: find interstitial dead zones in your calendar to stuff with reading. Eat your vegetables: I read a lot of books I don’t particularly enjoy, because I think they’re important, culturally or historically or in some sense. I think this is good. If you only read books that hook you, you’re going to read very little, and much of that will be unremarkable page-turner slop. Internalizing that you can read a book even if you don’t love it immunizes you against the lack of motivation. It’s like going to the gym even if you don’t feel like it.

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annie's blog 1 months ago

Oh to be a snail feasting on a sycamore // Week 21 — 2026

Are these weeknotes again ? Yes they are! Is this a fluke or is it a trend? Who knows! Who cares! Let’s do iiiiiittttttt. Current situation: Monday 18 May: Went for a walk early, before the rain set in. I adore a rainy day. Got a lot of work done. Afternoon thing canceled due to power outage from the storm. Evening thing canceled due to it being outdoors. Busy day became cozy day. Did an interview for a freelance piece. Do you have questions about EoE? I might have answers 1 . Thinking about studying but not studying. I should just study. Tuesday 19 May: Hospital day. Walking out to my car I happened to go past a young couple leaving the hospital with their brand-new baby. Mom sitting in backseat, leaning over, looking, exhausted smile. A glimpse of tiny baby face nestled in. Dad checking and rechecking the car seat, slowly easing the door shut, hustling around to the driver’s door. A precious, unrepeatable moment I was lucky enough to observe. Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up words in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness. The endless endless task of learning new words was for me an image of life. — A Word Child , Iris Murdoch Wednesday 20 May: Long walk in the morning listening to podcasts. Trying to brush up on my Spanish so it doesn’t fade away entirely. I don’t think this conversational listening podcast is gonna do it but maybe it will help. When I can’t make a decision I’m usually overcomplicating the context and overestimating the impact. A veces no me gusta tomar decisiones. Thursday 21 May: Early morning meeting. Long walk. Work. Last day of school. For Lily, last day of middle school. If I squint and tilt my head I can see the light at the end of the school-parent journey. Then I start crying. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FEELINGS ALL THE TIME. Anyway here’s a flower. Another Official and Exceedingly Delightful Meeting of the Cunty Bitches Book Club. We talked about books for 10 minutes. It’s fine, books aren’t even the point. Friday 22 May: Made shrimp and collard greens and cornbread for dinner. Mom used to boil collard greens with a ham hock. I sauté them in bacon grease. Won’t change a thing about her cornbread recipe, though. It’s perfection. It  is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so  that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number  of disagreeable surprises. — The Art of Eating , M.F.K. Fisher Saturday 23 May: Hospital day. Hit 10,000 steps by 12 but things were fairly quiet all afternoon, so only 15k total for the day. Sunday 24 May: Hiking church. Look at this snail feasting on a downed sycamore. 💪 Three gym sessions: push/pull/legs. Sauna every time. Benched 95 lbs, my max so far. Maybe I’ll hit 100 next week. 👟 Four long walks and a nice hike. 🎵 Leave Me When I Need You // Lahra 📚 Continued A Word Child by Iris Murdoch. Started The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Dipped into The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. Started Moonbound by Robin Sloan. Reread a bit of Finite and Infinite Games 2 by James P. Carse. 🔗 I Did Not Come to This Kids Party for an AI Sermon // Justin Ribeiro h/t Baldur Bjarnason The quagmire is clear; to engage with the preachers is to legitimize not  only the sermon but rather the dominant hierarchy that the viewpoint  attempts to crystalize. That hierarchy is not one of “the AI fulfills  your needs” but rather the external force that AI is is inevitable and  places a radical demand on your life—you may not want to use it, but its  placement in applications you use places demands on you. The sermon is  no different; it places a radical demand for you to engage, with someone  who is either ill-informed or worse, well-informed and willing to seek  gains at your expense. 🔗 Friction deserves a better reputation // Nicholas Bate What costs something to produce tends to be better than something which  costs nothing. The slow letter beats the careless message every time. I agree. 3 🔗 Prepare your no and keep it handy // Derek Sivers It’s so handy in those high-pressure moments where someone is looking  you in the eyes, asking you to do something, and awaiting your answer. No problem! You have it memorized and ready-to-go, even when unexpected. You can be kind but decisive on the spot. A good practice . I leave you with this cautionary reminder: Eosinophilic esophagitis. It’s becoming much more common. Caused by food allergies but the triggers aren’t obvious as symptoms/reactions build over a long period of time. The gist is if you have trouble swallowing or keeping food down, it’s not normal, get it checked out, symptoms do worsen without treatment. This is not medical advice. I can’t find anything I’ve written about this book but I know I’ve written about this book this is one of my favorite books wtf I must remedy this situation immediately OMG I AM LOVING THE PIKA LINK SEARCH FEATURE Eosinophilic esophagitis. It’s becoming much more common. Caused by food allergies but the triggers aren’t obvious as symptoms/reactions build over a long period of time. The gist is if you have trouble swallowing or keeping food down, it’s not normal, get it checked out, symptoms do worsen without treatment. This is not medical advice. I can’t find anything I’ve written about this book but I know I’ve written about this book this is one of my favorite books wtf I must remedy this situation immediately OMG I AM LOVING THE PIKA LINK SEARCH FEATURE

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Jim Nielsen 1 months ago

Book Notes: “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”

I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger . I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is. He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving hard problems, but from spending their time knowing what a simple solution looks like — and acting on it when they see it! We’ve succeeded by making the world easy for us, not by solving the world’s hard problems. Munger analogizes their approach to investing like jumping a fence. They don’t spend all their time trying to figure out how to jump a seven-foot tall fence. Instead, they find a spot where the fence is only a foot tall, jump it, and take the reward on the other side. The approach he articulates for investing, in fact, seems broadly applicable to any kind of problem solving: Whenever people ask him for advice (as if somehow he could bestow upon them some kind of knowledge that will save them the pain and hardship of experience) he seems anathema to the idea that you can live life without making lots of mistakes. To paraphrase Charlie: “I don’t want you to think that we have a method of learning that will prevent you from making mistakes. The best you can do is learn to make fewer mistakes than others. And then, when you inevitably do make mistakes, learn to acknowledge them and fix them quickly.” Straightforward. Practical. No bullshit. No ego. (Basically the opposite of everything I see on social platforms.) I quite enjoyed his perspective. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky Quickly eliminate the universe of what not to do. Follow up with a multi-disciplinary attack on what remains. Act decisively when — and only when — the right circumstances appear.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

House of Day, House of Night

In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation. Their neighbors include Marta, an older woman and wig maker, and So-and-so, who tells the story of how young Marek Marek hanged himself. Other stories weave through this place: a man dies on the Czech border and his body is dragged from one side to the other; a young monk writes the story of a saint and longs desperately to be a woman; a husband and wife each fall in love with a mysterious visitor, neither of them knowing of the other’s indiscretion. Occasionally, Germans are seen walking through the fields at night, digging in the ground. There’s a question here about place and displacement, about what happens when the people who built a town come to haunt it, and the people who live in it walk lightly over the ground. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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