Technology Commentary

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

When you think of CI, you probably picture a remote server somewhere: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins. You push your code, you wait, and eventually you get a green checkmark or a red X. This is so normal that we don't even question it. But why does CI have to be remote?

Training and running a neural network on a 1982 BBC Micro — first in BBC BASIC, then in 6502 assembly. Fixed-point Q4.11 arithmetic, a sigmoid lookup table, and a shift-and-add multiplier all prove that backpropagation doesn't need a FPU, a GPU, or anything invented after 1985.

Learn how to use Greenmask alongside OpenEverest to automatically anonymize production data and restore it to a staging environment — keeping developers productive without exposing sensitive information.

Lessons about XML from the open source IRS Tax Withholding Estimator.

The network that runs your business is facing a reckoning. For service providers and data center operators, that reckoning isn't abstract, it's existential. In 75 years, networking has gone through two complete transformations. We're in the middle of a third. Most organizations are

A conversation about agent orchestration, AI vampires, and why your bike ride is all hills now

A public model for engineering work in an AI-native world

How eight iterations of a blackjack simulation earned each nine the hard way

The following article originally appeared on Wes McKinney’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.Like a lot of people, I’ve

The year is 2006. A contract web developer who is working from home decides to take his Pomodoro break by walking to a thrift store down…

A holistic introduction to Emacs: how useful it is and how it champions free software.

"Red, green, refactor" promotes premature abstraction. I had all the information to come to this conclusion 20 years ago. I'm embarrassed to admit how long it actually took. What makes me say that? Well, sometime between 2003 and 2005, I met Ward Cunningham at a Seattle Extreme Programming Users Group

I tried to stop web scrapers and bots. My notes on IP blocks, ASNs, fingerprinting, and using CAPTCHAs or Turnstile services.

Why roadmaps fail: the real issue is hidden systems. Decision rights, ownership, and constraints shape delivery long before prioritization begins.

There's no silver bullet, but if we put some "lead" bullets in the right places, we have a good shot at keeping sensitive data out of logs.

Last April, I wrote a well-received article about the 13 software engineering laws - Hyrum’s, Conway’s, Zawinski’s, and 10 famous others.

Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding

Encore is an open-source framework for building robust distributed systems, using a declarative infrastructure-as-code approach ensuring performance, security, and quality.

Infrastructure from Code derives cloud infrastructure directly from application code, replacing Terraform and YAML with declarations in TypeScript or Go. Here's how it works.

Most SQL tools treat SQLite as a “flavor” of a generic SQL parser. They approximate the language, which means they break on SQLite-exclusive features like virtual tables, miss syntax like UPSERT, and ignore the 22 compile-time flags that change the syntax SQLite accepts. So I built syntaqlite: an open-source parser, formatter, validator, and LSP built directly on SQLite’s own Lemon-generated grammar. It sees SQL exactly how SQLite sees it, no matter which version of SQLite you’re using or which feature flags you compiled with. It ships as a CLI, VS Code extension, Claude Code LSP plugin, and C/Rust libraries. There’s also a web playground which you can try now: paste any SQLite SQL and see parsing, formatting, and validation live in the browser, no install needed. Full documentation is available here. Here’s syntaqlite in action: Formatting with the CLI syntaqlite fmt -e "select u.name,u.email,count(e.id) as events from users u join events e on e.user_id=u.id where u.signed_up_at=date('now','-30 days') group by u.name,u.email having count(e.id)10 order by events desc" SELECT u.name, u.email, count(e.id) AS events FROM users AS u JOIN events AS e ON e.user_id = u.id WHERE u.signed_up_at = date('now', '-30 days') GROUP BY u.name, u.email HAVING count(e.id) 10 ORDER BY events DESC; Validation with the CLI

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe shares his thoughts and plans for his newest startup, Mind Robotics.

Hello there, If you’re an avid reader of blogs, you’ll know this medium is basically dead now. Everyone switched to making YouTube videos, complete with cuts and costume changes every f…

The real impact of the digital revolution hits us directly in the place that matters most: our very experience of life

A friend of mine has been a software developer for most of the last five decades, and has worked with everything from 1960s mainframes to the machines of today. She recently tried AI coding tools t…

In the early days of the Internet, having a high-speed IP connection in your home or even a small business was, if not impossible, certainly a rarity. Connecting to a computer in those days require…

It seems that for as long as there have been readily available 3D printers, there have been moral panics about their being used to print firearms. The latest surrounds a Washington State Legislatur…

If you have ever read science fiction, you’ve probably seen “alternate history” stories. You know, where Europeans didn’t discover the New World until the 19th century, or t…