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There is an idea which recurs in many forms in the tech industry, which I summarise as: “where we’re going, we don’t need people”.

I am forever trying to explain, to people I know who aren’t in tech, why I am such a big fan of the Oxide Computer Company.

Karl Popper described science - I think convincingly - like this: A theory cannot be proven true, only disproven by experiment.

A Pattern Language (APL) is one of my favourite books.

We talk about “abstractions” a lot in software development.

I have recently been trying to implement, in my life, Fernando’s email inbox algorithm: For each conversation in the inbox: If it’s spam, delete it.

A few articles have popped up recently about open-source software and its role in society.

Programmers are familiar with the idea that it is important to understand why a system or behaviour is the way it is before trying to change it.

I’ve recently switched to using the new jj VCS, which you can think of as a Mercurial-like frontend for Git.

The rise of large language models which can convincingly reproduce human writing has made me notice something.

Thief is one of my favourite games.

Several AI thinkpieces are setting the tech commentary world alight right now.

Things I have been reading recently.

In database design especially, and in software development more generally, it’s tempting to store a boolean as a “yes/no” piece of state.

Each Good Friday, I am reminded of the song Ol’ Glory by Psalters, one of my favourites.

If you are unlucky, you might get me started explaining why I am so annoyed by PDF files.

An idea I keep returning to: a particular kind of performance optimisation consists of vertically integrating the source code that implements a particular functionality.

Dorothy Day writes this about the early days of the Catholic Worker: As fast as we gave things away people brought more.

In a business application, the database is just about the most important and valuable component.

Ursula Franklin said “peace is not the absence of war, but the absence of fear”.

Sometimes, I get to tell someone who didn’t know that the internet depends critically on vast networks of subsea cables which connect all the earth’s continents. https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ This usually happens with people who don’t work in tech, b…

A big part of my life in the past year has been working towards creating more affordable housing in Sydney.

Things I have been reading recently.

There are two up-and-coming architectural paradigms for app development in the web world: Durable execution: business logic written in procedural style can be reliably split up over long periods of time and different machines.

It was June 28 of this year that I unboxed my new Framework laptop.

The other week I asked a very pointy question on the PHP Australia Slack channel: Real talk, is encrypted casting security theater?

This is probably my most trivial tech pet peeve and I want to get it off my chest.

Ursula Franklin was a scientist, author, activist and Quaker who wrote, among many things, on technology.

I’ve developed a strong opinion about exceptions over the last few years.

Tonight I gave a lightning talk at the last PHP Sydney Meetup of the year.

I’ve used JSON-RPC before as a simple request-response protocol for Websocket services.

I’ve been looking into how to build a Figma-like realtime multiplayer editor.

The epigraph to Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities reads: “We are all very near despair.

For the first time since 1868, Quakers are not meeting for worship on Devonshire Street in Sydney.

At work, we’ve been trying out Graphite for the past year or so.

A small fact about Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater house: Wright designed the home above the waterfall: Kaufmann had expected it to be below the falls to afford a view of the cascades.

Things I have been reading recently.

Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

I found out about Paradicms when searching for advice about working with RDF data in JavaScript.

This is me upholding the web developer meme of rebuilding my personal site, and writing about rebuilding my personal site!

After trying to write long-form content for a while back in 2019-20 and realising that a) I now don’t have the time for it, and b) it’s hard to stay motivated for the length of an entire piece, I’ve decided to revamp my website and focus on building up a…

I’m really excited to go Linux full-time with a just-arrived Framework 13" running Fedora.

Yearly Meeting is the annual gathering of all Australian Quakers.

There seem to be a common misconception about the meaning of the term “relational” (in the context of “relational databases”).

Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth.

Technical and tech-adjacent writers seemingly never tire of describing various technologies as being “like Lego blocks”.

C++ was the first Object Oriented programming language.

As I write this, Facebook’s blackout of news content in Australia is only one day old.

or, why structural typing is awesome Comment on this post on dev.to When designing software, we strive to ensure each module, class, or function has a single responsibility.

I will be re-reading the following quotes from Sandi Metz’s Practical Object-Oriented Design every morning before I start coding: Object-oriented design is about managing dependencies.