Johan Halse's blog

Because sometimes you're worth a few extra bytes.

You can't open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like "agentic engineering" or "openclaw" into your beautiful but disapproving face.

The AI Ouroboros is chewing its tail, and we're all being strangled in the center.

Let's be realistic: DHH isn't going anywhere.

I managed to survive the rise and fall of the blockchain without writing a single goddamn word about it.

These last few months have been a whirlwind, haven't they?

Everyone keeps turning their noses up about developers having "hot takes" online but you know that article?

Every techie dreams of one day writing a considered harmful post and today, my friends, today that honor is finally bestowed on me.

I once heard Dave Rupert call types "baby unit tests" and that never really left my mind.

My social media has taken a hard turn for the nerdier since Twitter shut down and everyone with a modicum of moral fibre stopped posting there.

I recently stumbled over a reddit thread about children and parenting.

I've been using Web Components lately.

My tech posts often come from kind of a negative place.

It seems to be open season on Tailwind CSS!

In the dying embers of 2023, Mayank wrote a post that went through the trials and tribulations of React Server Components.

The Gävle goat is still standing, for now.

I'm sometimes linked to Twitter (sorry, I mean X) threads.

There seems to be a little swirl of anti-Tailwind sentiment brewing.

Brandon Weaver posted a thread on Mastodon a couple of days ago stressing the importance of planning ahead in software projects, and I caught myself feeling kind of offended.

DHH is in the tech news again!

Figma has been in the news lately, probably as a result of their Config event where they announced a bunch of new features.

There's a certain trajectory you follow as a developer.

I've been the sole developer of Bidders Highway for something like a year and a half now.

An article came out recently, declaring the seven Swedes still playing in the Russian KHL "a shameful part of Swedish sports history."

Many years ago, we went to London to watch football.

I'd never heard of Silicon Valley Bank before it exploded in a shower of pretty sparks last week.

There's been a bit of a brouhaha these last weeks as parts of the Internet suddenly woke up to the realization that most Single Page Apps are slow and overcomplicated, and — shock horror — it turns out that Facebook, the lovable scamps that brought us Rea…

I thought I would be the cool dad playing video games with my kid.

The short version is that I'm on Mastodon now and that feels okay, but I'm bitter about it and I wish it never had to go so far.

As you all know I'm a big fan of Twitter.

I like my software boring and stable.

I was a late adopter of Tailwind CSS.

I keep coming across the phrase "strong opinions, weakly held" and I swear to God I've never heard a more wishy-washy piece of spineless bullshit in my life.

I recently read an article by Jason Swett where he argues against Sandi Metz' old chestnut "duplication is better than the wrong abstraction" and it made me feel like I have to articulate why I'm Team Sandi here.

Look, I'll freely admit to knowing next to nothing about the Enterprise world.

Unless you're cool enough to commission your own icon set, you're probably using a library like Font Awesome or Google's Material Icons.

I've started a new job!

I've set up a Gemini server for johan.hal.se!

Well, wouldn't you know it!

There's a recognizable type of snobbery that stems from mastery, and you can see it practically everywhere.

Welp, here we are: stuck in the blessed land of carbon footprint reduction.

A significant chunk of the web runs on Amazon hardware now.

I can never remember the syntax for find.

I absent-mindedly leave my headphones at work about once a month.

It’s time to stop what we’re doing for a second and talk about automatic updates!

Confession time: I’m partly powered by smugness.

We all know a bunch of good stuff happens when you delete social media apps from your phone.