Ben Papillon

I think I’m going to buy a mandolin.

“Rift: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day.

“Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care” on Astral Codex Ten - helpful data and analysis.

Most-played discovery from the annual year-end list comb-through.

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert - hard to imagine a book about computing from 1980 aging better than this one has.

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru - interesting book about art, success, status; the “Covid era” already feels so long ago.

Why Co–Star uses Haskell

Readwise Reader - The best read-it-later/bookmarking app I’ve found; I’m about to renew my subscription to it for a second year.

Recommended by a friend who knows the frontman through past touring, my interest was piqued by a comparison to the Silver Jews.

So good.

This is a great hour to catch up on the current state of things in open source LLMs.

Ambient pedal-steel guitar.

Interesting episode that presents an alternative narrative for the 1970s inflationary episode, pinning it on regulations that cap bank deposit returns in order to prevent irresponsible insured lending at unsustainable rates (or lending at high rates and i…

Wide-ranging and thought-provoking talk from the creator of the Elm language, given at the final Strange Loop conference in 2023.

I’m a software developer and software engineering leader with a focus on B2B SaaS startups, data analytics, marketing tech, and payments.

A discussion about DevOps in 2023 The Rise of Feature Flags in DevOps During the second half of the 2010s, the DevOps movement gained massive momentum throughout the SaaS industry.

At ~6 hours, this two-parter is an investment, but one of the more engaging speakers I’ve heard discussing AI risk.

“Sketch of a Post-ORM” by Fernando Boretti - He has a lot of fantastic posts, there are probably 5 others I could have shared instead.

"There's this curious background belief many have where they think most systems must operate near the efficient frontier except of course every system they’ve ever worked inside."

examples of influential software made by one person?

Carbon - handy website for making nice-looking images of code snippets

“An Oral History of Bank Python” by Cal Peterson

Inputs This month, I read Ted Chiang’s two books of short stories, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, both of which were incredible.

Inputs Meghan, Jasper, and I camped at Jekyll Island for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

Several of my past companies have had an onboarding convention where a new developer makes a code change that is deployed to production on their first day, or at least their first day after any company-wide onboarding is finished.

Inputs The only book I read this month was Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, which delivered more or less as promised - a scientifically dense but nonetheless easy-to-read page-turner that is surely destined for the silver screen.

Fynn Glover and I worked together at Matcha, where he was CEO.

Inputs This month, I started my new job at Relay Payments after a few weeks off.

I’ve been in software management roles for the past six years or so.

In the last few weeks, I left my position at Springbot, about six months after I joined the company as part of its acquisition of Matcha, and will be joining the engineering team at Relay Payments later this month.