A noise floor built from the range of K single samples, compared against a mean: why it widens as K grows while the measurement behind it gets better, what it adds on two real suites, and what should…

Part 1 of this series laid a foundation for a better terminal experience: a package manager, terminal emulator (Ghostty), and shell (fish). This time we’ll look at a set of tools that improve…

A handmade spinlock in Go looks like eight lines of code. The missing ninth line is a policy, and the policy needs context the lock word cannot see.

Go spins in both of its mutexes and exposes neither spin loop. The reason is context, and the fix for a hot lock is almost never a better way to wait.

TL;DR: Open a sample study and learn how the protocol works. And: spec + code on GH. I'm an unusual patient: I publish my own health records in a public GitHub repository, imaging and EHI export…

ASMC https://github.com/philzook58/asmc is another attempt to glue lifted Ghidra assembly semantics into CBMC.

An old Xcode project of mine was crashing Xcode 27 and I had no idea how to fix it. Usually at this point I'd spend three hours debugging this. Instead, I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to figure out why my…

In the previous blog post I simplified complex test methods by refactoring the arrange and act code into reusable classes and methods. In this blog post I'll continue by refactoring the assert…

I gave the Mutuals Checker a lot of love! It's way faster now, even for sites with thousands of followers. Neocities has a glitch where some followers go missing from the list when a site has a lot…

Superoptimization is the process where a compiler automatically finds the optimal sequence for a loop-free sequence of instructions. – Wikipedia Compilers are good at making mechanical…

In JavaScript today, any object with a then method is a promise, as far as the language is concerned. Promise.resolve will call it, and a promise made by one library can wait on a promise made by…

I have been working on an AI-based expense tracker app which is now open source

The fear of missing out on updates Do you rely on a test suite that gives you enough confidence to blindly merge pull requests from automatic dependency update bots such as Dependabot or Renovate? If…

I finally started that email client/RSS reader project here. As you can probably infer from the docs folder, this is so ever-lovingly-vibe-coded-to-shit because I am a writer and not a programmer. I…

A technical walkthrough on how I improved my /now page with Eleventy

In the last post, I gave an analogy of software as a roomful of bugs between a floor (what the language guarantees automatically) and a…

This is how I deleted ~19k lines of code in about a week. A month later: no reverts, no fix-up commits. Why deletion gets skipped Code accumulates, and nobody removes it. A staff engineer at a…

Programming is fun!

FOREWORD: I tried something a bit different with this post. Everything on this page I wrote by hand. The main deliverable/artifact for this post is a bunch of text I generated with my agent and…

A visualrambling story.

When I started using Claude Code on my Rails apps, everything went into one CLAUDE.md at the root. Naming conventions, where business logic goes, how we handle money, the patterns behind each…

October 9–16, 2026 This week, my open-source work ranged from interpreter compatibility across the django CMS ecosystem to performance…

layoutMarginsGuide gives your views the system margins, so content lines up with the navigation bar on every device. Learn how it works with the safe area, and how to change it.

Swift 6.4 lets us write some View? and any P? without wrapping the type in parentheses. Here is why the short form used to fail, what works now, and the one case that still needs them.

I am learning Cheng Lou's Handwired, where a program is a fixed list of FP32 ops. Five widgets on a toy runtime: the ReLU step trick, both branches always run, the host loop, loops as fixed work, and…

How I name, structure and format MiniZinc models, and why I am building Zincite to help with that work.

Virtio devices normally work asynchronously: the guest submits a request, the host processes it, and an interrupt tells the guest that the result is ready. This gives the guest an opportunity to do…

Every rating system in elote hands back one number: the probability that the first competitor beats the second. In chess, football and most of the sports people rate, there is a third thing that can…

Implementing Infinite Scrolling in SwiftUI with ExpressJS

Four tests I ran on Graph Starz, a map of pictures: replaying uploads, a bulk import, scoring 16 picture models against museum records, and blind judging.

I get you. I really do. Creating regression test are always not a priority. Maintaining the tests is a hassle. Creating new ones can be cumbersome. Well, not in the AI (is anybody saying SI ?!) era!…

Transparent objects are sorted back-to-front to ensure the correct drawing order. Learn about alpha blending, alpah clipping, dithering, and the screen texture.

This can sound stupid, but I’ve only recently learned how to insert PDF files on a web page; see, I’m from the generation that suffered the dreaded Adobe Acrobat thing, and also ActiveX…

Here is a small tip that has saved me a lot of time: Always log your entire parsed configuration when your service or application boots. Or at least, support logging it through a verbose logging…

Declare commands, arguments and flags once, and get typed handlers, generated help, prompts and tests for free.

Lots of new languagesI’ve worked through the language support requests and pull requests that had piled up across GitHub, Codeberg and git.flow-control.dev. Flow now highlights 25 more…

Python is known for fast packages despite being a slow language. The fastest Python packages are written in compiled languages such as C, C++, or Rust, with Python acting only as a glue. Python users…

I’ve shaken the cobwebs off my real-time watercolor simulation. I’m reaching for something I’ve wanted to do for years: the technique known as lost and found edges. Here are a few…

footer { display: none !important; } |

curl started out GPL licensed, as direct inheritance from its httpget days, but in October 1998 we switched to the Mozilla Public License (MPL). In 2001, we added the MIT license as an additional…

@sdxc/activitypub @sdxc/attribution @sdxc/authz @sdxc/backoff @sdxc/billing @sdxc/captcha @sdxc/cloudflare-mocks @sdxc/cron @sdxc/crypto @sdxc/dates @sdxc/diagram @sdxc/digest-fields @sdxc/distill…

apparently you can just do things now so here's the 2010 twitter app for ipad (the one with the cool sliding panels) but turned into a pwa for bluesky:

MP 178: Which is better?One of the interesting things about working with agents is getting to see how the generated code differs from the code you might have written yourself. When I generate code…

This is the story of some work I did for an employer over a decade ago, although I think it is still very applicable today. I always meant to try to get some of the code released, but now much…

/* On a phone a wide figure keeps its drawn size and scrolls sideways in its own frame, so its text stays readable. */ @media (max-width: 767.98px) { .wide-figure { overflow-x: auto; } .wide-figure…

One of my favourite things in the Python standard library is the ThreadPoolExecutor . It is a very simple way to run a bunch of tasks in parallel, such as converting or repacking a whole bunch of…

To wrap up all recent experiments with AI and SMLib, we decided to publish a nice-looking facade for our sloppy CAD: www.a3cad.org It turns out the tool is actually pretty handy. I'm already using it…