A while back, Eric Meyer emailed to ask about my old post arguing that CSS variables were a bad idea. Did I still feel that way?No. I’ve changed my mind.

Generation got a hundred times faster and reading did not. What that actually breaks in code review, why spec-driven development collapses into a compiler, why clean code matters more when agents…

Alternatively, "I dont know C#". Making UNBEATABLE show what you’re playing on Discord.

.lme button{background:none!important;border:0!important;padding:0!important;color:inherit;font:inherit}.lme button:hover{background:none!important;color:inherit}.lme…

The job search process can be chaotic, stressful and scary. It's easy to lose track of the progress you've made in a sea of rejection emails. As you progress through the stages, it becomes important…

While making Emacs Eglot format code on save (eglot-format-buffer, in this article) is excellent for fixing indentation, line breaks, and spacing, a formatter is essentially cosmetic. It will not…

From the very beginning of Portable, logging is always a four-tiered simple idea: We assemble a formatted String with a designated log le

Event: Community Over Code 2026 Dates: October 11–14, 2026Location: Glasgow, UKWebsite: https://communityovercode.apache.org/events/glasgow-2026/ Community Over Code is the Apache Software…

I have been trying out Grammarly, but the editors it integrates with are not the ones I use. I want to write Markdown in vim on Linux and have the same features.

Volume 10 , Issue 31 ; 19 Oct 2026 Who doesn’t love a good markup side quest? In my day job , we run regression tests before each release . Regression tests generate a bunch of XML and the easiest…

TLDR; I set out to make asynchronous programming on microcontrollers easier. Along the way, I accidentally built somewhere that humans and AI’s can work together comfortably. This is the first…

I've always been interested in what ideas other people have to create open-source software. There can be many reasons why something is created, perhaps because you had a good idea, or some pain you…

(Yes, it’s long. I have many many thoughts, and even left some of them out!) Event PyCon Africa 2026Dates October 7–9, 2026Location Speke Resort Munyonyo, Kampala, UgandaWebsite…

It has been quite a while since my last post, and during this time I have been investigating a couple of complimentary things: TabPFN and revisiting my Kalman-EMA filter. I say complimentary as I…

If some details (like sequence charts) display incorrectly, please check the website version of this page . The Formal Frontier and Formal-First Research By Fabrizio Montesi. Created on 2026-10-19.…

A new picker with aliases, first-class worktrees mapped to GitHub issues, faster caching, and more.

We added 80 new records, updated 54 records, and made a constellation of improvements and updates to the Semantic Farm and Bioregistry in the first two weeks of October 2026. This post gives more…

Deb’s tablet games only worked online and were full of ads. On our flight to New York I vibe coded her an alternative: Pocket Arcade, nine casual games with no ads that install in the browser…

Every few months someone writes that PHP is dead. After years in languages that most developers stopped talking about, here is how I check that claim: with installs, release dates and a community…

• Another week, another round of good progress towards Hanami 3.1 readiness. Lots of little improvements, plus a couple of nice highlights. • The main thrust of my work was...

Moving the stores exposed incomplete inventories, different retry decisions and a final event that could not wake its consumer.

This post describes a recent improvement to the Semantic Farm alignment workflow with the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry enabled by contributing upstream data and code…

Prologue #Like last year, I livetooted the release of Python 3.15.0. Here it is in blogpost form! Two weeks #Two weeks until Python 3.15.0 final! #Python #Python315 Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 00:30 EEST One…

How I built Felix for venue and equipment enquiries: guided questions, catalogue matching, indicative pricing and manager handoff across a Telegram bot and Mini App.

day10 reverse dependencies are live and found a dune regression; the aardvark 2017 run finished; and the v2~beta1 Zarr store was rebuilt on a grid that no longer depends on its own data.

You may have seen my relentless stanning of the jj version control system, e.g. in my recent FrOSCon 2026 talk. I think jj is super fun to use! But not on all setups. In fact, I recently ran into the…

How a small Claude Code skill turns my GitHub Discussions powered blog into an agent-friendly publishing platform, plus a clean version you can use yourself.

I switched my zettelkasten to Obsidian several years ago, and I've been pretty happy with it except that, in addition to notes, I tend to track a lot of personal statistics that in a zettelkasten are…

A view model is a powerful tool, but it’s also an extra file and an extra layer of abstraction. Through four practical examples, we’ll look at when a view model earns its place and when it’s just…

Greetings, traveler! You add a vector PDF to an Xcode Asset Catalog, display it in your app, increase its size, and suddenly it does not look quite as sharp as you expected. That seems strange. The…

Post #11 wrote an equation’s sums as a macro call, and post #12 wrote a model’s data flow left to right. Next in X_eTaL’s plan, after the pipelines: integrals. A convolution in a signal-processing…

It’s 2026 and I’m still hopelessly addicted to Gmail, the red letter “M” forever pinned to the top-left corner of my browser window. In my humble opinion, Google’s psychedelic concoction of a…

I had some Rust code that needed simplifying. It would have been easy enough to do manually; but I decided to see if I could use an LLM to speed up the process. I decided to use MiniMax M3.1 Flash…

Take a really boring loop: walk two []float32 slices and add them together, element by element. Written the normal way in Go, the CPU handles one pair per step. The funny thing is that the same CPU…

Attempting to conjure good properties. Ever since I learned about property-based testing, I've been fascinated by it. The notion of test data generators seem superior to Test Data Builders : Both…

There was a new feature added recently I had been anticipating. I’ll take this opportunity to write about it and program configuration in general, as this was promised a while back.

A pre-registered test of whether a codebase can be its own yardstick. The headline is mixed, the most useful part is where it fails, and one piece is still to run. Every god class detector I know of…

OOMWOO will be able to use an old Android phone instead of a Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5. Step one: ROS 2 in Termux - options, instructions and measured proot overhead on a Pixel 7.

I really enjoy learning new things in my free time. Lately I’ve been studying this book on Static Program Analysis . The book is very good, but some of the formulas are quite dense so I like to try…

This is no longer true. In a world where AI generates the code, my syntax explorations simply don’t matter. My digging into the edge cases of a language or a framework have become irrelevant.…

Posted 13 October 2026 While working on my new ‘vision-enhanced’ robot project, it became apparent the the OAK-D Lite camera was not the best tool for handling a ‘stuck’…

Write behavior tests in your Spring application, then run the same assertions against its Codename One port. Check responses, failures and state on the JVM…

Pi4J is the Java library that gives you access to the hardware I/O of the Raspberry Pi: GPIO pins, I2C, SPI, PWM, and serial communication. With it, you can read a button, blink an LED, or talk to a…

What if your MAUI tests could just say “get the app to greet Grace” and let an agent figure out the taps? If you read .NET developers also deserve E2E!, you know e2e-dotnet can drive mobile apps. Now…

isPaid works until a payment is pending, refunded or half paid. Why one status column with a CHECK constraint beats a pile of boolean flags.

I didn't trust the Atom Echo's factory firmware, so I erased it over USB through the ESP32's boot ROM and flashed my own ESPHome build. Push to talk with a local voice pipeline, a doorbell chime…

A vendor API answers 429 and says how long to wait, and Laravel ignores it. Reading Retry-After in every form vendors send, releasing a job without spending its tries, and a job middleware that makes…

A stranger on Telegram asked me for advice on the crypto wallet he had been vibecoding for eight months. I said don’t. He shipped it anyway, so I helped him rebuild it.

Gotta go fast The approach I used last time isn’t very efficient, since it repeatedly appends new SVG elements. Here’s a speedier approach, via drawing on a canvas 2D context: Start/Stop Reset…