The Curious Engineer

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Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)

labnotes.org

🔥 All about software design, development, and culture. A mix of insightful and funny. Goes great with coffee. ☕

Software / engineering practiceAI / MLTech news / industry

’23’24’25’26
Posts
174 from 31 Jul 2023 to 27 Oct 2026
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weekly (73 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 64

  1. newllm.js
  2. Weekend Reading — Timeshare for cats
  3. Weekend Reading — I’m afraid you don’t have enough tokens to do that, Dave
  4. Still under warranty?
  5. Weekend Reading — Photobombing
  6. The mileage rate moved in July
  7. Schedule C, translated
  8. Weekend Reading — Can somebody else do it for me?
  9. Expense, am i being smart with my money?
  10. Ask your expenses a question
  11. Weekend Reading — Invisible as someone else's problem
  12. Expense in foreign currency
  13. Connect to Expense
  14. Weekend Reading — Skeletons in the closet
  15. Expense: One receipt, once
  16. Finding things in Expense
  17. September 12th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — It’s a good day to have a great day Steven Hoefer Fold I love this. ❤️ It's yet another one-person app coded with AI that solves the eternal todo list problem. Sounds utterly redundant, but when you're not building for a huge target market, you can m
  18. September 10th, 2026 1 min read How Expense reads a receipt Every receipt that lands in Expense has to become four fields: merchant, date, amount, category. A model can do that. Model calls also cost money and seconds, so the pipeline is built around not making them. Most receipts never reach one. T
  19. September 8th, 2026 1 min read Cmd+K at Expense Expense now has a command palette. Press Cmd+K anywhere (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) and type what you want to do: go somewhere, add something, search, export. The mouse is optional. The keys I actually use: * g e expenses, g r reports, g l emails, g
  20. September 5th, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — At the POST office trying to GET my mail A nosy polar bear and a lucky squirrel: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlist Some wildlife photos for your viewing pleasure. The world is changing. This weekend we got a post about the software ind
  21. September 1st, 2026 2 min read Connect Fastmail: your receipts move from inbox to Expense Most expense apps auto-import receipts from Gmail. If your mail lives anywhere else, you are the import. Expense connects to FastMail directly now. Link your inbox once and receipts file themselves as they arri
  22. August 29th, 2026 12 min read Weekend Reading — FRAP aka as "the zoomies" Clarissa "What if we kissed on the Cray supercomputer loveseat?" Vibe coding and quality "When you hear that some app was “vibe coded”, how much quality do you expect?" I was just wondering about this very topic. I think LLMs
  23. August 25th, 2026 1 min read Reconcile in Expense And I made a cool thing in Expense that I find incredibly useful. Once a month comes along and I have my statements, I import the PDFs into Expense and let it reconcile the expenses. It looks up if the expense already exists in my list and reconciles
  24. August 22nd, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — Kanban it nivs I second that recommendation: An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail. I've been using Fastmail for over a year now and I like the progress they're making adding useful new features to the app. Sadly, there are not enough services that su
  25. August 18th, 2026 2 min read Fixing USPS Informed Delivery How I Replaced USPS Informed Delivery With a Cleaner Email Digest So I read this article and I just thought, why not try it out myself? I like Informed Delivery because it emails on days when I receive new mail, so that I don’t have to go do
  26. August 15th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — The Stalk Market Karel Titeca "Richard Scarry already summarized everything there is to know about cyber security, about 50 years ago." Yes, I just asked DeepSeek V4 to run a security audit of my code, because why not? The code is not super valuable, th
  27. August 12th, 2026 1 min read Prompt For Progress Me just asking DeepSeek to make my app go faster, to which it replies with: The cumulative effect across all the changes so far: the list page went from 6 DB queries to 4 (removed merchants + cached rates + cached account), and the edit page went from
  28. August 8th, 2026 7 min read Weekend Reading — The least you can do a brief history of consumption This week I completed developing the expense report app. This is the software that I am working on for getting all my tax stuff together – receipts, mileage and what not. This is made using Deepseek V4
  29. August 6th, 2026 2 min read Expense — receipt tracking for easier tax filing $9.20 to steward an app into existence in one week. It's made of 38,000 lines of code and 15,700 lines of comments. Tests make up about 21% of the code. Spec size is about 3,200 words. I understand that "vibe code" feels Re
  30. August 1st, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — The elderly health category Pixelcats "Opened the mail .. Derpy arrived early! SQUEE!" Did I just vibe-code an app because I didn’t like the new UI? Why yes I did. I’ve been using Expensify for many years to keep track of my expenses. It was good. There
  31. July 31st, 2026 4 min read The Art of War, Applied to Litigation I have an AI agent that helps me handle legal cases. It's not a lawyer, but I can iterate with it for hours on different scenarios, work on collecting evidence, ask clarifying questions, etc. It charges me an hourly rate of $1.20, so 1
  32. July 25th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — Industrial complex Laura Tech Stuff MacPaw releases CleanMyMac CLI for cleaning developer and AI environments on macOS I love that it's a CLI, super easy to use, and cleans up your developer caches, build artifacts, and AI coding junk. brew install cleanm
  33. July 18th, 2026 6 min read Weekend Reading — I am so far behind on my procrastination Cat "Jeez, would you look at the time?" Tech Stuff InkLeaf Foldable screen, but not a phone — an e-Ink tablet on which you can read and write. Stylus included. In defense of not understanding your codebase That’s w
  34. July 11th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — I’m bringing .exe back David Phd "The British are adding panels to the Bayeux Tapestry while its in London" Tech Stuff Chatto is now Open Source! Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using. You’re probably familiar with the
  35. July 4th, 2026 6 min read Weekend Reading — Hydrate like a data center Shawn "Fruan" Poulsen "Thirst trap" Tech Stuff SmoothCSV CSV editor without the Excel overhead. Features include smooth cell editing, SQL queries, cell and row swapping, command palette, and more. Since it's a Tauri app, minimal
  36. June 27th, 2026 7 min read Weekend Reading — It's gettin' hot in here … Tjeerd Royaards "Hot. Cartoon from last year." Tech Stuff DevCleaner Free space on your Mac that's currently used by the caches of Xcode, npm, Cursor, Claude, et al. Runs local, minimum memory footprint, and there's a free versi
  37. June 20th, 2026 7 min read Weekend Reading — A sourdough finisher CrankGPT The human-powered, local-first, private AI. Tech Stuff Lettera Based on Bear's remarkable Markdown editor, a standalone app for editing Markdown files from your file system. I like Bear's Markdown editing, so I think Lettera
  38. June 13th, 2026 11 min read Weekend Reading — Future-proofed like there’s no tomorrow! Neil "Just because you can...." Tech Stuff OfficeCLI A CLI to help AI create/read/edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Open source and doesn't require a Microsoft Office license. I just installed this for t
  39. June 6th, 2026 7 min read Weekend Reading — Little Bobby ignore all previous instructions Frechrotz_Pix 'Lego- bzw. Klemmbausteine' Tech Stuff pitchfork A devilishly good daemons manager: start/stop daemon, automatic restarts, health checks, file watching, cron scheduling, and many more useful featu
  40. June 1st, 2026 5 min read I Got $4.84 From a Class Action Settlement and They Really, Really Didn't Want Me to Have It So here's the thing. When a company loses a class action lawsuit and has to pay millions to regular people, they don't just write you a check. They go out of their way to make sure
  41. May 30th, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — How to lose 2 hours geekysteven Tech Stuff Zed I really like using Cursor but it's a huge IDE (basically VS Code) which takes forever to load and eats up too much memory and sometimes I have to restart it just to fix a broken extension. I started using Zed
  42. May 23rd, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — I do not think, therefore I do not am Natasha "Fragile Handle With Care" by Roman Pankoy (2020) Oil on canvas Tech Stuff Animata A collection of React + Tailwind animations and effects to enhance your UI. A pretty substantive collection of animated element
  43. May 16th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — Low-maintenance passive traffic calming Sophie Schmieg "Work moved to a new building. I didn't expect to take SAN damage from facilities." Tech Stuff Magic Notebook A free app, simple and elegant UI, no cloud sync, just open a folder and get working. Can h
  44. May 14th, 2026 2 min read coolify-deploy — Vercel-style deploys on your own hardware Introducing coolify-deploy — git push to your own server with the simplicity of a platform. I used to host everything on Vercel and honestly it was great. Connect a repo, push, your app is live — simple enough that
  45. May 9th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — Locally hosted torment nexus John "Posted today by Lego on their official Instagram account. Well done, Lego, well done. 😁" Tech Stuff portless HTTPS for npm dev using .localhost URLs instead of port numbers: Portless runs an HTTPS reverse proxy on port 443
  46. May 2nd, 2026 11 min read Weekend Reading — The background noise of the AI bubble Fake Metro Trains "Due to ongoing delays with the delivery of our new Xtrapolis 2.0 trains, we've implemented some temporary measures to keep our network running." Tech Stuff What's actually new in JavaScript (and what
  47. April 25th, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — Dream of bigger things GeriAQuin Tech Stuff Tolaria I just added this app this to my repertoire. I didn't get a chance to use it much yet, but it looks interesting — build a knowledge you can share with your AI that's version controlled and doesn't requi
  48. April 18th, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — Penguin drama Niki "Most useless sign in the universe" Tech Stuff ShowMD The Markdown space is heating up 🔥 Today I installed a Markdown editor (Scratch), upgraded my Markdown viewer (mud), and setup this Markdown QuickLook previewer (ShowMD). erictli/s
  49. April 11th, 2026 6 min read Weekend Reading — Look Away Someone Turned an Old Ford Van Into a Mini Semi and It’s Fantastic Tech Stuff LookAway This is one app I have to run on my Mac. It forces me to take a break every 45 minutes — not a Pomodoro break (which I never got the hang off), but Read more
  50. April 4th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — For entertainment purposes only Natasha "Perfect for Easter, EGGO is a two piece construction toy" Tech Stuff PopTask As a concept I find this super interesting — a task list that lives in the menu bar and understands human inputs like "evry tue thu 7 30
  51. March 28th, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — The paperwork flood Holeintheheadesign Tech Stuff HopTab Open source app switcher and tiler to replace Cmd+Tab. If you Cmd+Tab a lot you may find this app quite useful. Number, currency, and unit formatting Did you know that the mathematical value 1234.5
  52. March 21st, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — First roll back, then debug Lady Laura "Pack of Dogs by John Littleboy" Tech Stuff Infisical I'm trying this service as a replacement for Doppler. Seems to have more capabilities plus it's an open-source project you can self-host (if you so care). Does f
  53. March 14th, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — Happy π day! Mina "It's PiDay!" Tech Stuff How to Do Code Reviews in the Agentic Era I've been working on open-source for over 25 years, I suspect that's why I accept The LLM as just another project contributor: My “unpopular” take: I don’ Read more
  54. March 8th, 2026 11 min read Weekend Reading — Go forth and prompt cliff538 "What a great artistic reuse of old license plates!" Tech Stuff Shepherd "Stay focused. Grow your sheep." Chrome extension that auto-categorizes thousands of sites as productive, neutral, or distracting—keep using productive
  55. February 28th, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — Sunlight with ads ConnectionWithWonder "Knitted bollard-warmer Weymouth" Tech Stuff UNF* Records every version of a file and can easily rewind back without having to manually commit changes. Perfect if you're working with AI agents and don't trust the
  56. February 21st, 2026 8 min read Weekend Reading — Known to cause boys in yards Marcel "It's embarrassing how quickly a bit of sunshine can change my mood." Tech Stuff Current is a new RSS reader that’s more like a river than an inbox If you want to enjoy RSS give Current a try. $9.99 as a one-time Re
  57. February 14th, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — The Cone of Uncertainty Dinosa Labs "Bueno, ahora sí, os presento a CLOROPLASTO, la minúscula ciudad de la fotosíntesis 🪄✨🌱😌" Tech Stuff npmx If you search for npm packages frequently, give npmx a try. It's much faster and the UI is an elevated design
  58. February 7th, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — Load bearing post David Zinn "Jen’s response to winter is to wear big boots and keep on stomping." Tech Stuff pandoc for the people The pandoc wasm web-app is now available and allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the
  59. January 31st, 2026 11 min read Weekend Reading — A very British problem Stéphane Bortzmeyer Tech Stuff Craft Agents Claude Cowork is the Claude Code brains for working with office documents (Word docs, presentations, etc) which I think is a powerful idea. Yet, I just started using Craft Agents and I
  60. January 24th, 2026 6 min read Weekend Reading — Universe closed, use Rainbow Natasha In "Albuquerque, NM, Rainbow road runs parallel to Universe blvd." Tech Stuff Pencil The demo looks amazing, basically an MCP server that can design your product with pixel-perfect precision. Let Claude Code be your
  61. January 20th, 2026 3 min read Rentail.space Launches AI-Powered Marketplace Connecting Businesses with Short-Term Retail Spaces Rentail.space, an AI-powered specialty lease marketplace, today announced its official launch, transforming how businesses discover and secure short-term retail spaces in s
  62. January 18th, 2026 9 min read Weekend Reading — A server raclette MTV Rewind If you miss MTV from back when it was a TV station that plays music, aka the good old days. Tech Stuff dbreunig/whenwords This is seriously cool. A library that provides timeago ("in 3 days"), duration ("2h 30m"), parse_dur
  63. January 10th, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — So close to the end of the world Laura Manach Tech Stuff Convert & Compress When you need to process a batchload of files: convert them to a different format, limit their width/height, compress with specific quality loss, etc. (* To make sure my webap
  64. January 3rd, 2026 10 min read Weekend Reading — Where are all the coffee filters? Volpeon "Make yourself a little foxxo companion" Tech Stuff TapHouse Manage Homebrew form the convenience of a GUI with single-click installs, doctor and cleanup tools, auto update, menu bar mode, and more. Mise Simpli

2025 51

  1. December 27th, 2025 5 min read Weekend Reading — A double young-man Mabelz Tech Stuff BrewServicesManager Manage Brew services from the menu bar. CSRF protection without tokens or hidden form fields New to me and quite useful: The Sec-Fetch-Site header can have one of four values: * same-origin, whe
  2. December 20th, 2025 11 min read Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces ARGVMI~1.PIF "Well, you can't say you weren't warned." Tech Stuff How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents Yes. JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn't have written it this quickly without the Re
  3. December 13th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — This heater is from space Street Art Utopia "Painted Octopus! By Lumen Street Theatre in Limerick, Ireland." Tech Stuff Building a Toast Component This is the story of Sonner, why they came up with that name, how they managed animation and stacking, m
  4. December 6th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — The “Can that wait till January?” club David Zinn "Claude’s secret to surviving winter is having a grandma who knits." Tech Stuff W4G1/multithreading The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript. Supports modern browsers, Node.js, Deno
  5. November 29th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Torment Nexus is financially sound Slirt "Don't forget to save enough SPACE for dessert... Nanu-nanu!" Tech Stuff Respinner For when you need React spinner components. Rebane 🤯 cursed CSS trick: use the Q unit instead of px, it looks almost the same a
  6. November 22nd, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — Increase time in the bathroom Real Life Bog Person "My SIL has informed me that this exists in Auburn WA. I have a new place to visit!" Tech Stuff Grila If you calendar a lot you're going to love this app: a keyboard-driven calendar. Pure CSS Tabs Wit
  7. November 15th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — 404 bragawatts John S Russell "Where I post from." Tech Stuff Zod + TypeScript: Schema Validation Made Easy Learn how to use Zod, a TypeScript schema validation library that allows you to validate external data at runtime. abbiistabbii ftw you realise
  8. November 8th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Aggravation is observed Wilhelm Gere "This should explain things" Tech Stuff Cursed Knowledge Immich shares their experience and I love that their product website (it's not a dev tool!) has this page. (via archiloque) You Should Write An Agent In the m
  9. November 1st, 2025 7 min read Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves Kevin Beaumont Tech Stuff I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong I'm using Alabaster to see how I like it (PS it's an extension, not a theme): The problem with that is, if everyth
  10. October 25th, 2025 7 min read Weekend Reading — More relevant ads Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025 – in pictures Collection of amazing photos for your enjoyment. Tech Stuff Your data model is your destiny Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to
  11. October 18th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — And a ghostty October to you The Autistic Innovator "Someone didn't think that design through" Tech Stuff LaunchOS Launchpad is back! Not my favorite UI, I never cared to use Launchpad, but I know a few people who swear by it, and now you can brew inst
  12. October 11th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Prime minister of France for 15 minutes Lizzy "You guys i did a thing" Tech Stuff Folder Quick Look fixes an all-time Mac grievance for free This is pretty slick, very useful, and free to use. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents M
  13. October 4th, 2025 6 min read Weekend Reading — Ancient Ruins link (t)wink Tech Stuff How I Use AI An ever growing list of ways in which David Bauer uses AI for work, life and play. Includes some interesting prompts. I took one to help Claude write for brevity. Nine HTTP Edge Cases Every API Develope
  14. September 27th, 2025 10 min read Weekend Reading — KVICK SÖRT KVICK SÖRT Tech Stuff Tangled Interesting 🤔 If GitHub bumped into Bluesky, a social-enabled git collaboration platform using atproto. LLM Rankings: The New Battleground Welcome to the mention economy! If you want to appear in AI search re
  15. September 20th, 2025 10 min read Weekend Reading — The Yeet Sheet Laura Manach Tech Stuff How to keep package.json under control With the latest npm hacks adding a cooldown period to installs should be regarded as standard security practice. Now available in pnpm, npm-check-updates and hopefully oth
  16. September 13th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — The battle at Git's Hub elle "All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes" Tech Stuff sonner When you want a nicely designed React toast component. I just started using it in my project and it's pretty slick looking with an elegant
  17. September 6th, 2025 11 min read Weekend Reading — Geiger counter brettezeleliquide Spoonbill bird in flight. Tech Stuff Vibe Coding as a Coding Veteran The road from 8-bit Assembly to English-as-Code: This gives an entirely new meaning to Knuth’s “literate programming”: Rather than interspersing nat
  18. August 30th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — First rule of Eight Club: no typos Natasha Jay “Biker gang - believe this group are leaders in the illegal cat nip trade ...” Tech Stuff looks-same Nice library for visual regression testing, when you need to compare images from different platforms (dev
  19. August 23rd, 2025 13 min read Weekend Reading — Is it me you're calling for? MostlyHarmless "The bloody hipsters have gone too far." Tech Stuff Embeddable When you need a little widget on your website that converts traffic (newsletter signup, posted review, discount checkout, etc), why not let AI do
  20. August 16th, 2025 14 min read Weekend Reading — I'm back and I miss you all! 💋💋💋 Syulang "Soooooo.... capitalism is at it again." First the good news: 10 days ago was the 20th year anniversary of this very blog! 🎂 Many happy returns! Unfortunately, I spent last weekend in the hospital — it took them
  21. August 2nd, 2025 11 min read Weekend Reading — "big" is smaller than "small" Meanwhile in Canada "You know it's hot when the cat melts" Tech Stuff Kiro "Tame complexity with spec-driven development" Smart use of generative AI: Kiro turns your prompt into a requirements document, and then uses that t
  22. July 26th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — Swipe right diana "Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip" Tech Stuff daisyUI What goes around comes around and this Tailwind plugin brings back proper CSS classes. And it comes with CSS classes for buttons, cards, modals, avatars, alerts, footers, you name
  23. July 19th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — Eat plenty of fiber a beautiful bitch "This is why i make sure i eat plenty of fiber" Tech Stuff kompressor macOS image convertor with a very interesting UI: drag & drop images into the wormhole, then toggle the kind of processing you want, and away we la
  24. July 12th, 2025 6 min read Weekend Reading — a24z Information Is Beautiful "Seems to fit?" Tech Stuff kepano/defuddle When you need to clean up a web page and extract only the important contents. This library claims to offer some benefits over Readability. Sindre Sorhus You don’t need a roadmap, you
  25. July 6th, 2025 10 min read Weekend Reading — Code remains liquid at room temperature Tiki Bunny Imports "Y'ALL. LOOK. My inner 8-year-old is beaming and SO HAPPY with 42-year-old adult me right now." Tech Stuff Remix Utils A collection of utility functions for use in your Remix (or React-Router) app
  26. June 28th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — Monotation Uphill Rd, Joshua Tree, CA I shudder to think of how many birds have unwittingly plowed into this place. Tech Stuff Min A very minimal browser, offers more space for the web page, fewer distractions. Ryan Grove Software developers, I need you t
  27. June 21st, 2025 7 min read Weekend Reading — Wrong opinions, weekly held Jen Gentleman “I'll never be able to unsee this” Tech Stuff Nxtscape An open-source agentic browser. Basically you instruct the browser what you want it to do. Eniko Fox It's a common misconception that types exist on computers
  28. June 14th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Reefer Madness OnlMaps “Air traffic in the Middle East” Tech Stuff Fireflies.ai When it's a meeting that you need to capture, transcribe, summarize, and turn into meeting notes, try Fireflies. Wispr Flow Typing: 45 wpm. Talking: 220 wpm. I know some peopl
  29. June 7th, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — 🎻 World's smallest violin Scientists at Loughborough University create 'world's smallest violin' Tech Stuff TLTD #29 - Vibe Coding Your Way to a Seed Round On the relentless march toward zero-cost prototyping: Enter vibe coding: now founders can translate
  30. May 31st, 2025 8 min read Weekend Reading — 😎 Good morning LA Good morning LA! I just moved to downtown LA to experience the nice weather and delicious food, though you're more likely to find me at a coffee shop drinking iced Matcha latte because that's the Z thing to do. Tech Stuff Just a QR Code W
  31. May 24th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Only one Wiener Hot diggity dog! Wienermobiles put on riveting race in Wienie 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway In this race there will be only one Wiener. Tech Stuff lucy github actions have github consequences zumerlab/snapdom Captures any HTML element
  32. May 17th, 2025 12 min read Weekend Reading — Sell your soul for cuteness and regret nothing Ricki Crush Bandicute Tarr “1983 was a wild time.” Tech Stuff Marginalia Search A search engine that prioritizes non-commercial web sites. And they do have some interesting filters: blogs, academia, small web
  33. May 10th, 2025 14 min read Weekend Reading — Turbo round and round Silicon Valley perplexed by traffic innovation: the turbo roundabout Tech Stuff Inngest Durable functions that stand for job queues, save state, run cron jobs, and all the other plumbing your project might need. Restate Break up your
  34. May 3rd, 2025 17 min read Weekend Reading — Run time/rest time Tech Stuff Bored Spreadsheet RTO got you down? Stuck in the cubicle? Boss hovering? You can now play classic games that look like you're working on a spreadsheet! “A refreshing take on spreadsheets that makes data entry more enjoyable” S
  35. April 26th, 2025 11 min read Weekend Reading — 🦩 Flamingo Street Art Utopia "Whales in the sky! 🐋✨ From the beach to the clouds at the 38th International Kite Festival in Berck-sur-Mer, France. Absolutely surreal!" Tech Stuff Spring Jo 💪 The EU is introducing an energy label for phones, together wit
  36. April 19th, 2025 10 min read Weekend Reading — Distributed CEO Ben Royce "Why do I feel like I'm in an art museum for some odd reason?" Tech Stuff Managing Developer Experience Debt When I was leading a tech team at a previous startup, I would love Mondays because they were the start of another fun
  37. April 12th, 2025 13 min read Weekend Reading — Bunny Time Nuno & Lua Friends I think there's some bunMovement going on! We just noticed a giant bun with a army of small buns standing at a local hypermarket 😮 perhaps this is it! WeBuns are going to take over! All the snac will belong to us! Tech Stuf
  38. April 5th, 2025 13 min read Weekend Reading — 🐧 Tax the Penguins! Sin of empathy Tech Stuff new.email Get some AI help to build the perfect email template, using react.email which is a super cool email template library, so you can resend your emails away! (If you’re still stuck in MJMLand, give it a
  39. March 29th, 2025 17 min read Weekend Reading — Fuck aboot, find oot Tech Stuff Denny Karri Saarinen: 10 Rules for Crafting Products That Stand Out Linear’s CEO shares his approach to quality and craft: 1. Commit to quality at the leadership level 2. When it comes to building teams, go small and aim
  40. March 22nd, 2025 15 min read Weekend Reading — Department of weird Dan Neuman “Nice one, IKEA” Tech Stuff ⌘K Fast, composable, unstyled command menu for React. Not to be confused with Paletro, a command palette for every macOS app. Remind Me Faster I think this is the perfect app for people with ADH
  41. March 15th, 2025 17 min read Weekend Reading — Not like us Baby koalas rescued in wake of storm Tech Stuff Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code The best way to learn LLMs is to play with them. Throwing absurd ideas at them and vibe-coding until they almost sort-of work is a genuinely useful w
  42. March 8th, 2025 17 min read Weekend Reading — The Agentic AI revolution Street Art Utopia “Darth Fisher sculpture by Frankey for Amsterdam Light Festival in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Photos by Janus van den Eijnden.” Tech Stuff Claude Code overview The Agentic AI revolution is taking shape and app
  43. March 1st, 2025 12 min read Weekend Reading — 🇺🇦 Slava Ukraini Elise “periodic reminder that Barcelona has a supercomputer inside an old church and it's one of the most rad things you can see” Tech Stuff macOS Tips & Tricks It's going to take me forever to learn all of these shortcuts, or even just
  44. February 22nd, 2025 11 min read Weekend Reading — I. Kant. Terry Matz “Seems like a good time to share this free knitting pattern for the This Is Fine Sweater by Yu Jie 玉杰” Tech Stuff Ólafur Waage Databases are still using tables? Don't they know we've switched to <div> years ago? Rethinking Find-in
  45. February 16th, 2025 13 min read Weekend Reading — I'll take one Canadiano please CM Harrington "Timeline cleanse: Her name is Nibi." Tech Stuff pandan Not to be confused with the flavor, this is a fantastic time-tracking app that lives in the menubar. I like to know how long I'm spending at the coff
  46. February 8th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — As asap as possible! Ben “Nice lil guy I just found out we own” Tech Stuff AI Prompt: Writing Supabase Edge Functions This is a new Supabase article but it's also a good example of how to write prompting rules for Cursor, which I just learned are easy
  47. February 1st, 2025 6 min read Weekend Reading — On energy saving mode I'm Not Lazy, I'm on Energy Saving Mode Current status Tech Stuff Trammell Hudson “my new years resolution is 80x25” Jake Rayson “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t unde
  48. January 27th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — Sortie dramatique heyheymomo “Lovely day lovely day” Tech Stuff Niki Tonsky “Old classic” Some Dude Was Keeping the Company Afloat The wildest part? No one in the company realized he was doing this. Not his manager, not the dev team, not even upper man
  49. January 18th, 2025 10 min read Weekend Reading — When you excel … BasicAppleGuy “Lumon Industries Macrodata Refinement Terminal.” Tech Stuff vivus A library that will animate SVG files bringing them to life. Justified Text: Better Than Expected? When you need your text properly justified: text-wrap:
  50. January 11th, 2025 14 min read Weekend Reading — The whisky war of 1973 sjvn “Best snow truck name ever.” Tech Stuff trimMiddle This is such a cool function: it trims any string to the desired length by dropping text from the middle of the string, like Finder does with filenames. And a lot of times
  51. January 4th, 2025 9 min read Weekend Reading — DOOM x 2 Andy P “But it is public domain” Tech Stuff Fish 4.0b1 I'm giving Fish a try. So far it’s really amazing and a step up from ZSH, which itself was a step up from Bash. 4.0b1 is out, noted as “highly stable” and as better Read more

2024 49

  1. December 28th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Happy New Year! 🥳 Vitalis 🇺🇦 The most original and unusual landmark in Odesa, which has become a symbol of the creativity of Odesa residents. Tech Stuff Cursor I really really like Cursor. I had a great time using VS Code + Github Copilot. I found the
  2. December 21st, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Happy "That's a January Problem" week Can Christmas season start a little earlier this year Tech Stuff Ramsey Nasser fuck it happened i am in a situation where i do actually need to reverse a linked list Atuin I just learned about Atuin and am giving
  3. December 14th, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Claim denied The Mighty Git "One of the curious upsides to discovering you have ADHD as an older man is that suddenly other people have an easier time finding presents for you..." Tech Stuff Mantine DataTable When you need an all powerful data table
  4. December 7th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Make Orwell Fiction Again MostlyHarmless Tech Stuff colinaut/action-table A web component that allows users to sort/filter a table. Just wrap your table inside <action-table>. So simple and works like a charm. VineJS A library for validating form data
  5. November 30th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Never For Europeans...... Tech Stuff da_667 “people who write javascript don't make threats, they make promises” NumberFlow - Transition and format numbers An open source component to transition, format, and localize numbers — because sometimes you wa
  6. November 23rd, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — More time to write More Time to Write A fully functional clock that ticks backwards, giving you more time to write. Tech Stuff Martijn Faassen (FWIW I don’t know how to use any debugger other than console.log) People tend to look down on print debuggi
  7. November 16th, 2024 10 min read Weekend Reading — The future is reduced for quick sale Sure is Tech Stuff What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres If you’re just starting with Postgres, make sure to not repeat past mistakes. No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains Yes! “Our offl
  8. November 9th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — 😱 Existential angst This week we got message in a bottle, weight of our coffee beans, AI bizarre, a spying air fryer, bossa nova sound track, mental music in a smash room, and grandma advice. Read more
  9. November 2nd, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Thingy brokey This week we learn about timezones, build a Turing machine in LEGO, learn to turn off the Mac, turn out PDFs into brainrot, revive Snap, block the roads, get a borchestershire shot, pitch our friends, and learn to ignore deadcats. Read m
  10. October 26th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Voting time! Halloween humor Hello and welcome back. If you missed me, I went on a trip for three weeks, so didn't have time to post. But I did enjoy delicious food, beautiful sites, and super fast trains. Now I'm back to posting and this weekend I' Re
  11. September 28th, 2024 10 min read Weekend Reading — Our traffic light-identifying overlords How to respond to your weird neighbor’s Drumph sign. Tech Stuff Mac Firewall Apps When you don't want apps broadcasting your every move out to the world: Little Snitch, LuLu, Radio Silence, and Lockdown Privac
  12. September 21st, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — “Tonic” Masculinity This week we race the track in an Isetta M, we clean our MacBook keyboard, we got a new wallpaper, we Agile all the Scrum Master out of Agile Grooming, put the nuclear plant in safe hands, squeeze ChatGPT into an TI-84, deliver pi
  13. September 14th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Concept of a plan This week we play Tetris on our database server, learn BASIC again, upgrade to a Victorian iPad, avert the shoplifting crisis, turn HTML back to Markdown, replace the podcast bro with AI, get unlimited data for free, and throw baby
  14. September 7th, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Human Slots Machine This week we learn a new Postgres trick, write JavaScript for MS-DOS, we answer phone calls on our washer, go big on monospace fonts, we teach you how to market, Rickroll our customers, name our wifi Stinky, and cross the street i
  15. August 31st, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Home office the way I like it This week we run a search through Postgres, wear our Mac on our wrist, font with the Z80, hyperfocus through this post, remember Quiznos, close the circle of grift, watch Cybertruck in its habitat, lay off our wizard, make
  16. August 24th, 2024 12 min read Weekend Reading — Florida clown This week we learn how to Zod, we draggy and swappy, we interview our internal customers, don’t get anything completed on time, lay off our energy healer, decode the ToS, guard our headphones, walk around with normal human items, and visi
  17. August 17th, 2024 16 min read Weekend Reading — Very demure, very mindful This week we get our dev docs offline, color the windows, guesstimate our credit score, sue an ice cream, honk like a self-driving car, experiment on a lion, cancel our Disney+ account, and reuse our unexpired N95 mask. Read m
  18. August 10th, 2024 13 min read Weekend Reading — Momala and Popala This week we do a screen recording, restart WordStar, take our printer to space, play medieval tunes, sample the LLM, and watch out for the blow-nado. Read more
  19. August 3rd, 2024 11 min read Weekend Reading — Emotional support billionaires This week we watch the olympics, make a todo list, propose new password rules, purchase a domain for > $1M, get an AI massage, shot with hand in pocket, save 100% by not buying anything, and measure our height in corgis. R
  20. July 27th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — 🥥🌴 Canadian Dogs This week Jupyter and Notion have a baby, we play mockup in the browser, we can’t talk much — fish in the car, we get to keep our cookies, we use an LLM to do math, and we embrace our childless cat lady hero! Read more
  21. July 20th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Bumpy safety yellow This week we test a new test framework, get a smartwatch from 1984, become a pet psychic, use AI to get funnier, realize Cellebrite is not breaking into our iPhone, not fall in love with our first theory, drink Modelo Negra, and tour t
  22. July 13th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Tactical Assault Shiba This week we’re headed to the JSON station, we find a lighter and faster alternative to lodash, steal like an artists, generate better prompts than an Oath Keeper, discover Britain’s new ruler, and read the funniest Reddit story abo
  23. July 6th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Gesturing wildly and in every direction This week we kick start the Slow Software Movement, CTRL+F the Spice Rack, walk over the kitchen table, slop the book, hide behind a tree, skip leg day, and hide under the weighted blanket. Read more
  24. June 29th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Legally prohibited from complaining This week we write 200 lines of code, play breaker with the calendar, sprint plan our week with the spouse, teach Claude to SQL, blur the cat’s face, patch our Oreo cookies, and apologize for how hot it is. Read more
  25. June 22nd, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Occam's shaving kit This week we work around our ErrorBoundary, ignore our \\TODO, write in Sans Bullshit Sans, pay $500/hour to dress the same as always, count succors borne every minute, and name a dinosaur after Loki. Read more
  26. June 15th, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Move slow and improve things This week we upgrade out clock, get a bumper sticker, practice the RTO of layoffs, convince HP to buy us for $25B, listen where we look, have a sad day indeed, enjoy spicy ramen, and ravel at the new defender. Read more
  27. June 8th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Video should have been a blogpost This week we get the Homebrew App Store, dump Bartender, get AI to do all our work, elect an LLM mayor, avoid using Windows 11, watch the Raven diagram, make tea in the tank, and travel in style. Read more
  28. June 1st, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — All romes lead to roads This week we get cranking on our indexes, keep our focus on iOS, change jobs on first day of the month, find the Google Search leaked documents, check our boss for signs of AI, twist our hands, and wear a kilt. Read more
  29. May 25th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Don't give eeffoc This week we turn web app into desktop app, discover a new tablet, stop chasing our dreams, review the new Google “No Intelligence” Search, Microsoft spying on you, OpenAI’s ties with News Corp, grieve over Kabosu, avoid Teslas, and screa
  30. May 18th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Objection-oriented programming This week we find a power-up box, replace GitHub Actions with Maven XMLs, avoid the worst website in the world, revisit RTO policies, “listen” to OpenAI employees, watch our Slack private messages, do laundry for free, and fa
  31. May 11th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — Stack over you This week we remove gatekeepers from our CI, break a Guinness world record, redesign review ratings, understand the meaning behind “job requirements”, and level up. Read more
  32. May 4th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — May the fourth This week we setup our new Minecraft server, play Spacewar, avoid burnout, wonder about Facebook AI spam, lose our passkeys, and claim stairs on the way back home. Read more
  33. April 27th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — The Bob Ross of programming This week we use coffee tasting as our design practice, get as close to and as far away from the metal as possible, find an easier way to write documentation, discover why Google Search is getting so bad, and why Siri was neve
  34. April 20th, 2024 5 min read Weekend Reading — WD40 smells so delicious This week we got a new incarnation of Norton Commander, the best flopping electric vehicle, a reason to keep everyone happy, conscious invertebrates, a 420 cat, and colorful eggs. Read more
  35. April 13th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe This week we have an app for managing group trips, and one for recommending and following podcasts, we’re unsure about the size of a minute, appreciate the new nutrition labels, have a lot of securit
  36. April 6th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Healthy living isn't available in your country This week we got a great app for hikers, a way to threaten our code, place to put our cursor, another story of a dying startup, some really bad tales about AI, a shirt to commemorate the earthquake, and some
  37. March 30th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — Ctrl click back This week we deploy a real-time server app, mute our keyboard, apply ethical social proof, run LLM on our computer, of all things in Excel, and uncover the most insidious backdoor. Read more
  38. March 23rd, 2024 9 min read Weekend Reading — Hurkle-Durkle This week we play the songs of Vim, double performance every 2 years, draw a manual wheelchair properly, learn about the reality of a Silicon Valley Unicorn, discovery the uncanny history of AI, and change our toothbrushing routine. Read mo
  39. March 16th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — The magic word This week we got a UI for writing markup and securely reading emails, we avoid context switching, and seek out optimism, find our traffic sources, get more realistic about artificial intelligence, and read the new villain origin story. Rea
  40. March 9th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Bill for unused domain names This week we got tools for URLs and PDFs, a better search engine, semantic HTML, some ideas for running your business, reversed engineers prompts and biased AI, a honest password form, problematic aircrafts, and the best meme
  41. March 2nd, 2024 10 min read Weekend Reading — That escalated quickly This week we discover new way to publish blogs and manage our tasks, stick to memory-safe programming languages, discover Japanese design show, improve developer experience, understand the difference between LLM and “next word comp
  42. February 24th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Places where I've lost my glasses This week we catalog the risks we’re addressing, run Postgres in the browser, modernize our app using generative AI, learn about focus and ADHD, stop trusting product reviews from Google search, and keep the operating
  43. February 17th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — The real luxuries This week we over infrastructure decisions, plea for lean software, find some interesting productivity apps, remember good old Lander, meet the world’s most responsible AI model, revisit the World Economic Forum, and finish watching
  44. February 10th, 2024 4 min read Weekend Reading — The Zoom meeting crowd This week we tally the most in-demand frontend frameworks, learn how to PDF using an iPhone and no 3rd party app, make luck and avoid the paradox of goals, and wish you a happy new year and a wonderful Valentine’s Day. Read more
  45. February 3rd, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — Put � in random text fields This week we have some disappointing metrics from Copilot, revisit React, learn how to write a Git commit message, did you know about Font Variant Numeric?, speculate the fastest growing software sectors, watch sleeping cats
  46. January 27th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — Never Again Is Now This week we remember how to write quality software, add true vintage look to our modern web app, play PowerPoint Karaoke, design digital instruments for our car, hire Boss as a Service, correct and avoid AI mistakes, watch Snoopy sl
  47. January 20th, 2024 6 min read Weekend Reading — Where's my car? This week we find the missing car, test with cats, remember old computing machines, follow the layoffs on TikTok, ask the chicken the question, and build our Mac with Lego bricks. Read more
  48. January 13th, 2024 7 min read Weekend Reading — Layoffs, explained This week we have a collection of interesting software, Windows 95 for React, a brief explanation of layoffs, a beautiful AI device, a caffeinated Jupiter, and a mouse to clean our house. Read more
  49. January 6th, 2024 8 min read Weekend Reading — Happy and safe new year! This week we run a desktop in the browser, re-learn JavaScript and React Server Components, cover a bunch of cool developer tools, revisit inclusive design, write a brag document, get ourselves a free VPN, and snack on a Shoeshi

2023 10

  1. December 30th, 2023 7 min read Weekend Reading — Hot Potatoes This week we decide on monolithic vs micro-service, Remix all the things, run a performance comparison, get better at making decisions, say farewell to Firefox and Substack, exercise every morning, recommend two things you can watch onlin
  2. December 23rd, 2023 7 min read Weekend Reading — Trick AI bot into selling Tahoe for $1 This week we discuss whether HTML is necessary, get a new calendaring app, cover some productivity hacks, balk at AI Gone Wrong, and advise you how to wrap your x-max presents. Read more
  3. December 16th, 2023 7 min read Weekend Reading — 🫛 War and peas This week we solve an SQL murder mystery, watch the mother of all demos, explore the creative playground, cry over some dead startups, list a couple of new cool AI tools, and praise our Neanderthal genes. Read more
  4. December 9th, 2023 4 min read Weekend Reading — Current mood This week we cover HTML bad practices, an NFT that actually makes any sense, alternatives to the dying Evernote, some good design practices, anxiety, digital thermometers, and let’s all be frank about our current mood. Read more
  5. December 2nd, 2023 6 min read Weekend Reading — US politics in a nutshell This week we revisit the PDP-11, learn some CSS, pick some cool apps, take note of AI and ad blockers, and square some politics. Read more
  6. November 26th, 2023 1 min read Default Apps 2023 (Inspired by Chris Coyier) 📨 Mail Client: Shortwave and Spark 📮 Mail Server: Google 📝 Notes: Notes and Notion ✅ To-Do: Things 📆 Calendar: Fantastical through Google Calendar 📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive 📖 RSS: Reeder through Feedly 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contact
  7. November 25th, 2023 5 min read Weekend Reading — Darth driver This week we realize we need this truck, map the entire internet form Nov 1969, don’t obsessed over not getting hired, learn more about our brain and guts, and purchase the “never obsolete” PC. Read more
  8. November 18th, 2023 4 min read Weekend Reading — AI cycling This week we complain about GitHub Actions, find the perfect t-shirt, hallucinate to the dictionary, and learn more about the world around us. Read more
  9. November 11th, 2023 5 min read Weekend Reading — Sorry, nevermind This week we debate: to Next or not to Next? We recall of the future was imagined, many years ago. And we catch a break in the Minecraft bedroom. Read more
  10. July 31st, 2023 1 min read Where’s Assaf? The past three months have been quite the adventure. On May 4, I was headed home, walking back from my regular coffee shop, and was hit by a car going way too fast. Seriously hit. Broken bones, torn liver, spinal cord injury, the works. I ended up in ICU, se