The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

Sijin Joseph

sijinjoseph.com

Sijin Joseph — engineer turned technology leader in Greater Boston. Writing on software, teams, and tools.

AI / MLSoftware / engineering practiceSecurityEngineering management / careersDev tools / editors / IDEs

’10’15’20’25
Posts
331 from 3 Apr 2006 to 30 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (51 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://sijinjoseph.com/index.xml

2026 47

  1. Herdr, seven months in
  2. Stack Overflow, under a thousand
  3. The Programmer Competency Matrix, 2026 edition
  4. I rebuilt this site with an agent
  5. What 10x actually looks like
  6. The rest of my workflow moved into the terminal
  7. Margaret Hamilton and software engineering
  8. Book review: Kill It with Fire
  9. The cron job that ran every minute
  10. Sandboxing agents
  11. My Obsidian vault as an agent's memory
  12. Teaching juniors when the agent knows more
  13. Evals for my own agents
  14. The agent loop, visually
  15. Our model provider had a security incident
  16. SICP, reread
  17. Don't be a meat proxy
  18. Bespoke software is cheap now
  19. Writing specs for agents
  20. Mixture of experts, visually
  21. The backdoor in the job offer
  22. Hiring engineers when agents do the typing
  23. Hardware attestation and who controls your device
  24. Show human effort
  25. My personal agent
  26. Neovim in 2026: rebuilt with an agent
  27. Book review: Co-Intelligence
  28. The prompt injection in a support ticket
  29. Local models are good now
  30. KV caches and why context is expensive
  31. Code review when agents write the code
  32. Speculative decoding, visually
  33. Git commands I run before reading any code
  34. A team of agents in my terminal
  35. What a source map can leak
  36. Axios on npm was compromised, and our lockfile held
  37. Tony Hoare: null, quicksort and CSP
  38. My dotfiles, now that an agent edits them
  39. Book review: AI Engineering
  40. The agent that wiped our staging database
  41. Agents need accountability
  42. Windows, macOS and Linux: my 2026 setup
  43. Agents talking to agents
  44. How Tailscale works
  45. Should my agents get their own computer?
  46. Where did Stack Overflow's questions go?
  47. What I'm betting on in 2026

2025 24

  1. 2025: the year my team stopped writing boilerplate
  2. How LLM tool calling actually works
  3. Picking a model per task
  4. When our CDN went down
  5. uv, and the end of my Python packaging pain
  6. us-east-1 again
  7. Sub-agents and parallel work
  8. Two of our most-used npm packages got owned
  9. Why I'm still hiring juniors
  10. GPT-5 and choosing models on evals, not launches
  11. Pointing an agent at my notes
  12. Agentic IDEs compared, from the terminal side
  13. Software in the era of AI, for teams
  14. To my AI-skeptic friends
  15. Giving an agent an hour and a test suite
  16. I'd rather read the prompt
  17. The support bot that invented a policy
  18. If the CVE program goes away
  19. The wrong person in the channel
  20. A 10x faster TypeScript, written in Go
  21. A week with Claude Code
  22. How you get tracked
  23. DeepSeek-R1, and what a cheap open reasoning model changes
  24. JavaScript Temporal: dates done right, at last

2024 24

  1. Ghostty and my terminal
  2. Cognitive load is what matters
  3. The Model Context Protocol
  4. How I ship projects as a leader
  5. Computer use and the first real agents
  6. Timezones are weirder than you think
  7. The expired domain in our build
  8. Reasoning models
  9. SQL injection is still here
  10. BB(5): the busy beaver and a computer-checked proof
  11. Is open-weights AI the path forward?
  12. Twenty-seven laptops in a boot loop
  13. Vector embeddings, visually
  14. Book review: The Staff Engineer's Path
  15. GraphQL, six years later
  16. An agent that files my expenses
  17. How SSH authentication works
  18. Auditing our build images after the xz backdoor
  19. Spreadsheets are all you need
  20. Book review: Tidy First?
  21. Somebody else's six-figure bandwidth bill, and our smaller one
  22. Diffusion models, visually
  23. My editor in 2024
  24. Niklaus Wirth and the virtue of small programs

2023 24

  1. 2023: how AI changed my team's year
  2. Hackers & Painters, 20 years on
  3. Retrieval-augmented generation, visually
  4. The OpenAI weekend and AI vendor risk
  5. Finding money in the cloud bill
  6. Unicode for working developers
  7. Why commit counts lie
  8. The phone on our leadership team
  9. When your infra tool changes its license
  10. Bram Moolenaar and the editors that shaped me
  11. Zenbleed: a CPU bug explained
  12. Llama 2 on my laptop
  13. The vendor API that vanished in 30 days
  14. One set of dotfiles for Windows, macOS and Linux
  15. "No moat": open models catch up
  16. Memory allocators, visually
  17. Writing our AI usage policy
  18. An aperiodic monotile, visually
  19. The Friday our bank failed
  20. GPT-4 and my moving skepticism
  21. Book review: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
  22. Chatbots with a persona problem
  23. Leading a team through layoffs
  24. The transformer, visually: building a tiny GPT

2022 24

  1. Rotating the secrets in our password vault
  2. A week with ChatGPT
  3. Offboarding 30 people in an afternoon
  4. Fred Brooks, and what Man-Month taught me
  5. Copilot, a year in
  6. My personal knowledge base, 16 years after the last one
  7. Whisper: transcription that works
  8. Design docs people actually read
  9. The cloud account we forgot we had got suspended
  10. Use one big server
  11. Ropes, skip lists and tries
  12. Bun, Deno and Node: a runtime bake-off
  13. Book review: Software Engineering at Google
  14. Power side channels and Hertzbleed
  15. Hiring in a hot market
  16. SQLite's WAL mode explained
  17. We actually restored from backup
  18. DALL·E 2 and images from nowhere
  19. A contractor's laptop and our identity provider
  20. Please put units in names
  21. Book review: A Philosophy of Software Design
  22. How search engines rank: PageRank to BM25
  23. The runaway cloud bill weekend
  24. Web3, after actually building something

2021 12

  1. Log4Shell: the weekend we grepped every JAR
  2. Things I've learned in nearly 30 years of programming
  3. The day our routes disappeared
  4. Book review: Crafting Interpreters
  5. Perceptual hashing, and how NeuralHash collided
  6. SQLite on a static host
  7. GitHub Copilot, first week with an AI pair programmer
  8. Our ransomware tabletop
  9. A kernel ban and trust in open source
  10. Book review: Staff Engineer
  11. Profiling a slow loader
  12. Merkle trees, from git to Certificate Transparency

2020 12

  1. Auditing every agent with admin rights
  2. Apple M1: an x86 lifer's first week on ARM
  3. youtube-dl, the DMCA and open source maintainers
  4. One-on-ones over video
  5. CRDTs: how collaborative editing works
  6. Social engineering at the help desk
  7. GPT-3 and few-shot learning
  8. Book review: Building Secure and Reliable Systems
  9. Uninvited guests at our all-hands
  10. Taking the whole company remote in a week
  11. Tail latency: p99s, GC pauses and what users feel
  12. Clean code, what I still believe

2019 12

  1. Learning at work is work
  2. Sum of three cubes
  3. Password hashing, from crypt to bcrypt to Argon2
  4. Finishing the data science certificate
  5. The SSRF that reached our metadata service
  6. How a regex takes down an API
  7. Cross-validation and the bias-variance trade-off, visually
  8. Book review: An Elegant Puzzle
  9. Joe Armstrong and "let it crash"
  10. Ghidra, a reverse engineer's first impressions
  11. GPT-2 and "too dangerous to release"
  12. Backpropagation by hand

2018 12

  1. LSM trees: how write-heavy databases work
  2. The malicious dependency in our build
  3. R for a C# programmer
  4. Book review: An Introduction to Statistical Learning
  5. Garbage collectors, visually
  6. Random forests, visually
  7. Microsoft buys GitHub, and I'm not moving
  8. GDPR week: what we actually changed
  9. How DNS resolution works, step by step
  10. Book review: Accelerate
  11. Patching for Spectre and losing 30% on the database tier
  12. Meltdown and Spectre, visually

2017 12

  1. Linear regression from scratch in R
  2. Firefox Quantum and Rust in production
  3. KRACK: breaking the WPA2 four-way handshake
  4. The framework patch we hadn't applied
  5. Book review: Designing Data-Intensive Applications
  6. Back to school
  7. Attention, explained for engineers
  8. WannaCry Friday
  9. Book review: The Manager's Path
  10. How a SHA-1 collision is made
  11. Object storage went down and took our status page with it
  12. Consistent hashing, visually

2016 12

  1. Building a data team at a startup
  2. How video compression works
  3. The day DNS went away
  4. Bloom filters, visually
  5. PowerShell on Linux and the end of the OS wars
  6. Rolling out 2FA everywhere in a week
  7. Book review: Site Reliability Engineering
  8. The 200-terabyte proof
  9. Should you move into management?
  10. left-pad and the 11 lines that broke the build
  11. Apple vs the FBI: why I'm with Apple
  12. Monte Carlo tree search, visually

2015 12

  1. Babai's graph isomorphism result, for programmers
  2. TensorFlow, a practitioner's first look
  3. Leaving the colo cage
  4. The TLS handshake, visually
  5. The ex-employee who still had VPN access
  6. The Mythical Man-Month at 40
  7. How we run blameless postmortems
  8. Rust ownership for C++ programmers
  9. Visual Studio Code: Microsoft ships an editor for everyone
  10. B-trees, visually
  11. The root certificate on our sales laptops
  12. Your data isn't big

2014 12

  1. Book review: Superintelligence
  2. .NET goes open source, and I did not expect to see it
  3. Writing an engineering ladder
  4. The Shellshock weekend
  5. fork() can fail
  6. Raft: consensus you can actually understand
  7. Swift, first impressions
  8. Rotating every certificate we own in 72 hours
  9. Heartbleed, drawn out
  10. Book review: Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution
  11. How Bitcoin works, block by block
  12. What I ask in interviews instead of puzzles

2013 12

  1. A holiday-weekend card data scare
  2. How a "hot" ranking works
  3. Healthcare.gov and the myth of the big-bang launch
  4. Public key crypto, and what "NSA foils encryption" might mean
  5. Book review: The Phoenix Project
  6. Do things that don't scale, an engineering reading
  7. PRISM and the systems we build
  8. What a Linux container actually is
  9. Our host got breached, so we rotated everything
  10. Google Reader is dying, and I'm keeping my feeds
  11. How a hash table really works
  12. Aaron Swartz and the open web

2012 5

  1. Book review: The Soul of a New Machine
  2. The afternoon our cloud went dark
  3. Why a sorted array is faster: branch prediction, visually
  4. Learnable programming
  5. Stripe: Capture the Flag - Complete

2011 2

  1. Interesting Dynamic Programming Challenge
  2. Calling a web service from SQL Server

2010 22

  1. Spoon Application Virtualization Technology
  2. Youthful Arrogance
  3. Ubuntu Install Experience
  4. Oracle to start charging for MySQL - Standard edition @ 2000 USD
  5. Indiangeek featured as a resource for online computer science students
  6. The 5.2 billion dollar mistake. « Steve Blank
  7. Microsoft shifting to HTML5 as primary cross-platform runtime
  8. SPTH 'Taking the redpill: Artificial Evolution in native x86 systems' (VX heavens)
  9. Google Static Maps API - Google Code
  10. Google Chrome - Extensions run in separate processes too
  11. Keyboard shortcut for Sniping Tool
  12. ZeroMQ: Modern & Fast Networking Stack - igvita.com
  13. Scott Adams Blog: The Illusion of Winning 08/30/2010
  14. High Scalability - High Scalability - Pomegranate - Storing Billions and Billions of Tiny Little Files
  15. Beginner's Guide to Linkers
  16. SSMS Addins - Object Finder - DataScripter
  17. Regular Expression to check for primes
  18. Summary of use cases for non-relational storage
  19. Meditation: Why Bother?
  20. China is not the world's biggest manufacturer
  21. soapUI - Web Service tool
  22. OutOfMemory/Heap space errors in Java

2009 2

  1. Tools don't matter
  2. The Enlightened Newbie Syndrome

2008 14

  1. Windows Azure Distilled - A Programmer's view
  2. Using Windows Azure SDK with SQL Server 2005/2008
  3. A case study in micro-optimization
  4. What will be the next generation internet application platform?
  5. PsTools to the rescue
  6. Hacking democracy
  7. Subversion as a deployment tool
  8. Programmer Competency Matrix - 32 attributes to evaluate programmers
  9. Weblog is a "log"
  10. The Economics of Success
  11. An alternative model of computation for concurrency
  12. Hosting multiple sites on the same IP and port using IIS
  13. Finally got Webkit running under Visual Studio
  14. First alternative to google that I actually liked

2007 15

  1. How to leak memory in .Net - Statics and Event Handlers
  2. .Net framework hotfix wreaks havoc
  3. In defence on hacking
  4. Wireless power
  5. What they don't teach you in CS class
  6. Programmer's tools
  7. Make sure you know what you're fixing
  8. A new kind of adsense scam?
  9. Is a CS degree required to make a good programmer?
  10. CMM model is flawed
  11. Is Ruby "The One"?
  12. Notes on the software build process
  13. Moving back to XP SP2 aka Vista is not yet ready
  14. Picasa rocks
  15. Fonts for programming

2006 20

  1. Personal KM tool
  2. Use Visual Studio 2005 to browse existing code
  3. Vista First Experience
  4. Do not start with an I nterface
  5. Amazon utility computing web service
  6. Interesting reading for August-05-2006
  7. Innovative use of blogging as a marketing medium
  8. Dynamic web service proxies need to be loaded from disk
  9. Interesting reading for 1-August-2006
  10. w.bloggar
  11. Interesting reading for July-31-2006
  12. Treemaps for space constrained visualization
  13. Setting up wireless LAN
  14. NDepend 2.0 released
  15. Why managers get paid more than programmers??
  16. ThoughtWorks Master class - Agile programming for fun and profit
  17. Configuring TCP/IP for multiple networks
  18. Airtel broadband installation - funny typo
  19. C# Application Markup language
  20. Back from the dead