Posts

I just finished watching CultRepo’s brilliant new documentary, The Story of C++: The World’s Most Consequential Programming Language, and it sparked a lot of nostalgia. Looking back, I sometimes wish I had dove deeper into the C/C++ ecosystem early on. My own journey started with BASIC on the Commodore 64, but my career path ultimately deployed me straight into the infosec and sysadmin world. In that sector of the sandbox, tools like TCL/TK, Perl, Python, and Java became my primary operational assets. ...

Aaron Brethorst’s recent piece argues that domain expertise is the ultimate moat in an AI-driven world. He is spot on. AI has commoditised code generation, shifting the bottleneck from “can you build it” to “do you actually understand the problem well enough to know if the output is right.” But a deep domain moat introduces a brutal operational reality: it drastically shrinks your talent pool. Finding engineers who understand high-performance architecture and niche industry nuance is like searching for a unicorn. ...

The tech industry loves a treadmill. It wants us to keep running toward the next high resolution, battery hungry slab of glass. But sometimes, the most progressive move is a tactical retreat. My journey with the Samsung Galaxy series began in 2018 with the original Galaxy Watch, but long before that, my first smartwatch was a Pebble. When Eric Migicovsky announced the rebirth of the platform with the Core Pebble Time 2, the nostalgia was too strong to ignore. ...

The grid was built for a different era. Massive, centralised plants and long transmission lines made sense when generation was expensive and demand was concentrated. That architecture has a cost: one break in the chain and millions go dark. It is not bad engineering; it is a design that scaled well past its limits. At Blueprint Power, the strategy was simple: push generation and load as close together as possible. Move to the edge. The shorter the distance between where power is made and where it is used, the less you depend on the transmission backbone. The networking mindset was the means, not the message. ...

I recently spent some time getting snac2 running on my OpenBSD infrastructure. For those unfamiliar, it is a simple, minimalistic, and remarkably efficient ActivityPub instance written in C. It is a fantastic fit for the OpenBSD philosophy, as it plays nicely with native security features like pledge(2) and unveil(2). If you are looking for a way to join the fediverse without the heavy resource footprint of larger platforms, this is a solid choice. ...