On the slow rediscovery of paper notebooks
Started carrying a hardcover A6 again after about a year of doing everything on my phone. The friction is the point — if it costs nothing to capture, nothing gets remembered.
Three weeks with a homegrown bookmark manager
Wrote a small thing to replace Pocket. It's 240 lines of SQLite plus a CLI. After three weeks I have opinions about what self-hosted tools should and shouldn't do.
The case for keeping config files in git
Not dotfiles — actual server config. The first time you rebuild a box from scratch and find a working nginx.conf in your repo, you start putting everything in there.
Notes on rereading The Mythical Man-Month
Some of it has aged badly. Some of it predicts 2025 with eerie accuracy. The chapter on "the surgical team" reads differently after you've spent a year on a 3-person project.
Why I stopped using IDEs for shell scripts
If you can't write it in 20 lines of bash, write it in Python. If you can, just use the editor that's already open.
Migrating away from a 7-year-old Postgres database
It's never the data that's hard. It's the assumptions that 17 different services have quietly accumulated about its shape over the years.