From Safari

• Dune as an operational model – I vots that ‘DuneOps’ officially becomes A Thing[tm]
• Two People Exchanging Saliva – Odd, but gorgeous short film. And the dress she wears is fantastic.
• Why LLMs Write Incorrect SQL (and What That Means for Your Database) – This is why I worry more about changes that involve sql directly rather than an ORM.
• RBAC in Laravel: A Practical Deep Dive – Feels like AI wrote it, but still a good overview. Personally I would just use Laravel Permission and be done with it.
• On pricing – Pricing is a story. I don’t link to Seth Godin enough.
• How I write feature specs – How to use multiple levels of AI to produce a document for AI. I still bump into this trend of fully fleshed out specs as being ‘waterfall for robots’. But interesting none the less.
• Searching multiple columns with one URL parameter in laravel-query-builder – Looks good. I’ve used similar packages but not that were as elegant.
• 💵All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous. – This is going to be a bigger and bigger thing.
• Useful memories become faulty when continuously updated by LLMs – Now I feel like I need to audit the robot’s memory. I never wanted to be a programmer, I just knew how to program. But I see why people miss just writing code.
• In a quest to becoming AI-independent – Now, I would spend disposible income on art, not hardware, because I’ve never been a hardware nerd. But I’m glad people are doing this work. I would absolutely buy a $5k local inference rig to sit on my desk at the office.
• How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer – The is zero-tolerance, and then there is ‘humans in a can on the other side of the moon’ tolerant.
• 10 trillion downloads are crushing open-source repositories - here’s what they’re doing about it – My hunch is that someone will create something that lives in the AWS Marketplace that acts as the local cache between the repositories and will be able to make a lot of money. Yes, there are things like this already, but aimed at Big E Enterprise. What about the rest? No, I don’t have time to build this myself.
• Debugging Audio Artifacts Caused by… a Serial Port? – The really amazing part of this post is that they figured it out at all. Magic!
• How AWS Trainium actually works (2026) – Chip design decisions are neat. See above for running local inference things. Ideas proven at hyperscaler scale will eventually come to prosumer gear
• Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks – Yup, beware of defaults, and understand what you run. Also, Pintrest is still a thing?
• Your Container Is Not a Sandbox – Indeed. This is k8s heavy, but again, someone could wrap this all nicely with a bow that sits in your toolbar and be laughing.

From Phone

• SaaS Lens – I thing the AWS Well-Architected Framework is super handy. Since I specialize in SaaS, this is useful. Even if some is for a scale I don’t operate at.
• Fermi ROI: Fixing the ROI rubric – An interesting approach to a hard problem
• The Fascinating Stories Behind 5 of the World’s Big Currency Symbols – In completely alignment with my collection of useless facts interests
• Chinese Etiquette: Fist and palm salute – I’m amused that so many greeting rituals evolved to show that they are not attacking you
• 30 Of The Funniest Menu Translation Fails Ever – This is very much Asian menus getting English wrong, but ‘white people getting characters’ is as equally funny variant of this
• Guard rail (rail transport) – In case you ever wondered why there are sometimes extra rails on the track
• The shape of the new 1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S – Ligature nerdiness
• What’s Inside The Bean? Photos Show Construction Of ‘Cloud Gate’ – A) Did you know that is what is is actually called, B) So cool.
• Kit spent over $1 million on AWS in 2021 – An old (now) breakdown, but still useful. Understanding your cloud spend is part of senior tech leadership’s responsiblity
• The 50 Best Quotes About Men’s Style & Fashion
• Make Boring Plans – I aspire for boring. Except for shoes. (Of course!)
• Sending weekly 5-15 updates – I accidently do this with my “What’s New” posts every Monday
• Data diffs: Algorithms for explaining what changed in a dataset – Science has a reproducability problem. This is part of it.
• Growth and Power – Understanding Big-P Power is important as you ladder up
• Deconstructing a Waterpark – if you want a more technical name for ‘the pink slide’ or ‘the yellow one.’

From Safari

• New Comic: The Scale of a Man – Pieces of art become more when you know all of the story. And when the meta story connects with the artist it is even more powerful.
• Ship AI with Laravel: RAG with Embeddings and pgvector in Laravel 13 – Less ‘simple’ chat bots and more RAG pipeline examples please.
• I Left Port 22 Open on the Internet for 54 Days. Here’s Who Showed Up. – ‘Fifty-four days later, I came back to 317 megabytes of logs.’ I love everything about this. I want to see a long-term experiment like this. With nodes distributed around.
• The Great CSS Expansion – Yay for more CSS! Of course, I use Tailwind on my projects which negates some of this, but the less JS we need the better as far as I’m concerned.
• In Praise of –dry-run – Laravel /loves/ the CLI. I think most artisan commands have it. As I’m thinking about my new deployment pipeline, I’m thinking more about this as well as an emergency break.
• How We Reduced Median Memory Estimation Error by 99%, With the Help of AI – A nice write-up of when / how / why AI can help. And not just run a bunch of slop to production
• When upserts don’t update but still write: Debugging Postgres performance at scale – Another in a long series of ‘things are different at super scale’
• Components of A Coding Agent – I like this breakdown that tries to make the black box slightly less opaque. I might have also just added his books to the top of the ‘to buy’ pile. I don’t think I’m going to be building or tuning LLMs anytime soon, but I suspect I’ll appreciate knowing how they deeply function.
• Duolingo’s Kubernetes Leap – A really good read (or watch) about exactly the situation you should be looking at k8s. I think I have a tonne more respect for Duolingo’s tech leadership after reading this.
• How Much Do GPU Clusters Really Cost? – The answer, is a lot. But they provide math to compare and contrast. The math still maths to a lot though.

From Phone

• Boreal Mountain Anoraks – These jackets are cool, but I’d want it in bright yellow. Or red.
• Big Boy No. 4014 – I suspect we couldn’t build something like this from scratch again if we tried. Everything built in the last 20 years was an exact replica or from original drawings.
• Baseball History – I do love how deep the history of baseball goes
• DevRel Is Not Measured Like Other Roles — And That Needs to Change – I’ve talked to a couple companies about DevRel roles. Measurement is hard. The hiring team often don’t know how and are expecting you to bring that knowledge with you. My ‘tip’ is if you are going into this space these days, you should have an inkling of an answer. (And if they don’t ask, I feel like that in itself is a bit of a warning.)

From Safari

• How I Run a Fully-Remote Software Engineering Standup – I always have “Thing that looks suspiciously like a standup but isn’t because Scrum is too slow” for my teams. I think I agree with all these points.
• IPv8 – ‘Every manageable element in an IPv8 network is authorised via OAuth2 JWT tokens served from a local cache.’ Wait, what? Oh. Actually, that is quite clever.
• Why aren’t we uv yet? – Spoiler, it is because the robots are trained on pip. Same reason why they reccomend Stripe. And Next.js. And React. Etc. You have to tell it to forge a non-default path. And as more people are producing more code the robots create, the robots will train more and more on the existing patterns reinforcing it in the model as the desirable path. This is why I really worry about things in our AI hellscape.
• How do AI agents use S3 Files to persist memory and share state? (2026) – I don’t need this, though I do think the Agent Memory Problem hasn’t been fully cracked yet. But ‘S3 Files is a read/write cache on top of S3’ sounds like something to mentally bank for later.
• Programming used to be free – ‘And so it bothers me that this might regress computing back to the plutocracy of 1970s.’ Yup.
• For Lent, I gave up using my phone in the car.

  This reminds me of the first day of any training that I run, in which I land the class by forcing a few seconds of silence. I instruct everyone to turn off Zoom video and then I count down from 10; when I hit 0, people turn their cameras back on and we begin. The way folks smile or lean back in their seats or even tear up a little when we officially come back on video is oh-so-endearing. It’s a lot; everything is a lot right now and I know how important it is to be cared for via quiet.

• Does the New York Times Need a Magazine? – Lots of juicy bits in here about the halo effect a magazine has, how loss of identity often precludes loss of relevance, etc.
• A curated list of PHP Attributes available in Laravel Framework. – available as a Boost skill
• Print Doesn’t Scale? Let’s Redefine What Scale Actually Means – ‘And the question being asked, “how many people does this reach?”, is not the only one worth asking.’ – This is rapidly becoming my favourite weekly newsletter.
• Two Years of Valkey – An interesting observation. And one I think other projects that have had forks should do.
• Don’t wing it. Here’s how to behave on a plane – I love everything about these rules. (My wife would get called out for at least one of these. I’ll leave it to you to decide which.)
• 5 Incident Response Principles for CTOs – If you’re lazy, just scroll to the bottom of the page for a summary chart. But there are some good sentances in there. Like ‘So the question is never whether they’ll happen. It’s whether you’re prepared when they do.’
• AI-generated code ships fast, but runtime control hasn’t kept up – Obviously LaunchDarkly has skin in the game, but their list of runtime controls is good. And should be a key part of your deployment pipeline once you hit ‘scale’. (Whatever that means.)
• Why End-to-End Testing Fails in Microservice Architectures – As Charity Majors says, ‘Test in production or live in a lie’
• Context Anchoring – Why document? ‘Because code captures outcomes, not reasoning.’ I really need to do this.
• My Take on Vibe Coding VS Agentic Engineering – ‘Vibe Coding optimizes for immediate output. Agentic Engineering optimizes for correctness, maintainability, and confidence.’ I think I like this distinction.
• Under the Hood: How Blaze Speeds Up Blade Templates – Super nerdy, but cool explanation of Blade optimizing.

However, that doesn’t mean the author isn’t wrong. Lock-in for some things is absolutely desirable when you are the one reaping the majority of the benfits. This is why when people start talking about ‘multi-cloud strategies’ they should be laughed out of the room. (Lock yourself as tightly and as deeply as you can to your cloud vendor and don’t make any comprimises around your infrastructure.)

We live in an IP rental world. No one ‘owns’ a movie anymore. And when it rotates out of their streaming service, their access is gone. It is almost impossible to buy a standalone DVD player at some stores when they used to be ubiquitous. (I have no idea how I’m going to watch the Macross 2 DVD I kickstarted…)

I suspect we’re on the front wave of a return to physical assets for our media. I read somewhere that Criterion is doing extremely well. And there is the whole return-of-vinyl story.

Please let dead tree books be next.

Every so often the ‘unhinged smut’ side of Instagram leaks into my feed and there is the notion of ‘trophies’ where they read the digital or audio version (at warp speed. ‘speedmaxxing’ for the kids?) and then buy the print version for their shelves. But that also means you are paying double for it. (Or pirating one? Which is a separate problem.)

Books are meant to be read. To be held. To be lugged inconveniently on transit. To be experienced.

But I also say this as a middle age white dude in tech who until recently had a ridiucloud pay cheque who could afford to buy first edition hardcovers and limited editions. (Hire me? I have a book and art problem to finance…)

I don’t collect trophies. I collect memories. And they sit in boxes in storage until the day I win the library and can built myself a Victorian era-esque library for them.

(Also, don’t get me started on everyone grading and slabbing their comics. Read those too!)

In my opinion, the best Star Wars is Rebels. Especially if you have watched all of Clone Wars before you start into it. There are so many amazing payoffs towards the end. But even if they were not there, it is still the best series.

(I had high hopes for Ahsoka … but they were quashed. That’s a whole other rant. And I don’t think the Maul show that started last week is going to do much to change my mind.)

Anyhow, this is a stain glass of Hera, who is the captain of the Ghost. I got it years ago from Megnificant Glass.

Now, technically my office has a window, but it just goes to a common area and not outside. So it just hangs on the wall (looming over my head if I’m at that desk and on a video call.)

I need to find a job in order to post new acquitions, but in the meantime, you should #buymoreart.

No, what this is about is A) the mailer, B) the inside packaging.

The world needs more Disco Ball Pink Mailers. I knew the book was coming any day from tracking, but that mailer itself just brought me so much joy when I saw it in the mailbox. It is perfect. A sparkly bit of joy in our worst timeline hellscape. (Which I am sure was exactly the intention. Mission accomplished.)

And then, when you open it up, its wrapped again and blurbed … by his wife. Which is fantastic. (As is she – buy her books too!)

He didn’t have to wrap it in tissue paper. And I’m sure this mailer cost more than a standard craft paper one. But I’m quite glad he did.

I was at a MicroConf meetup last fall and they had a few copies of Stand The F*ck Out from an earlier event. With a title like that, how could I not pick it up. Love me some subversive marketing.

I think the overall thesis of the book is that in order to stand out in the middle of a sea of AI slop, you need to be intentional about standing the fuck out. (And then, fine. Feed it to the slop generators. But keep a human in the loop.)

Is there any ground breaking insights in the book? Maybe if you haven’t been thinking about marketing and branding for years and have two degrees in entrepeneurship. However, my marketing classes woulda been way more exciting if this book was used. And it absolutely could have been. Follow the framework and final assignment is the completed canvas with all the information filled in…

That still sounds a bit ‘meh’ there Adam, why the ‘Buy at full price’ verdict? It’s tone and style were incredibly fun. And it did give me a bunch of homework to do on Events In Plain Site. And there is a bonus if you get the bundled edition direct from him – access to a bunch of super useful templates and such.

Here’s some random underlines I made – because I am ‘that guy’ with resource books.

• Methodology
  • Stage 1: Insight Foraging – actually, real foraging, not AI-driven foraging.
  • Stage 2: Unique Positioning – why would people choose you?
  • Stage 3: Distinctive Brand – increase the odds of being discovered
  • Stage 4: Continuous Reach: – reach the right people, at the right time with the right stuff
• If we’re being honest, I skipped Stage 1 and started to build as I scratched an itch. Which means figuring out my positioning is hard. I have differenciation nailed, but that is subtly different than positioning.
• Positioning is subcategorized to Job, Alternatives, Struggles, Segment and Category
• The job is about the segment’s goals, not your own. (Oops.)
• Find out who you are actually competing against. (At Contractor Compliance we actually competed against A) the Status Quo and B) Excel and not ‘other companies in our space’. Knowing that shaped everything else.)
• Frame struggles through the SOS framework; Stop Obstacle Situation
• Don’t confuse struggles with jobs.
• A segment is a group of people you can serve using your distinct advange against the alternatives
• Use the RAGE framework to measure a segment; Revenue Access Growth Enjoyment
• Does this segment make you happy and bring you joy? If not, find another one.
• There is a fine line between being Disruptive and being Distinctive
• Stage 3 has 4 subcategories; Monster, POV, Spices, Assets
• Monster in this case is ‘a semi-fictional enemy representing some of the problems the segment faces’. Underlines-per-section ratio is highest here. I want to say the Events In Plain Site is Gatekeepers. Be that internal to a community or Facebook or Meetup or other walled garden.
• You can’t stay in your shell and stand the fuck out
• [AI] makes spicy food less spicy – paraphrased from Seth Godin
• Brands that stand out have almost no difference between what they say, how they’re percieved and what they do. (I say gatekeepers are the monster, but do provide gatekeeping tools under the guise of safety.)

Also, bonjour, bonjour.

* Scale is ‘Buy at full price’, ‘Buy on sale’, ‘Buy if it basically drops in your lap’, ‘Don’t buy’. Which, incidentally is the scale I use for shoe purchases. Though shoes have a scarcity metric applied to them as well.

This is part 4 of DevOps’ish and the final one for this list, and the final one for all lists. 5 months, 6000+ emails. This is September - November 2022, and then January 2026 to current.

Here is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4

• Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die – A quick search shows they haven’t dies in the last 4 years and the trick to work around them still is relevant.
• Breaking down how USB4 goes where no USB standard has gone before – Huh. Didn’t know there was a USB4. Spoiler, there is. Also, since this article was posted (2002), the the ‘upcoming’ USB4 Version 2.0 has been released.
• SBOMs: An Overhyped Concept That Won’t Secure Your Software Supply Chain – Remember when SBOM was the center of the hype for like 2 months?
• Just the Browser – “Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers.” Guess I know how I’m spending time not doing what I should be this weekend.
• How to write a great agents.md: Lessons from over 2,500 repositories – A reminder I need to rework my CLAUDE.md. Even though this is for CoPilot.
• How to write a good spec for AI agents – I’ve been planning thing conversationally. I should try and force myself to use specs. Just seems like overkill for one person working on bite-sized features.
• How I Taught GitHub Copilot Code Review to Think Like a Maintainer – More tuning tricks for agents
• OpenTelemetry Collector vs agent: How to choose the right telemetry approach – Another ‘know your options before choosing one’ link
• Blocking HTTP1.1 - Some Results – The internet moves slowly at times.
• My custom agent used 87% fewer tokens when I gave it Skills for its MCP tools – Token management. Also ‘Bloat. Bloat Everywhere.’
• The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep – Just don’t buy this folks. There are very, very few good reasons to own these. And most are ‘content creation’, which it could be argued we don’t need anyways.
• Markdown Ate The World – I love markdown. And everything it represents. Easy diff, readable, hard to mess up.

Well, it is back from the framer. I really like the green matting and gold frame. In my mind it was always going to have a gold frame. Alas, the obvious best choice was on backorder and I couldn’t get it. This one worked out well though I think.

I do need to stop buying more art (or find a job, or both), but you should #buymoreart.