Blogs about Development

Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, …

⚠️ Disclaimer: This article is written with the help of a Large Language Model (LLM). This is a take. I’m selling you a take. Would you buy my take? Ideology as a service probably always …

In 2019 I started Bad Gateway as a software development agency. Last year we grew all the way to 7 people. It was crazy challenging, especially with Covid in the mix; but ultimately could not …

We've achieved our goals already with this series: we have a web service written in Rust, built into a Docker image with nix, with a nice dev shell, that we can deploy to fly.io. But …

Today I want to answer a question that, honestly, almost no one ever asks. Why are we changing frames, instead of getting rid of them altogether? Talking about change in the geek trades is a …

I originally ran this on my newsletter last year but I like it way too much to let it rot in the archives. Enjoy! Happy Pi Day!1 To celebrate I want to get away from …

(or: It's embarassing how often as a customer, I have to make educated guesses on how a company's IT works, Part 1)

I’ve been doing lots of experiments with GPT, though I’ve only written about one until now… the more serious something is the harder it is to call it finished or identify the outcomes. Here I’ll …

I recently naturalized as a US citizen and I had a hell of a time identifying exactly which steps I needed to take to get my Nexus card updated to reflect my new citizenship status. …

Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering Truncated PNGs (CVE-2023-21036): The bug lies in closed-source Google-proprietary code so it’s a bit hard to inspect, but after some patch-diffing I concluded that the root cause was due to this horrible …

From time to time a NetNewsWire user lets me know that they’d be happy to pay for the app or add to a tip jar. The answer is always the same: we don’t take money, …

A few weeks ago my work team had a question we weren't sure how to answer. We publish open textbooks as part of the library's mission to provide access to high quality learning resources, and …

I've been working on an oscillating engine simulator. It's a type of steam engine where instead of valve gear, the cylinder swings back and forth, exposing a hole in the cylinder to an inlet port …

This week I’ve been a bit late on the reading update as I’ve gotten to move from pocket to notion, so a bit of reading to try and clean my huge reading list on Pocket. …

Tuesday, Sep 6 Illuminated Texts (permalink) made and submitted by nbertagnolli Using Dalle-2 to illustrate classic poems! — nbertagnolli

I’ve been working on a zine about how computers represent thing in binary, and one question I’ve gotten a few times is – why does the x86 architecture use 8-bit bytes? Why not some other …

Should content on a personal site be edited, or should it be a snapshot in time? Here’s my thoughts… So I read this post by Manu Moreale yesterday, where he was talking about retrospectively editing …

I find the traditional introversion / extraversion spectrum used in Myers-Briggs personality test to be inadequate to understand my social energy. When I took an online assessment years ago, I was smack in the middle: …

Conversing with Destiny A Dialogue on Free Will between AI and Humanity · March 15th, 2023 Content Warning: Strong language A friend of mine wrote a ChatGPT IRC bot recently, which is great, because now …

The split() method splits a string based on the given substring and returns a list. By default, whitespace is used for splitting and empty elements are discarded. >>> greeting = ' \t\r\n have a nice …