The Website Specification
A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence.
The Website Specification · specification.website [1]
A solid checklist for agents to implement on most sites. Very few sites need 100% coverage, but most should probably check most of these boxes
References:
[1]: https://specification.website/
Publishing rhythm
Revisiting the closed canon
A post I wrote in 2023, the closing of the canon, predicted that LLM answers would replace search results, dramatically lowering traffic to individual sites, thereby removing the incentives to eve...
Derek Kedziora · derekkedziora.com [1]
This is what makes rss so interesting to me. Its boring old tech that fell out of mainstream popularity years ago, yet many sites still support it. Not all, especially ones that come with a good dickover [2].
At the same time, it’s sad to see the human internet dying, even more quickly than before. Not only do we have rampant bots and sites seo maxxing to get to the top. We have ai search overview that answers mose simple questions pretty good, chat that does good, and agents at our fingertips. The need for tutorials is pretty much dead.
What we need now is human experiences shared and documented more than ever. I’ve been writing a whole lot less simply because this transition has been hard. Most of my pre 2024 posts were how to, notes for future me. Things so simple agents just spat out better versions in seconds these days with barely a question.
References:
[1]: https://derekkedziora.com/notes/revisiting-the...
On Rendering Diffs
A technical deep dive into how we built the @pierre/diffs package and CodeView component for zero-blanking diff rendering.
Pierre Computer Company · pierre.computer [1]
It’s incredible how some problems seem so simple until you load the browser with so much text it just bogs to nothing and how impossibly difficult it becomes after this point. Very cool implementation of a problem that…. who has this problem. If it takes me 2 mintues to scroll through a diff at mach speed like the video, is a diff going to solve my problem?
References:
[1]: https://pierre.computer/writing/on-rendering-diffs
- #tech #coding" playlabel="Play: His presence is still felt in the codebase to this day 😂 #codingmemes #developermemes #tech [1] #coding">
Remember this clip in 5 years, after the churn we just had with RTO and ai this is going to hit. Or AI will just figure is all out for us, who knows anymore. Not that they will figure out the human side, the what does this do, why is it here. A temporary fix is a clear signal to your other devs I didn’t have enough time to do it right, but this works. I think AI will squash a large number of these, especially in big coorporate internal tooling where you are trying to juggle as much as you can and just keep it a float at all times.
References:
[1]: /tags/tech/
Flowing Thoughts Ai To Help Blast Radius
Not sure how this matters to anyone else, but I'm sitting in the car and letting the thoughts flow.
I'm having really interesting conversations with ai recently. Like things I never thought I would care this deeply about. In part because it feels like the vulns are coming faster and harder, and in part because it is really enabling me to invest some time into the development that I would not otherwise have. I'm thinking about least privilege, reducing dependencies in containers, limiting pod access to the Internet and other pods. Reducing the blast radius.
Now I've always been hesitant to bring in new dependencies. I've always tried to strip to the lowest possible dependency set n my containers, but I would also re-use the main server container to run cron job workflows. I wasn't giving much thought about what services they could access, or their internet access
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How many people watching this sent their clankers out to make a uuid service for them as they were watching it. UUID as a service sounds great, heck @steipete [1] just has to mention it and his claws are on it building out the service, no need to even type anything or directly form a thought, just mention it in the meeting and a new repo will be up by end of meeting.
References:
[1]: https://steipete.me
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Incredibly well done satire on t3.gg, love the at one of the top comments is Prime asking to be done next.
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Lamb of God, a true classic, This album takes me back to high school. I don’t think I listened to the sacrament album as much, but “The Ashes of the Wake” was my jam for awhile, particularly hourglass.
To ignore commands that start with a space character, use the
HIST_IGNORE_SPACE option in bash or zsh.
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
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The 3 piece design for wheel s without a z-seam is absolutely genius. That is a sick trick. Love this guys style. Need a tool Make a tool.
[1]
[2]
References:
[1]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/8b6f5e2d-f8f2-4ff8-9744-0812bff8879c.webp
[2]: https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/34430a1b-cd5a-4762-89ca-d3428c70e20c.webp
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damn Johnathan Blow is not afraid to give you the cold hard opinions. If you want to be good you need to spend your early most formative years doing hard things, because you will not do it later, then goes on to say you should not do anything related to web development during that time as it will rot your brain.
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Thorsten is always a great listen with well thought out answers. I thought the advice “all you have to be is good” from his is so great, so many people focus too hard on credentials and certificates, they miss the time in the saddle and raw, just being good at what you do. They talk a lot about industry trends and that ai/llms have been here long enough to see that they are the new iphone. In some way you need to learn to work with them. Much of the minutia is churn, it will change and we will forget about it in six months. Working at amp right now is really trying to focus on releasing exactly the right thing and not everything. We’ve been given these great models that can churn out poc very quickly, it is our job to focus on what the right thing to adopt is.
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Thorsten is always a great listen with well thought out answers. I thought the advice “all you have to be is good” from his is so great, so many people focus too hard on credentials and certificates, they miss the time in the saddle and raw, just being good at what you do. They talk a lot about industry trends and that ai/llms have been here long enough to see that they are the new iphone. In some way you need to learn to work with them. Much of the minutia is churn, it will change and we will forget about it in six months. Working at amp right now is really trying to focus on releasing exactly the right thing and not everything. We’ve been given these great models that can churn out poc very quickly, it is our job to focus on what the right thing to adopt is.
Ping 59
"All you have to be is good"
[source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thMFsqe8kbQ)
Not sure if this is a quote from somewhere but thought it was some interesting
advice that @thorstenball received when he was starting into web development.
He asked a friend already in the industry if he thought he had a shot. He had
no degree, no credentials, no experience at the time.
remember rule 4
I almost for got Rules [1] 4 today, rollout when smooth late in the day right
before a vacation day (terrible time to deploy I admit not my clearest plan).
Race conditions are a b****, all around on this one. The app I was concerned
about won the race to deploy first and was fine by itself, then another app had
a race condition inside itself that killed it
References:
[1]: /rules/
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Hilarious ai episode of the office. all sort of flaws. nailed the personalities.
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one minute in, I cannot believe Prime has never used a password manager. For all the shit they give Trash for his one password, He does not use a password manager!
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Prime on Big A they make a really great mix. I really like primes perspective on the layoffs here. Adding in an ops perspecive a bit here. Maybe inspiring a full level post. infra, ops, sre roles are incentivised to keep uptime, that is your goal in these roles. Idk how it works on big products, its probably more greased, higher stakes, more well thoguht out, more well discussed. In my role for many small internal applications developers constantly use my platform different and find new edge cases that we never expected to hit. Depending on my week I’m either the team blocker and I’m fighting fires all week making sure new releases are getting out and stay running while everything is breaking, or I’m tending to the fire lanes, predicting the new edges, looking at previous outages and asking myself how do we never see this category of failure again. I think AI is really good a enabling both of these. I think you can probably run a leaner team with AI on the latter half. AI is really good at implementing things consitent (if you are careful) and fast. But when shit hits the fan, you still need the people who know the systems to get things back up quickly and prevent a cascade o...
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What a great way to start a Wednesday morning with a fresh brand new tiny desk concert with the Foo Fighters. The killed it, love the classics.
agents are never done
Agentic coding has this nice trick of letting you bang out a project in an
afternoon, something complex that would have take some real time to implement,
not just some rounding error that can slip right in between the jira board.
Then it will be perpetually never done. There will always be bugs and thorns
rear their head up, new features no one ever thought of, and now no one really
has to think much about beyond having the idea.
This part of software engineering has always been here, its the root of the
never complete 200 side projects. But now it feels like fuel has been poured
on the fire, like we can get more done than ever. But we are tricking
ourselves, these projects will never be “done”. There’s always more to add.
Without feeling any of the pain of implementing it yourself, why not just keep
adding new features forever. This is the mentality that is crushing me right now.
It pulls at your token anxiety like crazy. You look at the usage board and you
are almost cooked so y...
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I havent used windows in years at this point, but I feel this on the products I am forced to use for work. Basic features are not right, kinda work most of the time. New features, ai integrations, new skin/design, but still teams can’t use my system mic appropriately yet every other app does.
Also feel this computers have not got significantly better since around getting ssds. Yes they are better, but not at the same rate of being obsolete every two years. I hope we hit local model land and it flips this a bit, not in quite the obsolete every two years range, but some new hardware actually lets you do meaningful more new things.
How to Install Silksong mods on the Steam Deck
Having a tough time with Hollow Knight: Silksong? These mods will help.
Long Play Tech · longplaytech.com [1]
Really good tutorial for how to mod silksong on the steam deck. We just did this on my son’s steam deck. I’d add a reccomendation to map ~ to a back button like L4. I think this guy was docked with a keyboard.
References:
[1]: https://longplaytech.com/posts/how-to-install-silksong-mods-on-the-steam-deck/
Building For The Future
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’...
The Cloudflare Blog · blog.cloudflare.com [1]
Full salary for the rest of the year after being let go. As much as this sucks as much as the job market sucks. It’s good to see that these companies laying off huge numbers during good times are trying to take care of those they brought on.
References:
[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
Programming Sucks
stilldrinking.org [1]
Absolutely incredible, will fill some notes later
References:
[1]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Programming Still Sucks. — Writing
Sorry Peter. — I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And...
stvn.sh [1]
Absolute banger of a post, this is the time we are living in. Explain “are you afraid AI is going to take your job” to a non tech blue collar worker. Broken over promises, greed, and projects mismanaged by leadership who has no idea what the day to day work actually does and how critical it is.
I’m not quite in Sara’s position, but I feel something shielded by half of this working deep inside of a non tech part of a non tech company leading a very small rag tag team with get shit done attitude.
But I feel it, I see colleagues hit by these blasts.b I get clipped with shrapnel from some of the largest blasts. But nothing as significant as I see many others hit with
References:
[1]: https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp