Rafe Colburn

Thanks to Claude Code, I don't have to worry about leaving GitHub repos with out of date README files in the case of my sudden death.

Rafe Colburn: Building Etsy in the AI era Etsy’s Chief Product and Technology Officer talks about the engineering org’s AI transition and recent partnership with OpenAI.

I had a fun chat about AI and Etsy on the Aboard podcast with @ftrain.bsky.social and Rich Ziade, it just dropped ... aboard.com/podcast/rafe...

This weekend I finished listening to the audiobook version of John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood." It's a great book about terrible people. The question I was left with was, which company is the Theranos of the AI boom? I imagine there's at least one.

Opinion | Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need? (Published 2024)

I don’t know what happened on the Harris campaign but he was outstanding on the Ezra Klein podcast right before he joined. www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/o...

This is 100% me, @simonwillison.net. simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/4/c...

I've been obsessed with improving my dotfiles repo since the holiday break started and last night I managed to get them working on Windows as well as MacOS/Linux. I know, weird flex but OK. github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

What interests me about it, though, is that the writing isn't excessively basic, it's excessively clever. Human writers are much more plainspoken, even the clever ones.

Oh yeah, it would be nice if the bin directory for the virtualenv were automatically added to your PATH as well ... github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

We've had an internal one at Etsy for ages, and I missed having the functionality available for personal stuff.

Add venv helper function for Python virtual environment management · rafeco/dotfiles@0af4157 Adds a convenient 'venv' command that toggles virtual environment activation. If no venv is active, it activates .venv or venv from the current directory, or offers to create one in .venv. ...

Here's the kind of stuff I never bothered to do before -- a shell function that activates a Python venv if there is one, offers to create one if there isn't, and deactivates the current venv if one is active: github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

GitHub - rafeco/cf-goto: Personal go links service on Cloudflare Workers - zero dependencies, zero cost Personal go links service on Cloudflare Workers - zero dependencies, zero cost - rafeco/cf-goto

Built another new toy for myself this morning -- a Go Links app that runs on the Cloudflare free tier: github.com/rafeco/cf-goto

I actually think there's an inverse that's also true. If you ask a chatbot for feedback on a doc or to extract insights from a doc someone sends you, it often reveals how shallowly most people (including me) read things. My read combined with the LLM read are always more useful than my read alone.

The Dotfiles Project One recent observation I saw about AI tools is that as much as they enable you to do things you already do faster (or maybe better), perhaps more importantly, they enable you to do things that you wou...

I revamped my dot files after a decade of neglect ... rafe.codes/posts/the-do...

Essentially Free Semantic Search Having recently migrated my old WordPress site to Hugo, I was wondering if I’d written a post about a certain topic and wished I had search functionality. Sure, I could just use Google to search my si...

Doing a little light tech blogging again … rafe.codes/posts/essent...

I'm celebrating Christmas by building an app to help me be better prepared for Christmas next year.

Useful patterns for building HTML tools I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …

Just applied this approach to creating a tool to format feedback collected through Workday for easy consumption (with the help of Claude Code). Addressing a long-standing annoyance in just an hour of easy work was nice. simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...

cc: @simonwillison.net

I do love how Claude Code makes it easy to pick up tasks I'd normally never bother with, like updating my dot files and making sure they work on both my laptop and GitHub Codespaces: github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

I am far too lazy to have ever done this without an assist.

I finally got around to migrating rc3.org from an outdated, no doubt insecure WordPress to a static site generator (Hugo) and Claude Code was amazingly useful. Here's a guest post Claude Code wrote explaining the migration: rc3.org/2025/11/23/m...

Someone let the domain name associated with their BlueSky account expire ...

Google's product management is really getting in the way of Gemini's success. This seems like the most obvious use case for Gemini in Google Docs and yet ...

Clear IC6 competencies on the Etsy career ladder of 12 years ago.

Years ago I asked someone to write a proper curl wrapper at Etsy only to realize there were already at least five in our codebase.

This talk has me rewriting next week’s all hands presentation over the weekend.

Back again for one of my favorite annual traditions. #monktoberfest

I think a classic example would be adding a caching layer when it’s not needed but that’s context specific, you don’t know from the code whether it was needed or not.

ChatGPT - Grok AI Musk Influence Shared via ChatGPT

ChatGPT's theory of what happened is similar to yours ... chatgpt.com/share/68724e...

It’s marketing for the AI products they’re selling.

I often say that management is the art of repeating yourself. I started saying it to remind myself as a new manager not to be annoyed by repeating myself.

So you can think really big thoughts and the leverage of having those big thoughts has just suddenly expanded enormously. I had this tweet two years ago where I said "90% of my skills just went to zero dollars and 10% of my skills just went up 1000x". And this is exactly what I'm talking about - having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keeping track of a design to maintain or control the levels of complexity as you go forward. Those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to knowing where to put the amperands and the stars and the brackets in Rust. — Kent Beck, interview with Gergely Orosz

I like this take by @kentbeck.com on how AI-assisted programming changes the balance of which skills are most important

From this interview with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-age...

Today I was trying to solve a problem with Cursor, and it misunderstood me, did something completely different than what I was asking for, and in the end helped me figure out the problem anyway. That felt like collaborating with a real human.