I started a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patternw guide about anti-patterns - things NOT to do
So far I only have one: Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators, aka dumping a thousand line PR without even making sure it works first simonwillison.net/guides/agent...
Somebody did TiddlyWiki, but with Markdown
[blog] February 2026
I find out that I have a cataract; 2nd Shingrix vaccination, protest (and counter-protest) at a Humanists event, a visit to the British Museum, Clay Hunt VR might finally be improving my clays in real life (despite the cataract). Along with the usual pupdate and solar diary.
I built a programming language you're not supposed to read, veralang.dev. Vera is designed for machines to write. No variable names. No style choices. Compiler errors are instructions for the model, not diagnostics for you. Go and point a model at it, negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/28/a....
I was suggesting earlier that they might have been inspired by Douglas Adams and the Disaster Area stunt ship.
bsky.app/profile/cpsw...
Button bar screen shot from my iPad. There are a bunch of buttons on the right hand side, but they're black, on a black background 🤦🏼♂️
Did the liquid glass people at Apple take their inspiration from Douglas Adams and the Disaster Area stunt ship?
“Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it.”
it’s so part of every day life that I don’t think we interrogate enough the ideological underpinnings of “data driven” and people’s positive connotation of that phrase
I remember my dad explaining bakelite to me as ‘this is what people had before proper plastic’. It had been around for decades before he was born in the late 30s.
You haven’t said whether you liked it or not?
👌 no harm, no foul, a new thing for your repertoire.
🤮 “I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding about what I ordered”.
When the Right Wing squeaks in, it's a mandate and a true cultural shift. When the Left wins it's an aberration that we need not pay attention to.
I sadly won't make Scale to say hi, but possibly relevant to your RPM workshop...
I've been automating .rpm packaging using nFPM and GitHub Actions, and then hosting for yum/dnf on GitHub Pages over the last few weeks.
blog.thestateofme.com/2026/02/24/p...
blog.thestateofme.com/2026/02/27/p...
[blog] Publishing apt and yum/dnf repos on GitHub Pages
Following on from my post about creating .deb and .rpm packages with nFPM, this looks at how to host those packages on GitHub Pages based apt and yum/dnf repos.
But you did Esc
"Just as there are clouds and clowns, there are hyperscalers and mere scalers of hype. Amazon’s and Microsoft’s incremental CAPEX in 2025 is each roughly on par with hype scaler Oracle’s lifetime CAPEX."
[blog] Packaging Dart binaries as .deb and .rpm etc.
nFPM makes it very easy to put your binaries into a Debian .deb or RedHat Package Manager .rpm file. I also took the opportunity to slide in the new(ish) Dart cross compilation capabilities rather than using Dockerised build for arm7 and riscv64.
Kent Beck at @yowconf.bsky.social Sydney: nobody knows what programming will look like in two years — "even getting to 'it depends' would be progress."
If you're feeling anxious or grief-stricken about where our industry is heading, I wrote this for you.
👉 leaddev.com/ai/nobody-kn...
Have you tried Mermaid?
Or Blackwoods (Navy strength)?
My lovely friend @santoshyadav.dev included some of my words and thoughts on to his 'Contribute to open source - acomprehensive guide for everyone' resource with my experiences and tips on contributing as a designer to open source www.santoshyadav.dev/blog/contrib...
It’s kind of weird that it’s taken so long for this stuff to become mainstream.
Acunu did a flash friendly filesystem that helped make Cassandra performance more consistent, leading to an Apple acquisition in 2013 :0
Which doesn't indicate that coding agents aren't useful.
They obviously are super useful.
My read is that it indicates the obvious fact that software development velocity is dominated by factors other than the writing of code itself.
Fortunately @juderogers.bsky.social and @thequietus.com are here to put Edge of Darkness into perspective. 🙏 thequietus.com/opinion-and-...
Who do I know that’s at Container Days London today?
"The valley and the monomyth," by me for @negroniventurestudios.com. Every pitch deck is a Hero's Journey. Silicon Valley's greatest export isn't technology, nit's storytelling. The facts don't change the world. The stories do. negroniventurestudios.com/2026/02/09/t...
No worse than any other home labber
So many developers have sent me that Anthropic skills/mastery case study that I realized I should ungate what I *already wrote* about this: beginning principles to design workflows that work *with* your mind, not against it, & protect your problem-solving
www.fightforthehuman.com/cognitive-he...
If I was starting out again today I'd find a nice Hugo theme to publish to GitHub pages (and I have various projects that aren't my main blog where that's exactly what I've done).
Even if you decide in the future that GitHub isn't a safe home, the generated pages are entirely portable elsewhere.
"...we're now operating in the slopocene, where people don't care about prior art because they can get their model to barf it up on demand; like little chicks being fed by mother owl."
Me just now in a Signal chat.
GitHub Community Insights is now hidden behind a mandatory setup of discussions.
What fresh hell is this?
I'm guessing the GitHub PM for Discussions has a number to make, and the only way to do that is dark patterns 🤦♂️
#e14n
AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case.
redmonk.com/kholterhoff/...
