jacobian

Thank you for this review! I have a loose evening in Vegas next week and have been considering seeing this — think I’ll probably go for it now.

Anubis: Web AI Firewall Utility | Anubis Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests to protect your website!

anubis.techaro.lol is very effective

The real 10x programmer was the friends we made along the way 😆😆😆

Hey if you’re looking to try/retry/find a home on the ActivityPub/mastodon shaped part of the fediverse, I will personally help you get set up, move followers, block assholes, etc

I have no interest in debating the merit of bsky-v-mastodon, purely offering help.

Reskeets welcome ✨

I never knew about their connection, wild. Makes perfect sense to me: I’ve always been a zillion times more productive working with a good project manager/assistant/goat herder/whatever than trying to white-knuckle productivity on my own.

Damnit, I’m so sorry to hear that. That fucking sucks.

Thank you for writing this - I read Yegge’s article and thought for sure that one of us had had a stroke

Add @404media.co to that list - they’re doing amazing work

I don’t use Nix/NixOS so I’m not sure I totally understand — but it sounds like you’re doing the “have LLM generate config, apply config” workflow (rather than “SSH and do the work directly) — is that right?

People who are having success managing (low-stakes, non-production) servers with LLMs — how are you going about it? Are you just pointing Claude (or whatever) at an SSH connection, or are you having the LLM write config management code and then applying that? Or something else?

Hell yeah, love it. “Only take feedback from people with some skin in the game” (sponsors, in your case), is totally the kind of middle-ground option I was thinking about. I’m glad it’s working for you!

Working in Between Public and Private - Jacob Kaplan-Moss If working in public isn’t working, consider adopting a middle-ground option instead of retreating into fully-private.

The “default” working model for open source projects is working in public: you don’t need permission to contribute, you can just show up. When this doesn’t work, people often retreat into working in private. This is a mistake! There is a middle ground:

jacobian.org/2025/oct/18/...

I hear Little Bobby Tables had a mean curveball.

Hey #Django fam do I Know anybody at Zest Health? They've got some jobs I'm interested in and are apparently a django shop.

Boosts appreciated!

Changing Directions - Jacob Kaplan-Moss <p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I&rsquo;m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully &ldquo;for good&rdquo;; if not, at least &ldquo;for now&rdquo;.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the co...

Reading @jacobian.org 's exit from tech rings a bell. We love computers but we hate the tech industry. We love space but we dread the space industry. We love music but we loathe the record industry.

We can have nice things, just not under capitalism.

(OTOH, excited for him ❤️)

In case anyone’s wondering, `jacobian . bsky . social` isn’t me. Super flattered that I now rank high enough to score an impersonator tho!

Oh neat! Related, I’ve often wished for some sort of Gantt charts that can show uncertainty, but I don’t have good enough designer/dataviz chops to really know what that would look like.

Beware tech career advice from old heads - Jacob Kaplan-Moss If you’re new to tech – say, less than 5 years in the field – you should take career advice from people who’ve been in the industry more than 10-15 years with enormous skepticism.

A lot of tech people, particularly more junior folks, are looking for jobs right now. A short but important note for them: newcomers should generally ignore career advice from people who've been in the field longer than 10 or 15 years.

jacobian.org/2025/mar/13/...

A reminder: doing illegal things is illegal. If somebody gives you an order to do something illegal, it is your obligation to say no. "Just following orders" has never been a defense, legally or ethically.

Here’s how to share sensitive leaks with the press Thinking about securely leaking information to news organizations? This guide will show you how.

Worth reviewing: freedom.press/digisec/blog...

Sidebar #4: Quantitative Risk Revisited - Jacob Kaplan-Moss In part 1 of this series, I briefly covered quantitive risk measuring – assigning a numeric value to risk, like “$3,500”, rather than a qualitative label like “medium” – only to quickly recommend agai...

Part six of my risk series is up — a final (long) sidebar to the introduction, coming back around the the concept of quantitative risk analysis and giving a more complete explanation of what I see as the pros and cons of that practice: jacobian.org/2025/jan/28/...

> Lots of situations in life are like this, where there’s a loud way to accomplish very little and a quiet way to do some good. And far too often, we reward people for doing the loud ineffective thing.

alexgaynor.net/2025/jan/27/...

What accomplishments sound like on software engineering resumes - Jacob Kaplan-Moss Effective resumes need to contain two things: responsibilities and accomplishments. The first tells the read what your job was; the second, what your results were. Unfortunately, most people fail at t...

I'd like to write a version of jacobian.org/2020/may/8/e..., but tailored to management roles.

If you have a manager resume that lists specific accomplishments, and you'd be OK with me anonymized bits in a post like that, please email me your resume? jacob at jacobian dot org.

Do You Work For the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants To Hear From You. We’re doubling down on our coverage of government agencies and federal policy. With your help, we can dig deeper.

💪❤️🇺🇸 hello former 18f and usds colleagues. reach out and say hi www.propublica.org/tips/federal...

400 individual members of the Django Software Foundation As of a few weeks ago, the Django Software Foundation reached 400 individual members.

400 individual members of the Django Software Foundation – pretty cool milestone! https://thib.me/400-django-individual-members Now going for 500! 🌈 That’d be a great milestone to reach for the 20-year birthday of #Django in July 2025. Submit a nomination, or 2, or 3 to help make it happen?

Funny, in infosec we do “event” vs “incident”. “Incident” triggers regulatory/contractual obligations, so we call things an “event” until we’re sure it’s a real incident and not a false alarm.

Last night someone lit a Tesla on fire at the dealership here in Salem. Golly gee.

The holiday app names thing was my favorite Easter egg, good times

Sidebar #3: Two Flavors of Medium Risk - Jacob Kaplan-Moss When you look at a likelihood/impact risk matrix, you might notice that “medium” appears twice – once as high-likelihood/low-impact, and once as low-likelihood/high-impact. These two “mediums” aren’t ...

Part whatever in my risk series:

When you look at a likelihood/impact risk matrix, you might notice that “medium” appears twice – once as high-likelihood/low-impact, and once as low-likelihood/high-impact. These two “mediums” aren’t at all the same!

jacobian.org/2025/jan/17/...

Sidebar #2: The Swiss Cheese Model - Jacob Kaplan-Moss In the real world, accidents happen when a series of small missteps align to create severe consequences. This is something we call the “Swiss Cheese Model”: imagining a systems failure as a set of “ho...

Most serious accidents aren't singular events, but instead are the result of a series of small, seemingly-inconsequential missteps. We call this the Swiss Cheese Model, and it's one of the most important concepts in risk management:

jacobian.org/2025/jan/16/...