One idea I've internalized while designing APIs is that actions don't always have to look like actions. Many actions are better off being actual resources.
It feels intuitive and logical to define endpoints like:
POST /subscriptions/:id/cancel
POST /invoices/:id/pay
It's straightforward to build, easy for clients to use, and by itself it's not inherently wrong. But again and again, I've noticed its limitations.
Read moreI'm currently on a weight loss journey—I'll tell more about that in a future post. But I just heard a statement once again that confused me for a long time:
When you're losing weight, you need to be careful that your body doesn't burn your muscles instead of your fat.
This is very misleading and oversimplified. It can sound as though you'll stay fat while your body consumes only your muscles. It sounds daunting and makes it seem more difficult. In reality, your body does not choose exclusively between burning fat and losing muscle.
Read moreThere's a new bug in the YouTube TV app for Google TV that is so utterly stupid that I need to rant about it.
When you play a video and press back on the remote, it should jump back 10 seconds. Well, now it now jumps back 10 seconds… and then immediately skips forwards 10 seconds to where you were before. So pressing back is basically doing nothing anymore, other than glitching a bit. You have to press back multiple times, or pause first and then press back.
The same thing also happens when you press forwards: It skips forwards 10 seconds, and then jumps back to where you were before.
This is already pretty annoying. But now comes the best part:
There's this "Jump ahead" YouTube Premium feature that entirely skips a commonly skipped segment. You press forwards once, it knows that many people skipped this segment as well, and then jumps ahead to where other people usually jumped to. It basically allows you to skip sponsor segments quickly. So you press forwards once on the remote, it skips to the end of the sponsor segment, and you can immediately continue. That's a really great feature! The UX is a bit meh but in theory it's a great idea.
But now, with this freaking new bug, it skips the sponsor segment, then glitches back, and then thinks that you didn't want to skip the whole segment (because it looks like you jumped back), so it removes this skipping point so moving forwards won't skip the whole segment again. Which means you can't skip the segment again. So this whole freaking feature is now not working anymore.
There are some UX lessons here about these "magic features" that sometimes appear and disappear that I might want to write about in the future, but for now I only care about how the actual fuck it's possible that the YOUTUBE APP—the official app for THE SECOND MOST VISITED WEBSITE ON THE WORLD—developed by FREAKING GOOGLE is constantly shipping broken crap that's noticeable within seconds of using a core feature. When did software turn so shit?
The number of times I still see "Loop Engineering" popping up in any of my feeds is truly upsetting.
The amount of effort you spend on meta-engineering is an illusion of a return on investment that will allow you to build the product better, faster and with greater ease.
It's the same as building your own framework, or framework-in-a-framework, because you think that all other frameworks out there are slowing down your ability to build the actual product.
Read moreEvery few months, software engineering will be over in a few months again. It can't be, but for reasons you might not expect.
When coming back to work in the beginning of 2026, organizations everywhere were going crazy. So many people, including lots of upper management, had used the winter break to build software with AI and felt that software engineering was over. They had experienced it first-hand. Everything had changed, because look at what they built! Why couldn't work feel the same?
Their experiences were real, but they happened in isolation. Building software by yourself is orders of magnitude easier than building it in a team, or across multiple teams. The hard problem at work was never just about writing code. Their experiences didn't reflect the challenges of the organization they worked in.
Read moreThis week I discovered Starsailor for the first time. Based on their age and Spotify numbers, they're not exactly a hidden gem. But it seems like they never quite broke through to the mainstream either. I had just never heard of them before.
Specifically, their debut album Love Is Here. I've listened to it so much this week. It's such a great record, filled with great songs. Their music is raw, punchy, expressive, emotional. There's so much going on in the arrangements, and structure, and lyrics.
I don't want to go deep into an analysis, or into how some of their songs remind me of Mando Diao's Give Me Fire, another fantastic album. This post is just a recommendation. Give them a listen. Maybe you, or someone else reading these lines, will be discovering them for the first time as well, and their music will touch you just as much.
This video from Waffle House swept into my Recommendations today. It starts kind of unhinged, then quickly gets fully unhinged and just keeps its trajectory towards insanity.
At Waffle House, cooks remember their orders by putting packets and other seemingly random stuff on a plate, and the types and positions of the packets tells you what order it is. Like, putting an upside down jelly packet with a mustard packet on the bottom of a plate means: scrambled eggs with 3 eggs and wheat bread. The packets are the "markers". Want some hash browns? Cook sprinkles some hash browns at the top of the plate. Want those hash browns steamed? A butter cup is added.
The customer doesn't get the markers, they're removed from the plate before it goes to the customer.
Insanity.
It reminded me of my weird keyboard shortcut "system", just without the upside-down mustard packets.
A must-watch, in my opinion.
I'm currently working on adding an OAuth/OIDC authorization server at work. Claude told me twice, on different occasions, to just implement the OAuth provider from scratch. No library, just raw-dog OAuth and OIDC completely from scratch. It said it would be worth it, because it's only ~500 LOC.
Read moreIn October I wrote a post about a little experiment I implemented. An experiement I wanted to build since I was a teen. Now I'm removing this experiment again.
To recap in short, back in the days when I started to create websites, I was fascinated by the idea that the design of a website (or at least a header image) depicts its own little world, with its own simulated weather and urban scenes and people living there. So I did it, with AI, which renewed the header images every 6 hours.
