Shorts
Had my first unproductive day in 3 months. Thanks to MacBook issues.
One day. In 3 months. Just because of tech problems. Not because of meetings or calls or metawork.
Actually I’m not even mad, that’s amazing.
me: blocks ntp in firewall on homelab vps tunnel
vps: time drifts out of sync, google oauth breaks
me: surprised_pikachu.png
I just waited 2 hours for my bag at FRA airport until I was told it’s in a separate baggage claim near the train station, because I have a connecting train.
Who tf designs this crap. A train is not a plane, don’t treat it like one. Against user expectation.
Notably, it’s mostly about dependencies. Dependencies are entropy. When everything can be a dependency of everything else, entropy reaches its maximum. Activity ceases.
Heat death of a codebase.
There are three base ingredients for a scalable codebase: Modules, Layers and Interfaces.
Modules to tame data dependencies. Layers to tame function dependencies. Interfaces to tame dependency boundaries.
Ham’s blog now also features “Moments”, as a way to share smaller thoughts and everyday moments on his own site.
Love to see more people adopt this way of sharing their thoughts outside social media platforms, just on their own websites. I really, really like following the people I care about. I just don’t want to open Twitter or Bluesky most of the time.
Slowcial media, baby!
TIL the United States has no transit zone, so you need to go through US immigration for a connecting flight.
The german in me thinks this is very inefficient.
I fell asleep while a Vsauce YouTube Short was playing on my tablet.
I woke up over 6 hours later. It looped fucking 400 times.
Bought some melatonin today to combat jetlag next week.
I had to try one out. idk why but it always fascinates me that medicine actually works. i’m so fucking sleepy
Just imagine how much time and money has been wasted on reimplementing shitty versions of iOS’s wheel picker.
I just released Buckets on Railway. This is huge for me.
I came to Railway because I want to give developers truly great experiences. And this is exactly the stuff.
A rush of adrenaline, relief, and positive feedback. No idea how I should be able to sleep now. It’s 2:15am.
Replica Metrics (one of my first projects at Railway) is now in GA! You can check how your replicas are doing, spot hot or underutilized regions, and catch replicas going wild.
choo choo 🚅
https://docs.railway.com/reference/metrics#replica-view
TIL there’s a german PhD thesis from 1978 about guys injuring their junk by sticking it into a hoover. It lists 16 medical cases.
Case 14 is about a guy cleaning up and curiosity got him.
Case 15 is about case 14’s father who wanted to prove his son lied.
He did not lie.
It’s mindblowing what’s possible within a week.
I started adding Buckets to Railway on Monday. Today, 5 days later, I can create a Bucket in a project, click deploy, copy the credentials from the frontend, and upload files to it.
That’s kinda crazy.
Infra as Code doesn’t gift you confidence.
You’re only as confident in your changes as you are in the tool.
If it feels like magic and you don’t understand it, it makes you less confident, not more.
There comes a point where a 3rd party API is just so ill-designed that you can’t think of any way to abstract it nicely, and you just add a big comment block to explain what the actual fuck is going on.
i’m cooking rn 👀
You call it a memory leak. I call it unlimited caching, baby.
This post should be crossposted to my blog, to Twitter and to Bluesky. Poggies if this works. (edit: it did!)
I started adding storage Buckets into Railway this week. It’s Day 2, and I can already create and deploy a Bucket.¹
I’m excited af about this because I’ve always experienced Buckets as this boring table UI in some cloud console, and to create a Bucket you had to fill out a huge form. But look at this! Right-click, Bucket, boom, here you go, now build stuff with it!
¹ right now the Bucket is just an empty shell and you can’t yet do anything with it. But tomorrow is the day where I will turn it into something usable
Share every small win. When you’re on a roll and have one small win after another, just share them. A big win is just a collection of many small wins over time. It helps you notice the progress you’re making, and as a nice side effect, others will notice too.
I can now post images! I can just send sent them to my Discord bot and ✨ they are here. Discord even supports alt text which is really handy.
To verify this works, here are two DALL-E images I recently generated.
Most of the code I’ve written today could’ve been written by Claude, with some manual intervention and guidance in between. Because it was a lot of work where you look at similar implementations in the codebase and do roughly the same, which AIs are generally good at.
But
Then I would’ve only learned a tiny fraction about the existing code, and I likely wouldn’t understand half of it. By doing everything by myself, I learned so many things about the codebase that will be massively helpful in the future.
I also built a small Discord bot with n8n to automate posting. I added it to my private Discord server (which I use for various stuff), and whenever I post into a specific channel, it creates a new post here!
Tomorrow: crossposting to other socials. I think. Or maybe images first.
I added short posts as a new post type. Basically as an alternative to posting on Bluesky or Twitter. Like in the old days.
It’s scrappy, there’s a bug in timezones with relative times, and I want to add a bunch of stuff. But I can use it.
I still don’t feel like I want to open Bluesky or Twitter. It pulls me in too much and messes with my inner peace. But I’ll definitely set up some cross-posting in the future, and I also want to pull in likes (and maybe comments? dunno yet) from socials.
