What have you done for email?

I ended up at Soverin. Luckily I was already using Gmail with my own domain, so I could switch without having to change addresses.

https://soverin.com/

For me, Fastmail has been incredible.

I concur on Fastmail. I only keep a "legacy" Gmail account for parental tech support.

In the early 2000s, we had a camera that saved to an internal hard drive. The only way to watch videos was to either copy them to the computer or hook an RCA cable from the camera to the TV. You could also go from VGA to RCA with the right set of cables.

However, everyone did have a DVD player! So I, similar to the author, wrote scripts to take videos, generate DVD isos, and then burn to DVDs.

I learned about message queues (rabbitmq) with that project and had connected a bunch of old laptops with Linux VMs installed.

I never finished the project and nowadays there are a hundred ways to share and stream digital video. I hadn’t anticipated, at the time, that casting videos wirelessly to our TVs would become the norm.

For testing, consider https://github.com/localstack/localstack

WAY too much. I just need a tiny service that translates common S3 ops into filesystem ops and back.

I work at Ramp and have always been on the “luddite” side of AI code tools. I use them but usually I’m not that impressed and a curmudgeon when I see folks ask Claude to debug something instead of just reading the code. I’m just an old(er) neckbeard at heart.

But. This tool is scarily good. I’m seeing it “1-shot” features in a fairly sizable code base and fixes with better code and accuracy than me.

An important point here is that it isnt doing a 1-shot implementation, it is iteratively solving a problem over multiple iterations, with a closed feedback loop.

Create the right agentic feedback loop and a reasoning model can perform far better through iteration than its first 1-shot attempt.

This is very human. How much code can you reliable write without any feedback? Very little. We iterate, guided by feedback (compiler, linter, executing and exploring)

These Xmas there have been a lot of converted programmers after having some free time and playing with things like Codex, Claude Code, AMP...

This basically sums up where we're at. Undeniably useful but careful in approach.

In the same vein, here are some goodies:

- Jon Skeet facts: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

- Chuck Norris facts: http://www.betterprogramming.com/chuck-norris-programming-fa...

Bruce Schneier Facts: https://www.schneierfacts.com/

I have just now learned about exe.dev and it looks awesome.

I really hate that modern development means not having persistent disk. I’m glad there are new options coming out which let you do this in and easier way than managing my own EC2 instances!

Could you clarify what this actually is?

Would I think of this as an EC2 instance which automatically and quickly scales to zero, with pricing only for resources consumed? (CPU and RAM when up, and disk all the time?)

Yeah that's about right.

It's a fast starting and fast pausing persistent VM, with a ton of built in developer tools (including a preconfigured Claude Code) and an extra JSON API for executing commands within it so you can treat it as a sandbox.

You may find my writeup here useful: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/sprites-dev/

I wrote an article on how to model a ledger with a DB. https://www.jaygoel.com/posts/building-a-scalable-accounting...

It addresses how to model dr/cr in a DB with positive and negative numbers, but still produce reports with positive numbers as expected

It depends on the “normal balance” of the account.

For Asset and Expense accounts, yes. For Liabilities, Equity, and Revenue it is the opposite.

Isn’t this the nature of all software abstractions? They often introduce a less performant way of executing a task at the tradeoff of user convenience?