Writing helps me think.

There’s a familiar anxiety in the air among software architects and engineering leaders. AI coding tools are going to make us lazy programmers. They’ll erode our fundamental skills. We’ll lose the ability to think through problems. Sound familiar? It should. I’ve heard this exact song before, just with different verses. In the ’90s, visual development environments were going to create a generation of developers who couldn’t “really” code. Before that, higher-level languages were supposedly making us soft. Hell, I remember when debuggers were contentious—Linus famously ranted that real kernel developers should be able to think through their code without stepping through it line by line. ...

We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings. Adjust your monitor height. Take breaks every twenty minutes. Use a proper keyboard. The IT department sends out reminders about repetitive strain injuries, and we dutifully nod while hunching over our laptops for another six-hour coding session. But here’s what nobody talks about: your brain is a muscle too, and we’re giving it the cognitive equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. The thinking muscle I’ve been writing software for over twenty years, and I’ve watched my industry evolve from “ship it when it’s done” to “ship it yesterday, fix it tomorrow.” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that thinking—real, deep problem-solving—is physical work. Your brain burns glucose. It gets fatigued. It needs recovery time. ...

I sat down a few weeks ago to ask Claude to help me analyze some user feedback data. I spent fifteen minutes crafting what I thought was the perfect prompt: > Please analyze this data, but don't make assumptions about causation, don't over-interpret small sample sizes, don't use corporate jargon, don't suggest solutions we can't implement, and definitely don't... The response was generic and cautious. Frustrated, I tried again with a simple request: ...

This is the 42nd version of my personal website and weblog, once again self-hosted at Dreamhost. I use the site as a forcing function; a way to learn various languages and tools, and a kick to get back into the habit of writing and publishing. This year I ported the content from Write.as to a self-hosted Hugo setup, which took about a day. Everything about Hugo has been better than expected, and the only hiccup was on the hosting side (SSL setup was broken for a few hours). ...

There is a point in your career where you start to weigh what you want to say with what you can and should say. If you’re not careful, it can paralyze and stunt your ability to hold opinions with conviction. I suspect that the difference between our inner voice and where it comes from, versus what we know we should sound like, is one of the primary causes of imposter syndrome, and possibly contributes to a cycle of burnout. I find the more disconnected my inner voice is from my external persona (and the longer there is dissonance), the less I feel like myself. ...

I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing. Sometimes I snooze it, sometimes I check it off. Sometimes I start to draft something and then lose interest. I leave the task on the list as I really should be writing more. There are a bunch of things getting in my way, but honestly I haven’t felt like myself for a few years. Working from home during lockdown was draining, and work itself is challenging enough that I don’t have much left at the end of the day. Even my non-work life has thrown a few curveballs. The most frustrating thing, however, is that I have been struggling with imposter syndrome. I feel like I don’t deserve to write. ...

I find trends in style guidelines interesting, especially when shared style guides lag language usage in the wild. I have observed a shift in headline style from Title Case to Sentence case in the majority of commercial publications online. I’ve also found a general improvement in clarity from the most reliable publishers, mostly due to well understood in house style guidelines. Common headline formats There are for general formats used for headlines today, with some publications using multiple methods depending on the feed source. ...

This is the 40th evolution of warpedvisions.org. It’s now running on WriteFreely, hosted by Write.as. WriteFreely is a minimalist writing platform built on Go, LESS, and plain old vanilla Javascript. It’s a speedy platform that feels nice to write in. This is also the 40th Warped theme. Not all 40 versions made the light of day, mind you, but I’ve hacked together all of these themes as a sort of playground of tech and design approaches. The process of building out a theme for a platform tells you a lot about the platform. ...

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a great place to scale down ideas and quickly finish demos and prototypes. This week I’m toying with generative art ideas, starting with a tool that stamps the screen in various patterns. I’m hoping to evolve these prototypes into a general plotter library, but for now I’m focused on making things that look cool, as a way to play in generative code again. ...

I’ve been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn’t my favourite language, but it’s fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s. First tests I started with a Minecraft style terrain generator, but as 2D tyles: ...