21 Sep 2026
Two posts I wanted to connect together because, links! Links are one of the foundational tenets of the World Wide Web, they are what keep us from spending our online life in silos. I love links.
First is the August edition of Tom MacWright’s Recently which is a monthly listing of his personal wanderings. There he wrote:
I won’t add those to the pile because I don’t want that kind of content to dominate what I mention, even if it does dominate what I read.
I find this great. I wish more would do that.
🔗 Recently – published by Tom MacWright
Second is a sideline that caught my attention. A declaration of love for links!
and no, I’m not going to dignify them with links because links are my love language
🔗 Raycast’s confetti cannon – published by Marcin Wichary
14 Sep 2026
A couple of quotes that I’ve enjoyed from this long form article celebrating BASIC. Other times.
First time I hear about http://www.quitebasic.com/ too. Look to the source, find the the relevant javascript source and you find a practical tokenizer and simple BASIC interpreter. Very cool!
When it comes to technology, I don’t feel like a grumpy old man. Nearly always, I believe that the best of times is now. But I don’t mind saying this: The world was a better place when almost everybody who used PCs at least dabbled in BASIC.
Today, Kurtz is blunt about criticism of the language he co-created as being insufficiently serious or a dangerous way to begin learning about computer programming. “It’s B.S.,” he says. “I’ll go out on a limb and suggest the degrading of BASIC by the professionals was just a little bit of jealousy–after all, it took years for us to develop our skill; how is it that complete idiots can write programs with just a few hours of skill?”
Famously, they wrote the first draft of Altair BASIC without having access to an Altair, using a simulator they ran on a Digital Equipment PDP-10 minicomputer. “Monte Davidoff, who helped me and Bill write BASIC for the Altair, once said programming was like writing a novel,” Allen says. “That’s how we approached BASIC. We started with a plot of sorts to know the general approach we were taking. We broke the big ideas into sections, or chapters, and then we’d edit and re-edit and keep editing until we had preserved the big picture and fixed all the bugs. It was the hardest but most enjoyable work I’ve ever done.”
These computers begged to be programmed in a way that their descendants do not.
đź”— A celebration of one of technology’s biggest, most underappreciated revolutions – published on TIME on
31 Aug 2026
There was no need to get anxious!
I guess, those ups and downs in the forest next to my home did the trick. 13 hours on our legs, 5 huts, hail, rain, sun, rainbow, about all one might get. My body functioned terribly well, I’m so grateful for the chance to keep up with this now tradition of one long trail run a year with LoĂŻc.
We might have chosen the second worst possible day of the entire summer to run this tour, and yet, we’ve had SUCH A BLAST.
The official race takes place in 3 weeks, my run report will follow on runboyrun.ch.
06 Jul 2026
sal does its job reliably and I’m happy to see the sparkline on runboyrun.ch being updated daily. I find that seriously cool.
About a month ago though, I’ve received an update on the Strava API terms that in short means for sal a Strava subscription becomes mandatory. Strava did an amazing job in providing this API for personnal access free of charge for a long time. It’s fair enough to me that they decide at some point to change that strategy.
I found cool that in this communication there was a redeem code for a 3-month subscription trial. I’ve used it and have until September to see what I’m gonna do with my setup before it starts charging me. I might refactor the entire thing, slightly, to avoid subscription costs. Those are not high, but to keep enjoying a frugal life I have to stay picky about what I subscribe to.
15 Jun 2026
I reached the final part of Writing An Interpreter In Go. Slowly but surely I’m building along, a first for me, a Pratt parser.
One of the first work of reference mentioned using a Pratt parser is
JSLint. Checking this out again, that led me
naturally to the website of Douglas Crockford
where I’ve learned that his inspiration for JSON were what he calls two brilliant languages
.
There were two brilliant languages, Lisp and Rebol, that had a portable representation of data structures in their syntax. My knowledge of those languages helped me realize that JavaScript did that too. I believe that I was not the first to discover that.
Lisp, well known. But Rebol? First time I hear about this one. Adrian did not mention it on his blog yet, so it must be niche. That makes me wonder how he chooses the language to learn in his one-language-a-year endeavor?
28 May 2026
I’m happy having my own shed on the internet and see myself when reading this article. As fun as it was learning all this craft, that must be so daunting today.
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.
On a tangent, the seed “leaving Gmail” keeps growing in me:
Laura Kalbag gave a great talk about digital privacy at FFConf 2019, and it was this talk that spurred me on to ditch Gmail and set up a paid-for email account. I recommend giving it a watch.
25 May 2026
I now have a better understanding of clip-path. My struggle mentioned last
week was due to my ignorance of what is called the winding
rule.
The fill-rule property configures this algorithm and can be set when using
the
path
function: clip-path: path(evenodd, 'M20 20 h50 ...');. Using the evenodd
value on the drawing I was working on would have made my life easier, but
that’s not the default value.
Another thing I’ve found handy and wanted to add to this followup is the use of the developer tools when tweaking the different gradient values to draw such a thing. Using the mouse scroll, I’ve found it easier and faster than hitting save from my code editor, even with live reload on.
21 May 2026
Joao shared interesting results of a bug analysis to the team recently. That revealed flaws in the handling of time in one of our softwares.
Oddly enough, I’ve had a tab left to be read around the traps of time handling for quite a while on my browser. I’ve read it, that’s of course another rabbit hole.
Our bug met at least the wrong assumption number one:
- There are always 24 hours in a day.
đź”— Falsehoods programmers believe about time
That led to another article on the same website where I’ve found this comforting:
When it comes to Web apps, there are two areas that seem to cause more pain than any other: people’s names and the time. These elements are both common, essential to the correct functioning of a system, and shockingly difficult to get right.
01 May 2026
A piece that hits a chord and I’m definitely not the only one. It’s been shared a lot on my feed.
So well articulated, I feel with the author. This technology is pushing out of the industry bright people. The spread of fear and doubt is just heartbreaking.
The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks. I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.
20 Apr 2026
For 6 months, I’ve revived this website. I have since then posted something on every Monday and I’m quite happy with that. There’s something empowering with consistency.
This note is published by a cron job, it’s a first! We are in Italy this week and I wanted neither my publishing streak to break nor my laptop to come along. So having this cron job is cool, that kind of frees brain space to prepare upcoming posts without thinking much about the publishing part of things. I simply set the date in the front matter of the content and at the time of the cron job’s execution it publishes all the content up to that date and time.