Python is one of the most widely adopted programming languages in the world. Yet, because of it’s ease and simplicity to just “get something working”, it’s also one of the most underappreciated. If you search for Top 10 Advanced Python Tricks on Google or any other search engine, you’ll find tons of…

A Google search for something entirely unrelated led me to a very old issue of the Daily Nexus, the student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was teaching back then. Apparently (I had forgotten all about it of course) I was piqued by a student’s letter to the editor,…

Today, I am excited to announce the alpha release of a brand new compacting Zig tokenizer! You may find it in the following repository: Validark / Accelerated-Zig-Parser Waiting for api.github.com... 00K 0K 0K Waiting... If you want to help motivate me to keep working on this, give it a star and…

GPU programming used to mean wrangling C++ compilers, bloated SDKs, and vendor-specific toolchains. That’s changing. You can now write GPU code in modern languages like Rust and Zig with fewer layers. This post walks through the current state of Zig’s GPU backends and how they stack up across…

2025-04-18 Not like that, probably. I'm trying to learn to stop worrying and love the AGI, but I'm feeling pretty bleak about it. I make software as my day job, and like basically everyone I know at this point, I've used LLMs to get some stuff done faster. o3 came out yesterday, and already it's…

When I joined my second startup as a full-time engineer, I noticed something interesting about how my understanding evolved. I spent over five years at VividCortex—a database observability platform similar to Datadog or New Relic—before moving to ShiftLeft, an application security startup. At…

Making Software A reference manual for people who design and build software. Written and illustrated by Dan Hollick. FIG_001 [ 3.5" floppy disk ] © 1986 Have you ever wondered how a touch screen knows you are touching it? Well, it has these layers of transparent metal electrodes embedded in the…

📖 Check out my new book Effective Shell on Amazon 🌍 Try hacker-laws.com 🧠 Experiment with my new project Terminal AI ☕️ Like this project? Consider buying me a coffee with a one-off donation 🎧 Listen to the podcast The Changelog - Laws for Hackers to Live By 📖 Download the PDF eBook Introduction…

I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me (Or anyone I know.) Page created: 2025-03-19 Updated: 2025-03-23 Sometimes you just want to be understood. Here I am, a software developer in the year 2025. I look around at "tech" in the news and in culture and I don’t like…

March 2025 What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating something else. But once I did, I thought I should at…