Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a…

A reader asked me to follow up on something I had mentioned quite a while back. Way back in 2018, I wrote that maybe I'd write about "war rooms" and why they are bad for getting thoughtful analysis work to happen. Here's my best take on it, in feedback style, where things are sort of off-the-cuff…

This article brought to you by LWN subscribers Subscribers to LWN.net made this article — and everything that surrounds it — possible. If you appreciate our content, please buy a subscription and make the next set of articles possible. Jake Hillion gave a presentation at FOSDEM about using…

I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot…

TeX and Typst: Layout Models June 21, 2024 Lately, I’ve been pondering the ways in which Typst’s layout model differs from TeX’s. While Typst adopts parts of TeX’s model, in particular the paragraph layout algorithm, there are also significant differences. Most of these are related to block-level…

I propose that the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence. I have noticed a bias towards specific technologies in multiple popular models and…

One of the most difficult challenges I’ve faced in my career is figuring out product-market fit. I’d wager most of us have gotten there through sheer dumb luck. What do we do if we’re not lucky, if we don’t strike gold on our first try? I don’t know if I have the answer. What I can do is try to…

Announcements 2/10/2025 django-simple-deploy 1.0.0 is out! It's been a long time coming, so I'm happy to announce that django-simple-deploy 1.0 has just been released. 1.0.0 is just a number, so what does it mean for this project in particular? It really boils down to two things: reliability, and…

In a galaxy not so far away, and what feels like an eternity ago, we raised a Seed round for Sentry. While the landscape has changed quite significantly since then, it’s always interesting to reflect on past times. At the beginning of 2015 I moved on from Dropbox. As most companies of it’s size it…

Merged last week for Python 3.14 is a new tail-call intepreter that aims to offer significantly better performance with around 10% faster performance in PyPerformance or around a 40% speed-up in Python-heavy benchmarks. This tail-call interpeter can even outperform the current Python JIT compiler…

Hope for the Organization Kid Joshua P. Hochschild June 1, 2024 Share Article Twenty-three years ago, David Brooks published in The Atlantic a long essay based on interviews with Princeton undergraduates. He found the students busy: overscheduled, achievement-oriented models of meritocratic success.…

Fifteen year ago, David Brooks described a specific kind of young people in an essay titled “The Organization Kid”. They were the highest achievers of American top universities. In his words, “their [schedules] sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes…