David Eisinger

Dispatch #33 (November 2025) (2025-11-05)

I fear the days of Big Baby Nico are coming to a close. My man’s walking, talking, making his desires known. It was a good run, 17 months almost. It felt like Nev sort of skipped this phase, so this was a novel experience, and Tiny Toddler Nico is awesome. The best is when we’re putting on a fresh diaper and he looks down, waves, and says, “bye bye my penis.”

Dispatch #32 (October 2025) (2025-10-04)

Claire took the kids away for a weekend with her sister and some childhood friends, all of whom have boys roughly Nico’s age. I find myself home alone for the first time in … I don’t know how long, before Nev was born almost four years ago. Strange feeling – so quiet. Not bad, just so different from my normal life. I can’t believe I used to live like this.

Dispatch #31 (September 2025) (2025-09-08)

Big month! Nico took his first steps. Nev’s onto a new school (well same school, but moved from the 0-3 building to the 3-5). She seems to be taking to it pretty well, but keeps asking if she can go back to being a little girl, which is adorable and absolutely heartbreaking.

Dispatch #30 (August 2025) (2025-08-05)

Nice to have a quieter month. We went down to Lake Norman for the Fourth, but otherwise stuck around town. Mom and Dad came down to celebrate Mom’s birthday, hit up Marbles (which Nev loved so much she snuck away and we had to organize a search party) and a Durham Bulls game.

Dispatch #29 (July 2025) (2025-07-03)

Big month: birthdays, travel, lots of music. My boy turned one – time friggin’ flies. He is on the move, talking up a storm, and getting into everything.

Local Docker Best Practices (viget.com, 2022-05-05)

Here at Viget, Docker has become an indispensable tool for local development. We build and maintain a ton of apps across the team, running different stacks and versions, and being able to package up a working dev environment makes it much, much easier to switch between apps and ramp up new devs onto projects. That’s not to say that developing with Docker locally isn’t without its drawbacks¹, but they’re massively outweighed by the ease and convenience it unlocks.

“Friends” (Undirected Graph Connections) in Rails (viget.com, 2021-06-09)

No, sorry, not THOSE friends. But if you’re interested in how to do some graph stuff in a relational database, SMASH that play button and read on.

Making an Email-Powered E-Paper Picture Frame (viget.com, 2021-05-12)

Over the winter, inspired by this digital photo frame that uses email to add new photos, I built and programmed a trio of e-paper picture frames for my family, and I thought it’d be cool to walk through the process in case someone out there wants to try something similar.

Why I Still Like Ruby (and a Few Things I Don’t Like) (viget.com, 2020-08-06)

The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey came out a couple months back, and while I don’t put a ton of stock in surveys like this, I was surprised to see Ruby seem to fare so poorly – most notably its rank on the “most dreaded” list. Again, who cares right, but it did make me take a step back and try to take an honest assessment of Ruby’s pros and cons, as someone who’s been using Ruby professionally for 13 years but loves playing around with other languages and paradigms. First off, some things I really like.

Dense Discovery – Issue 361 / All we watch are millionaires (via) (2025-11-13)

But the web/world is still full of thoughtful people making interesting things – small newsletters, obscure podcasts, blogs that three hundred people read religiously. They’re there, just quieter, harder to find, requiring a bit more effort on our part.

Using Assisted-by commit footers instead of banning AI tools - Xe Iaso (2025-11-12)

I think a better middle ground is something like Fedora's AI-Assisted Contributions Policy. This demands that you include a commit footer that discloses what AI tools you've used in your process, such as this: Assisted-by: GPT-OSS 120b via OpenAI Codex (locally hosted)

You Should Write An Agent · The Fly Blog (2025-11-10)

There are big ideas in computing that are easy to get your head around. The AWS S3 API. It’s the most important storage technology of the last 20 years, and it’s like boiling water. Other technologies, you need to get your feet on the pedals first. LLM agents are like that.

Strudel REPL (2025-11-07)

Strudel is a JavaScript version of tidalcycles, which is a popular live coding language for music, written in Haskell.

Software is supply-constrained (for now) | justin․searls․co (2025-11-06)

It’s long been my view that the appropriate response to the current moment is to ride this walrus and leverage coding agents to increase the scope of our ambitions.

Five Months of Journalling • Robb Knight (via) (2025-11-05)

I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I'm keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking like in my journal, I'm happy.

Duck duck duck dichotomy - annie's blog (2025-11-05)

It’s not about the right choice or wrong choice or the accurate choice or idiotic choice or worst choice or best choice. It’s about exerting your will. Choosing something. Selecting an option and then acting on it. Saying Yes. 

Why engineers can't be rational about programming languages | spf13 (via) (2025-11-04)

Every time an engineer evaluates a language that isn’t “theirs,” their brain is literally working against them. They’re not just analyzing technical trade offs, they’re contemplating a version of themselves that doesn’t exist yet, that feels threatening to the version that does. The Python developer reads case studies about Go’s performance and their amygdala quietly marks each one as a threat to be neutralized. The Rust advocate looks at identical problems and their Default Mode Network constructs narratives about why “only” Rust can solve them.

Scripts I wrote that I use all the time (via) (2025-11-04)

In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.

Fewer people should run marathons - macwright.com (2025-11-03)

And at a shorter distance, you can worry less about whether you’ll finish the race and start treating the race as a race: can you run it faster each time? Can you get to a higher ranking in your age group?