I’m a technologist in Durham, North Carolina, USA. I write about adventures with my family, stuff I make, and interesting things I find on the web.
Journal
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.
Dispatch #28 (June 2025) (2025-06-05)
Bamboo killing season is over, now we’re onto goddamn cockroach season. I’ve lived in the South for a quarter century but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing one of those things scurry across the floor. We went down to Lake Norman for Memorial Day weekend, spent a bunch of time on the new (to us) pontoon boat. So much fun. The kids loved it, and I look forward to many more years with them out on the water.
Dispatch #27 (May 2025) (2025-05-10)
Pollen season is over. Bamboo killing season is here. Lots to cover this month. Let’s go. Just got back from a week-long company gathering, starting in Falls Church, VA near where I grew up and heading up to River Mountain. Great to see everyone in person (and catch up with a few of my favorite former coworkers). Major thanks to my parents for taking care of the kids and animals (and also for coming down to help out while Claire took a staycation at a loft downtown).
Elsewhere
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.
Links (from Pinboard)
The Last Days Of Social Media (2025-09-16)
The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.
Just a few years ago, Rails was supposedly “dead.” The framework that once powered 90% of Y Combinator batches had lost favor. Shiny new alternatives took center stage. Rails was declared passé. What happened next teaches us everything about how to evaluate a technology, not just Rails, but any framework, language, or tool that promises to change how we build and collaborate.
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape (2025-09-15)
Someone's trash is another person's web server.
Through a Love of Note-Taking, José Naranja Documents His Travels One Tiny Detail at a Time — Colossal (2025-09-15)
From postage stamps to jetliner specifications to items he packed for the journey, José Naranja’s sketchbooks capture minute details of numerous international trips. “I’m lost in the intricate details, as always,” he tells Colossal. Everything from currency to noodle varieties to film references make their way into small books brimming with travel ephemera and observations.
Aspiration (2025-09-12)
You aren't what you say you are. You haven't done what you said you want to do. You are what you do. And barring blockers, obstacles, and other matters of physics and circumstance, if you thought you wanted to do something, then never did it, but completely could have, can you really be said to have wanted to do it? ...
Online feels truer than material reality – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden (2025-09-10)
“Taken to its logical conclusion, this assumption means that we are most real when we present ourselves to the world as the people we most want to become.”
A year with Go - Tim Hårek (2025-09-10)
One year ago, today, I started my first Go-project. I’m still maintaining and updating this project today. My passion for Go has grown a lot over the last year, and this is what I’ve learned after a year with Go.
An E-bike For The Mind - by Josh Brake (2025-09-04)
At the end of the day, we must remember that innovation is a bargain. We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable. Most of the time, we fail to stop and consider the tradeoffs. Perhaps e-bikes may give us a metaphor to frame our thinking.
Butlerian Jihad Now | Defector (2025-08-28)
Imagine a piece of wearable technology that, when its wearer reaches a certain level of dehydration, stimulates in them the satisfying sensation of cool clear water running down their throat and filling their stomach. That would not actually be beneficial or helpful at all! In fact, it would be actively contrary to the user's best interests. I do not think that any thinking adult would need much convincing about the dangers of that kind of device, whatever the productivity gains it might offer t...
“It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s ‘Mad Max’ Feud | Vanity Fair (2025-08-26)
That scene where you see Tom with Charlize on the bike and all the Vuvalini and the Wives behind, intermingled—that scene was probably the biggest change in seeing Tom really soften to Charlize in real life. We were all unprepared for how he performed that, and then I walked off and Charlize was walking back, and I said, “Geez, Charlize, that was amazing. Did a light switch go off? He was great.” She was quite taken aback by it, too. But it was great because that’s when you can see that Max and ...