David Eisinger

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 and those little monsters still freak me out. 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).

Dispatch #26 (April 2025) (2025-03-31)

Nico received a major software upgrade this month. One day he could barely roll over, the next he’s crawling, getting into stuff, maybe even talking? (It’s a little hard to tell but I’m going with “dada” as his first word.) We finally got Nev out of the Pack ’n Play she’s been sleeping in since she moved out of our room and into a proper bed. She loves it, and it’s great that she can just get out of bed and come downstairs by herself when she’s ready to start her day.

Dispatch #25 (March 2025) (2025-03-04)

My family popped down for an unplanned visit, just in time for another big snow – felt like Christmas in February. Claire headed to Mexico with some friends, and it was great to have help with the kids, but it was also pretty special to be Nico’s guy for three days. A lot of the primary parenting duties fall to Claire, and he’s not going to be a baby much longer, so I’m glad we got that time.

Dispatch #24 (February 2025) (2025-02-05)

We actually got some snow here in Durham, which is not something that happens every year. We took the kids out sledding, and, well, I had a good time; they’ll grow into it. Nev and I built a wagon out of scrap lumber and some casters that roll a little bit too well. We let Nev pick the paint colors and so it’s three shades of pink. We built it for her to wheel her toys around, but you know we plopped that boy in there within the first hour.

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.

Opinion | There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness - The New York Times (2025-06-01)

I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.

The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com (2025-05-31)

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

I am disappointed in the AI discourse (2025-05-30)

What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true.

The Copilot Delusion (2025-05-28)

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

To any AI skeptics out there: if you… | justin․searls․co (2025-05-25)

To any AI skeptics out there: if you take the time to use the latest tools and find them to be a net negative on your output, I completely respect that. I've been using LLMs for coding since late 2022 and until Copilot Agent landed in VS Code, I definitely think the benefit was a wash at best. Now I can see a real acceleration boost.

Readeck (2025-05-25)

Readeck helps you keep all that web content you’ll want to revisit in an hour, tomorrow, or in 20 years.

Early Impressions of Claude Opus 4 and Using Tools with Extended Thinking - MacStories (2025-05-24)

What I find most impressive about Opus 4 is the fact that extended thinking mode now works with tools. Specifically, the model is able to evaluate the responses of tool calls and reason over their output to adjust its strategy while following the user’s instructions.

compost.party (2025-05-21)

compost.party is a repurposed smartphone running on solar power. it's a web server pieced together from scraps, humming in the attic of an apartment building.

I'd rather read the prompt (2025-05-21)

I have a little more sympathy for programmers, but the long-term results are more insidious. You might recall Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building: writing a sufficiently complex program requires not only the artifact of code (that is, the program source), but a theory of the program, in which an individual must fully understand the logical structure behind the code. Vibe coding; that is, writing programs almost exclusively by language-model generation; produces an artifact with no theory behind it. The result is simple: with no theory, the produced code is practically useless. In Naur’s terms, such a program is dead; in our case, it’s stillborn.

A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (2025-05-21)

I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine™. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.