Journal
Dispatch #44 (October 2026) (2026-10-08)
Rough start to the month: new school year started (Nev’s last before kindergarten 😭), but within the first two weeks we had a hospital visit (Nev scratched her eye in a way that presented as a potential brain injury) then both kids caught COVID. We recovered in time to make it down to Lake Norman for Labor Day, then celebrated my 44th birthday with a sitter (rare for us) and a night out at Red Phone Booth and Little Bull (delicious).
Dispatch #43 (September 2026) (2026-09-06)
We had a couple trips essentially back-to-back in August, which made for a choppy, whirlwind month. First up, we flew out to California to spend a long weekend in Napa with some of Claire’s friends. Highlights included renting e-bikes and riding the Napa Valley Vine trail and visiting Muir Woods. The kids did great on the flight; guess they’re old pros at this point. Then we headed up to Delaware for our annual Rehoboth Beach trip. Even managed to make it onto the beach a few times, unlike some years past (the kids are generally much more excited about the arcade and candy store).
Dispatch #42 (August 2026) (2026-08-04)
August 2026 marks two big personal anniversaries: 25 years in Durham and 10 years in this house. Who would’ve thought? Certainly not Duke freshman Dave. Couldn’t be happier to be right here right now, though I might have made some different decisions had I known I’d be raising two small children in these increasingly cramped quarters. But that’s not how things work, is it?
Dispatch #41 (July 2026) (2026-07-14)
Nico turned two in June. What the hell! Where’s my baby boy, and who’s this sassy little dude running around my house. We threw him a farm-themed birthday (my man loves cows), then took the kids up to see their cousins in Richmond. The next weekend, we went camping with Claire’s family at Carolina Hemlocks Recreation Area. This was awesome – bit of a haul for sure, and the boy couldn’t handle the switchbacks on the way up the mountain, but we were rewarded with a beautiful campsite with river views and temperatures a good 20°F cooler than around here.
Dispatch #40 (June 2026) (2026-06-06)
April bled straight into May, so it felt like a three-week month and flew right by. We celebrated Claire’s birthday and spent Memorial Day weekend at Lake Norman. Then summer kicked in – ran the Running of the Bulls 8K with the kids and a friend of mine, and went to our local pool for the first time this year.
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 Marky)
In Praise of dhh (via) (2026-10-05)
Whatever happened to dhh? I regret to inform you that, after a long struggle, he eventually lost his fight against the parasitic fungus that was taking over his brain, and died. The exact timeline is unclear, but we suspect he succumbed to his illness sometime in 2020.
'Ask for what you want' is a key skill for the 21st century (2026-09-19)
For me, the aim is always a finished, standalone program — NOT a process still dependent upon AI agents. The prospect of a permanent tether makes me feel itchy. A distant API could fail, and you’d be … unable to do … anything?? Or, the distant API could suddenly cost more. Or, the quality of its responses could change. Sorry, but that’s the kind of unreliable computing I am trying to escape.
A day is short, a life is long - overkill.wtf (via) (2026-09-19)
I can travel. I can buy books. I can buy a stupidly expensive pair of headphones because for three months I suddenly decide headphones are the most interesting objects ever invented (heh!). There is a mortgage, and it gets paid. There is food in the fridge. I can save some money. I can invest some money. So what am I working ten more hours for? To watch big number go big?
I don't like passkeys | Ethan Hawksley (2026-09-18)
A combination of randomly generated passwords stored inside a third-party password manager, paired with an independent TOTP app, gives control to the user without giving up the flexibility of plain text. For users who previously reused passwords across all their sites, passkeys are a huge step-up. For everybody else, it is currently a step back.
It was really just life hacks all along | hi, it's mike (2026-09-15)
I don’t make them public because I don’t write the code and I’m not willing to stand behind them or manage PRs for them. That would be irresponsible. Which is pretty much like what we’ve all been doing with commodity scripting languages for years: Making things that just go in a directory and get used to solve problems particular to us, in the way we prefer to think about the problem.
Goodbye SourceHut - Tim Hårek (2026-09-10)
I was not prepared for this. I have been using LLMs to help me do a lot of grunt work for my projects, proof-reading my prose, helping me plan out migrations, and much more, and I don’t plan on stopping. Not all of it goes against the new terms, but I don’t want to second-guess where the line is every time I push something.
The joy of making stuff with a 3D printer | Note to Self (via) (2026-09-06)
Once I discovered Gridfinity, I went to town. When life feels out of control, there are few things more soothing than organizing small objects in little boxes.
Tiny E-Reader Is the Best Piece of Technology in Years - The Atlantic (2026-09-06)
In person, the Xteink is many things: plasticky. Flawed. Finicky. Nevertheless, it is the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years. In the two months before getting this cartoonishly tiny e-reader, I finished only one book. In one month with the X3, I read three books without even really trying—and my iPhone’s average daily screen time dipped by 25 minutes.
Spring clean, fall prune – amanda untangled (2026-09-01)
Since it's the first of September and I can literally feel autumn in my bones, I wanted to spend some time today talking about a routine that my family and I came up with over the last several years. It's a rhythm that we've really come to enjoy at the turn of the season, every spring and fall equinox.
Changes to SourceHut's terms of service regarding LLMs (2026-08-31)
The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.