Software-Management on Andrew Quinn's TILs

The long death of programming languages

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote my first Clojure program in anger a few months ago. Only, it’s not accurate to say that I wrote it; AI did most of the writing, and I directed it on what my design goals were and why. Architecturally, you could call it was a stateless anti-corruption layer, yapping between some REST endpoints and some ancient proprietary serialization.

I had never written a Clojure program of nontrivial size before. Indeed I had barely touched any Lisp at all since working through SICP during a high school summer vacation, over a decade ago. That didn’t matter. Much more important was emphasizing certain invariants from the start, like the aforementioned statelessness, which made it very easy to unit and integration test, which was the true challenge.

It's okay to solve a problem twice

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”:

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.

Much more at the original post, including preemptive rebuttals to what I’m about to describe. This post is entirely about cataloguing my own error.

I took this maxim, perhaps, a little too close to heart when I was starting out as a software guy, 15-odd years ago. This is my apology to past me. Past me, I apologize.

LLM, JavaScript, GitHub Pages, localStorage: A recipe for free apps anyone can use

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today on Hacker News Scrappy made the rounds, with the explicit tagline “make little apps for you and your friends”. I always like to see new projects in this vein.

That’s why I’d like to outline my alternative approach, which

Works cross-platform and on mobile devices by default,
Doesn’t require any app store tomfoolery,
Has great uptime built in,
Gives you just enough data persistence to not get in your way, and
Is owned by you, forever.

This is the stack I used to build my diet checklist, which I keep as a little icon on my phone’s home page. Here it is:

Consider the cronslave

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol. If you had told me I could have not just a watch but an entire machine that

Never lost the time,
Did what I wanted, how I wanted it, and
Could be programmed to do what I want, how I want it on a schedule,

I would have had to substantially revise my Christmas wishlist.

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark.

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling.