I can’t predict which post will matter, or to whom.

I just keep leaving little lanterns along the path.

Some of them will light the way for strangers.

Some of them will light the way home for my family.

And that’s enough.

Actually, I think it’s more than enough.

Maybe we’re all leaving lanterns behind in ways we don’t even realize.

WhatCable explains cable speed, charging limits, e-marker data, and connected devices in plain English. Name a cable and it tracks how the cable actually performs over time, so you can spot the one that has started misbehaving. No more guessing why a cable charges slow or refuses to drive your display.

Did you know that not every USB-C cable is the same?

If you answered "yes" to that question, then my friend, do I have the application for you!

After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.

This sort of overview is catnip for dorks like me. I appreciated the continuity error call out as well; my daughter has started pointing out these things in movies and I am equal parts proud and horrified.

Saw this on Noisy Deadlines, had to give it a go.

Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you:

1. Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998)
2. The Presidents of the United States of America - The Presidents of the United States of America (1995)
3. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories (2013)
4. The Rezillos - Can't Stop The Rezillos (1978)
5. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (2006)

I spent several days on vacation thinking about this, but ultimately I scrolled through my janky, vibe-coded music library page and went with my first instinct like Ariadne.

If you end up doing something like this on your own blog, please let me know!

For years now, I’ve documented the “glimmers” that brighten each month—the small moments that make me pause and feel safe, calm, or hopeful.

Glimmers, as coined by psychotherapist Deb Dana, are the opposite of triggers. Triggers, which are unique to each person, tend to pull us into fear or distress. Glimmers, also unique to each of us, bring us comfort and steadiness.

Documenting glimmers isn’t simply a saccharine exercise or reliable newsletter content. It’s a way to counter the more challenging moments of life. For me, glimmers are padding for a harsh world. By collecting them, I create some protection against the sharp edges that can snag and snarl a day.

I never considered that there could be an antonym for a "trigger".

Without a sense of self, it is impossible to know what we truly want out of our life. Without knowing what we want out of life, we are susceptible to games people play or living on autopilot. It is difficult to have a fulfilling life without being intentional. Knowing what we want out of life will give us the courage and will needed to carve out our own path.

All solid pieces of advice, but this last piece of advice resonated the hardest. It's embarrassing to admit how long it has taken me to recognize that I'm responsible for defining my own sense of self, but hey, I'm here now, doing the thing!

It is not acceptable to bounce users on old browsers, users with bad network connections, users using assistive technologies. Certainly not from a monopoly public service. A lot of hype and noise is pressing us to extend the cowboy, wild-west phase of the software industry’s expansion. We should set that aside, and take ourselves seriously as a mature industry. Build a web application that works on a playstation portable on a 3G connection - if you do, it will work for all your users, and it will still work 30 years from now.

My daughter's watching this episode right now, and it makes me wonder... could something like this happen if we all collectively decided not to use social media or AI tools?

Found myself nodding along during this entire article.

The vast majority of people in the software industry today were not in the industry in 2000. They did not experience ordering a floppy disk of software from a classified ad in a computer magazine. Or license codes on CD boxes. Or running a SparcStation server under the receptionists desk because that’s the only machine compatible with the business-critical software she used.

In short, most developers were professionally born into the era of SaaS and have never considered an alternative model. They have not even conceived that software could, or should, be sold in another way.

I'm excited to see what new business models pop up from this approach. Frankly, I am close to no longer needing to pay for a Claude Max plan with the way that open source models are performing on my M3 Max.

That era of building a viable SaaS business in a few months is gone. I mean, it technically still exists today but only in the arbitrage sense that the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught on to how quickly and easily software can be built. It’ll be gone soon, I promise.

If you could previously develop a new app in a few months, I can now build that by the end of the week—if not the end of the day. That’s especially because I don’t need to build any of the trappings of a multi-tenant app destined for the mass market. I can choose HTTP basic auth if it suits me. Or none at all. I might not worry about backups. I can host it alongside other internal apps with barely a glancing-thought towards scalability. I don’t need branding. Or marketing. Or billing. I can reuse internal design systems or let the AI run with whatever comes to its mind first.

The sophistication of the software I’ll produce this way is much lower than what an indie dev might have written 2 years ago. It’s not the same product—mine isn’t even a product—but it’ll solve my problem equally well. I don’t have to build the same amount of software to solve my problem that you do to deliver a solution to everyone’s problems.

You can see most of the software I've vibe coded for myself. I'm sure all of it will be useless garbage for you, but it's been hugely invaluable to me.

And most important of all: vibe coding from my phone has been the most fun I've had building software in decades.