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🔗 Dan Sinker: The Who Cares Era

This post has been doing the rounds in the online circles I travel in. I finally got around to reading it, and I think the author is right: caring about something in a world where others don’t is a radical idea. I know it’s an area where I could be better.

Oh, and I’m sorry, but I find the term “Instagram mini-essay” to be an oxymoron. The original poster’s quip of this Instagram essayist being another victim of the Who Cares Era are my feelings exactly. I mean, come on: don’t use frickin’ Instagram for your think pieces. Put a frickin’ URL on it next time.

🔗 Inessential: Retirement Day

I stopped working this day in 2025, almost 41 years later, as a senior engineer (which is surprisingly a lot like busing tables — lots of cleanup and setting the table just right for the customers to have a great time).

This line made me laugh. I’ve never waited tables, but as a senior dev myself, it often feels that my job has become less about coding and more about fixing problems and getting out of people’s way. So it goes.

Congratulations, Brent Simmons, on your retirement.

🔗 Jim Nielsen: Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”

What really resonates in his step-by-step process is how, as problems present themselves, you see how much easier it is to deal with performance issues for stuff you wrote vs. stuff others wrote. Not only that, but you can debug way faster!

The understanding that comes from the code you wrote yourself is grossly underrated in my opinion. Choosing to use a library for something is not free. There’s an exchange involved: speed now for understanding later.

🔗 Simon Willison: No build frontend is so much more fun

If you’ve found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here’s something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system. […] The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.

None of my frontend projects are used for “real” things, so I’m not speaking from authority here. But I don’t care: I still think the worst part of frontend development are all the crummy build tools. Remove them all and web development can be really fun.

🔗 Birchtree: Apple copies Samsung 😉

It has been fundamentally strange that Apple currently has OS’s with the same features that rarely share a number, so numbering them by year makes sense.

Wait, I was under the impression that Apple’s practice of trying to jam the same features into their OSes at the same time had a detrimental effect on quality. And they’re going to synchronise all their OS version numbers? Wouldn’t that just solidify user’s expectation on what’s in those OSes? Why not avoid that by keeping individual version numbers, and just ship features when they’re ready?

🔗 Inessential: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers

I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.

As someone who has only worked in mid-sized businesses (and government) I appreciate Brent Simmons — a developer who I admire and whose software I use every day — candour here. Admitting your biases is not easy.

I know the indie life is romantic. Believe me, nary a day passes where I don’t romanticise about it. But speaking for myself, I think people’s reluctance to go that route is less to do with ability and more to do with the non-technical side, like security, confidence, thinking you have a good idea (not to mention being simply being in a position to take that opportunity). I wonder if some day the stars will align and I’d be in a position to take the plunge. Time will tell, I guess.