Aug 09, 2025 I realized recently that rather than using “the right tool for the job” I’ve been using the tool at the job and that’s mostly determined the programming languages I know. So over the last couple months I’ve put a lot of time into experimenting with languages I don’t get to use at work.…

18th September 2024 Two years ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation—the PSF. I recently returned from the annual PSF board retreat (this one was in Lisbon, Portugal) and this feels like a good opportunity to write up some of the things I’ve learned along the…

This post is part 4/4 of a series about build systems. The market fit is interesting. Git has clearly won, it has all of the mindshare, but since you can use jj to work on Git repositories, it can be adopted incrementally. This is, in my opinion, the only viable way to introduce a new VCS: it has to…

Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when…

NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle I’ve spent the last 48 hours completely falling down the rabbit hole of NVIDIA’s Q3 Fiscal 2026 earnings report. If you just skim the headlines, everything looks perfect: Revenue is up 62% to $57 billion, and Jensen Huang is talking about a "virtuous…

It has now been 30 years since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was released. After the great response to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, released in November 1994, Blizzard began working on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North…

If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C? Stephen Ramsay Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly? Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds. First, I don’t particularly like vibe…

Being exceptional is less about rare talent and more about the choices you make every day. It’s a set of habits that quietly outwork everyone else. Below are five habits for anyone who wants to do exceptional. Show extreme care Care is visible. It shows in the neatness of your file names, the tone…

Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or…

Discussed on Hacker News, lobste.rs and r/programming. Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painfully familiar to anyone in Big Tech. On paper,…

I’m at the point where I’m migrating all my projects to uv, and new Python projects don’t use any other package manager. I finally got around to migrating this site to use it, using the very handy migrate-to-uv tool. So it’s time to update my recommended Python setup. My old Python setup was very…