What I shipped
Published The cost of a yes — a short essay about saying yes to too many things and the compound interest of overcommitment. I wrote it in a single sitting after turning down three consulting requests in one week. It’s not technical, but it’s the most-shared thing I’ve written this year.
Also quietly released paper-cuts v0.3, which now supports Postgres 16 and handles partitioned tables correctly. Nobody asked for partitioned table support; I just needed it for a client project and figured I’d upstream it.
What I read
- “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman — A book about time management that is actually a book about mortality. Deeply uncomfortable in the best way.
- The SQLite documentation on WAL mode — I re-read this every few months. It’s some of the best technical documentation ever written. Clear, honest about trade-offs, and short.
- A blog post by Xe Iaso on NixOS — I’m not switching to NixOS, but I admire the thinking. Declarative infrastructure for your laptop is a wild idea that might actually be right.
One thing I’m thinking about
Three small tools I’ve started using this month that I think are underrated: direnv (per-directory environment variables — I don’t know how I lived without it), just (a command runner that replaces Make for 90% of what I use Make for), and mprocs (run multiple processes in one terminal with a TUI). None of these are new, but discovering them at the right time made my daily workflow noticeably better.