I’m a software developer, co-creator of Django, and engineering leader. I’m an owner and consultant at REVSYS, and am the Treasurer of the Django Software Foundation. Previous jobs: Latacora, Hangar, 18F, Heroku. If you’re looking to contact me, please see how to get in touch and the ways I’m available to help.
Several recommendations for LLM usage in the context of open source.
“The long term goal of software freedom is to eliminate the harm of proprietary technology. While we work toward that greater goal, we should seek to mitigate the harms that we cannot immediately eliminate. These recommendations aim to abate the damage of these systems, and also consider how these tools might counter-intuitively help us advance FOSS.”
Notes (mostly for myself but maybe useful to others?) on how I set up Immich for storing/archiving photos.
Absolutely fantastic guide — all the impactful stuff, none of the nonsense.
A risk scenario is a fictional but plausible event that could harm your organization. Writing one well improves communication with others…
“FACETS is an acronym presented by Ian McCammon to describe a set of 6 heuristic traps that were common in his study of recreational accidents.”
I was reminded of this classic paper in the threat modeling literature canon. Hilarious and also insightful — worth a read if you haven’t seen it before.
A trap that many people fall into when trying to threat modeling or risk planning is a fear of being incomplete that leads them to not even try. People think, “there are so many possible things that could go wrong, so many potential risks. It’s going to be such a huge effort to enumerate all possible scenarios, and I don’t have time, so I guess I can’t do threat modeling.” That is, threat modeling seems so big, so hairy, that people believe it’s too complex to tackle.
This just isn’t true! Some planning is always better than no planning. In fact, you can get a surprising amount of value out of a very simple and fast technique: imagine a couple of scenarios – just two! – and game out what you could do to mitigate them.
Via RC’s AI article, a fascinating recording of someone programming a game almost entirely by prompting Claude by voice. This feels truly “futuristic” to me. Sure it’s clunky at times, but damn if this isn’t closer to the Star Trek computer than I ever thought I’d see in my lifetime.
Detailed, nuanced, and well-thought-out. Tons of great and insightful quotes from RC alums. And their conclusion is, I think, perfect:
You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it.
A bunch of really useful custom features for OnShape
An interesting 3d printing lesson about how the physical characteristics of printed parts differ from other manufacturing:
I needed to replace a rubber hydraulic hose retention strap on my tractor. The part’s $40 + shipping – ludicrous for a 6x2" strip of rubber – so perfect to try to replicate. I have some TPU filament that’s of similar flexibility, let’s go.
For V1, I just replicated the geometry exactly - including, without thinking about it, some little relief holes around the main hose holes:
I have two important announcements:
I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.
As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of topics that interest me (projects around my hobby farm, wilderness trips, emergency medicine) – more writing for me, less writing for some imagined audience. (I’ll probably still end up writing about some of the same topics as I’ve been covering since 2020, just less often.)
I’m writing this post mostly to give myself permission to make that change, and to give readers the opportunity to unsubscribe/unfollow if they’re not interested.
If you’re interested in more details about why I’m leaving the industry and what’s next for me and this blog, read on.
Great example of a simple risk framework in action.