Please add an RSS Feed to Your Site
I’ll start with the main take here: please, for the love of God, add an RSS feed to your personal site.
PyCon US 2026 Recap
I just spent seven days in Long Beach, California, for PyCon US 2026, the biggest Python conference in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Many of the people behind the language (including the creator, Guido van Rossum), packages, frameworks, and the community were there, enjoying two days of tutorials, three days of talks, two days of sprints, and lots in between.
Are Written Coding Tutorials Dead?
You can see the question of this essay in the title. It’s something my small support group of fellow programmers and writer/educators message together about regularly. What used to be the provenance of enviously looking at someone who had cracked the code and managed to attract real eyeballs and, therefore, a sales tunnel for a paid course or book, has now become fully existential.
You Are What You Read
It’s common to hear the phrase “you are what you eat” when it comes to diet, exercise, and overall health. Especially as you age (I’m 45 now, so these things take on more significance.)
Dealing with Dead Links (404s): 2026 Edition
I use Ahrefs free site audit feature for this website and several others I manage. Today, the weekly email showed I was suddenly linking to a host of 4xx links, which is the HTTP code for dead links.
OpenAI Acquiring Astral: A 4th Option for Funding Open Source
If you are a programmer and especially if you work with the Python programming language, today’s news that OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) acquired Astral is a big deal. Both OpenAI and Astral put out blog posts announcing the deal.
Heroku Is (Finally, Officially) Dead
Heroku is finally dead. The original Platform as a Service company that made it much easier (for a cost) to deploy web applications made an announcement yesterday, An Update on Heroku, confirming what has long been suspected: Salesforce (the owners of Heroku since 2010) is officially pulling the plug.
Fifteen Minutes a Day Equals Fifteen Books a Year
Reading is important. You don’t need me to tell you this, but it is worth remembering just how powerful a reading habit can be. Every study shows that children who read more do better in school, emotionally, and in life. Reading makes you smarter, more empathetic, and allows your mind to mimic experiences you’d never otherwise be able to feel. If it came in a pill form, reading (like exercise) would be prescribed to everyone.
Recently (late January 2026)
Some notes on recent books on China, encyclopedias, American history, and a stab at a fiction thriller.
Recently (January 2026)
I’m shamelessly imitating the Recently idea from Tom MacWright as I’ve come to really enjoy seeing what people I follow are consuming and thinking. This was my first week back in the new year and it consisted of work meetings, planning, and a bit of brain dumping. I probably will adopt a monthly cadence for Recently posts in the future, but as I have a lot to share now and the next few weeks will be more heads-down work, here it is.
Is AI Model Collapse Inevitable?
Everything and More - Book Review
This is a pop-science book on math, a genre I quite enjoy as someone deeply interested in these topics, but without a formal grounding in them. Usually, the author is an eminent physicist, mathematician, or occasionally a very well-informed journalist. To read a book on math by a well-known fiction writer and essayist was a departure, albeit one I enjoyed.
New Year, New Website Design
It’s a new year, and more than ever, I want to simplify and focus on a few things rather than spread my attention too widely. This applies to my consumption habits–more books and movies, fewer reading articles on my phone or spending time on Reddit or YouTube–and also to work: I have a few big goals for the year and will strongly resist being moved off track as disruptions inevitably appear.
Year in Review (2025)
There are still another two weeks in 2025, but I’m ready to reflect already on how it went. Let’s dive in!
The Secret Prompts in GitHub Copilot CLI
GitHub Copilot is one of the original AI-assisted coding tools, introduced way back in February 2023, to add code completion to Visual Studio Code as well as chat, agent mode, and access to GitHub tools. But until last week, it didn’t have a standalone CLI, similar to Claude Code, Codex CLI from OpenAI, Gemini CLI, and others.