Diary 2026-07

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +1000

July 2026

Things I’m seeing/reading/watching/listening to in July 2026…

Tools

FNM
- Fast Node Manager - Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust
- brew install fnm
act: Run GitHub Actions locally
- A powerful developer utility by Nektos that simulates GitHub runners locally using Docker, enabling quick workflow testing and debugging (nektosact.com).
Dev Containers
- A development container (or dev container for short) allows you to use a container as a full-featured development environment. It can be used to run an application, to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase, and to aid in continuous integration and testing. Dev containers can be run locally or remotely, in a private or public cloud, in a variety of supporting tools and editors.

Videos

Podcasts

Posts

Kotlin Toolchain 0.11: The Next Step for Amper
- A Reddit discussion on the release of Amper 0.11.0, which has officially evolved into the Kotlin Toolchain, reaching Alpha status and bringing major tooling improvements.
An opinionated (and mainly correct) guide to naming
- A popular programming thread highlighting practical rules, patterns, and best practices for naming code symbols to minimize cognitive load.
Quick tutorial: How to use the latest Docker 29.5.2
- Anatoly Krivitsky walks through configuring and integrating Docker 29.5.2 into modern enterprise Java / Spring Boot application setups.
Fintech Engineering Handbook
- A comprehensive, 25-page guide by Boytek Pitura on building robust software that handles money, detailing zero-trust engineering constraints, accounting ledger patterns, and currency representations.
So You Want to Fix Your All Hands
- Michael Lopp (“Rands”) breaks down why corporate All Hands meetings often miss the mark and shares actionable suggestions for making them engaging and valuable.
The HTTP QUERY Method (RFC 10008)
- Standardizing a safe, idempotent, and cacheable HTTP method that accepts a request body—offering a robust alternative to GET and POST for complex search queries.
Claude Code Best Practices
- The official documentation guide from Anthropic covering recommended workflows, session context management, and diff verification patterns for using Claude Code.
Fumadocs
- A highly flexible, open-source React/Next.js framework designed for building fully customizable, search-optimized developer documentation.
The llms.txt standard
- A proposed standard for putting a structured, agent-readable Markdown map (llms.txt) at website roots to help AI agents navigate and index site content efficiently.
My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite
- Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, on why Bun moved off Zig to Rust - arguing the split was about diverging values, management style and code quality rather than any technical limitation of the language.
The Ungradeable Career
- Addy Osmani argues that anything gradeable by someone else is being automated, so the durable skills are problem selection, taste, delegating to agents, last-mile polish, and taking accountability for what you ship.
Local models for agentic coding
- Birgitta Böckeler (Thoughtworks) revisits running local models on a 48-64GB Mac for coding agent work - privacy and token cost are the drivers, but tool-calling reliability and latency are still the binding constraints.
I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID.
- Registering on FIFA’s public football-agent platform silently added the account to FIFA’s shared Entra tenant, exposing internal systems guarded only by client-side authorisation checks - including live RTMP ingest URLs and stream keys for World Cup 2026 camera feeds.
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
- Unmesh Joshi makes the case that constraining an LLM to a DSL - fewer syntactic variations, plus a validator it can self-correct against - produces far more reliable generated code than free-form language output.
The Archaeologist’s Copilot
- Nik Malykhin on reviving a 20-year-old Java 1.5 codebase: vague “make it work” prompts produced confident hallucinations, while treating the AI as a forensic analyst and rebuilding a 2008-accurate Docker baseline actually worked. “AI defaults to optimism… in a restoration mission, optimism is fatal.”
I solved software development forever
- Vladyslav Nyzhashchyy’s tongue-in-cheek writeup of a six-stage /build pipeline - brainstorm, plan, plan review, implement, verify, ship - running agents in isolated git worktrees with parallel security/overengineering/test-coverage reviews and a human gate on merge.
I review database schemas regularly - AI-generated ones
- An r/Database thread on the recurring modelling mistakes that show up in AI-generated schemas, and what a reviewer looks for.
Jurassic Park Computers in Excruciating Detail
- Fabien Sanglard catalogues every machine on screen in the 1993 film - SGI Crimson and Indigo workstations, Quadra 700s, a Thinking Machines CM-5, and the fsn 3D file browser behind “It’s a Unix system!” - roughly $1.7M of loaned hardware.
Why did spec-driven development never take off?
- The Pragmatic Engineer talks to Dexter Horthy (HumanLayer) about specs and code inevitably drifting into two competing sources of truth, and his Research-Plan-Implement alternative that treats documentation as disposable per-cycle output.

Other

Refactoring.Guru
- A beautifully designed, beginner-friendly resource providing comprehensive guides on design patterns, code smells, and refactoring techniques.
openDAW
- A free, open-source, web-based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that runs entirely in the browser, offering audio/MIDI recording and a note editor.
AIUP Studio
- A web workspace giving stakeholders a single shared view of projects following the AI Unified Process - structured spec editors, auto-generated diagrams, and Git-backed version control.
The Mandy Money Book
- An illustrated Australian personal finance guide for teenagers and young adults, covering 169+ real-world money and life-admin topics from budgeting and payslips through to investing and property.

Diary 2026-06

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +1000

June 2026

Still lots going on while I’m looking for a job. I’ve been using Claude Design and Claude Code to build Catchup . It’s gone very well - using OpenSpec I’ve incrementally built it and got it to an MVP state. Because it uses Supabase as the backend I’m considering where to deploy it IF I do deploy it. Currently just implementing E2E tests with Serenity using the Screenplay pattern to get things to a happy place, and I’m intending to do some code review and hopefully post about findings.

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