I hope everyone had a good first week of 2024! I set some New Year’s resolutions this year (like I have in the past). We’ll see how they stick — I’ve tried to make them vague enough that they’ll be difficult to objectively “fail” at, but only time will tell. Anyways, on to the links:

• Flakes aren’t real and cannot hurt you: This was one of the best technical posts I’ve read in a while. I mentioned in my post that Flakes were the first thing to really make Nix stick for me. This post gave me a lot deeper of an understanding of their tradeoffs and how they fit into the wider Nix ecosystem.

• 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev: This article was a great mix of technical and business learnings.

• Fixing Macs Door to Door: I can best describe this blog post as a virtual page-turner. Similar to the post above, the secret sauce was how it mixed technical content with less technical subject matter. The post was a really interesting peek into socioeconomics around the Great RecessionIf it sounds like I’m talking about a historical event here, I was, well, 10 years old at the time. I did happen to graduate during the subsequent economic crisis of 2020, though, so it was interesting drawing parallels..

• A CAP tradeoff in the wild: It’s always cool seeing how theory rears its head in practice, especially in a project as big as Kubernetes. It’s interesting how someone had an issue, and it’s only in the follow-up where it’s recognized as a manifestation of the CAP theorem.

From the vault

• An Engine For An Editor: Emacs is super interesting. Not much more needs to be say. Alex Kladov has a great blog, and this post is no exception.