Welcome to this month’s Weekly! I’ve been putting in some work on other parts of this site. I launched my book review section that I mentioned last time and seeded it with some books I’ve read this year. I’ve also freshened up the site design a bit sprinkling in some more sans-serif.

I’m starting to think about writing up the last installment in my nix-on-mac series, covering nix modules and splitting out a flake into mulitiple files. I’ve had a draft of this for over a year now and I’m thinking it’s time to put pen to paper and ship it!

Anyways, on to the links:

Whimsy

• It is as if you were on your phone (Pippin Barr): This was just delightful — a scrolling simulator that runs on your phone, minus all the doom.

• Unparalleled Misalignments (Ricki Heiklen): This page is a list of “pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other”. Rather than explain more what that means, I’ll just let you click the link and check it out — this tickled a very particular part of my brain.

Software

• Compiler Reminders (Jeroen Engels): I’ve thought for a while that LLMs should do exceedingly well at this kind of compiler-driven development, and it seems like some of the models and agent frameworks like Claude Code and Cursor are doing pretty well here. I feel like if I were to go and get a PhD, I’d want to focus at this intersection of coding models and strong typing.

• Write the most clever code you possibly can (Hillel Wayne): Stretching your ability for the sake of learning — the title of this post is a bit clickbaity, but the sentiment boils down to “it’s worth it to write code that you’ll never commit”.

Miscellaneous

• Burn your title (Phil Eaton): Another post to join Tom MacWright’s in the “what you spend 8 hours doing every day can be positive sum” genre. I generally think of “agency” and “ownership” are bland, corporate-speak-y words that don’t inspire much excitement, and this post reframes the conceps in a way that puts the worker front-and-center. It’s my experience that there are always niches to fill if you go looking for them.

• Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Matt Webb): I really enjoy Interconnected but had no idea that it’s been around for so long! Matt’s recap of the different iterations of his blog over the course of the past quarter-century was a fun and relatively short ride through the history of the modern internet told through his personal perspective.