I would love to be able to use my computer or video game system for more than one day without some app nagging me for an upgrade. Sometimes it's the same app with multiple updates per week. It feels sloppy.

Nest was down today but Google’s status page said all was fine. It’s so depressing when companies can’t (or won’t) be transparent about outages.

Did you know I made a link page generator? It’s like linktree but it just gives you an HTML page you can post anywhere. And it’s free. https://bphogan.com/linkmaker/

Love getting feedback like this.

Ken Kousen@kousenit.com · 3mo ago

@bphogan.com Another great newsletter this week. Excellent job :⁠-⁠)

Ok, @temporalio comes through again. I posted a message through my custom posting system yesterday, and the posting to X failed. They deprecated the API I used. Today I corrected the issue and the Workflow completed. No code changes or restarts.

I love @tailscale. Whether I'm at a coffee shop or a doctor's office, I'm safely routing traffic back home, with access to my servers, my local LLMs, and even my cloud servers. The fact that I get to work there with a great team is even better.

if you don’t like the process of writing then don’t be a fucking writer, it’s not that complicated

I swear to god if anything AI related tries to pull an April fools joke tomorrow I’m going to kick off digital Ragnarök

Kids don’t try this at home

Ingrid Burrington@lifewinning.com · 4mo ago

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

This is the key though. Use AI tools on domains you understand well so you can guide them. They accelerate your work. They don’t replace expertise.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Jaana was a distinguished engineer at GitHub and is now a principal engineer at Google. I expect more testimonials from accomplished engineers about productivity gains of AI in 2026. Engineers claiming AI tools don’t work well will increasingly look like a skill issue than a problem with AI tools

Another good one. Nicely done

Issue 48 of my newsletter ships later today. It includes a markdownlint tutorial. Subscribe at https://newsletter.bphogan.com/ to get the latest issue in your inbox.

Just pushed publish on my 4-song Christmas EP. Traditional songs in my style. If you celebrate, give a listen. https://soundcloud.com/bphogan/sets/december

I'm a subscriber, and I can vouch for the fact that it's good. And free, as he said :⁠-⁠)

I have published my newsletter for 47 months straight. Are you subscribed? It’s free. Once a month. newsletter.bphogan.com

Code, Content, and Career with Brian Hogan

A monthly newsletter with opinions and advice about software, technical content creation, and career development.

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The Minnesota Wild plays at the Grand Casino Arena and airs games on FanDuel Sports Network, and we are supposed to be surprised there’s a current sports betting scandal in another sport?

HOW DARE YOU, MR. HOCKEY PLAYER! HOW DARE YOU USE YOUR HOCKEY STICK TO PUT A PUCK IN THE NET! NO GOAL FOR YOU!

I can only be friends with people who are old enough to remember the annoyance of suddenly having to use area codes even for local domestic calls we used to only have to remember seven digits!

bleary (feat. Akon)@bleary.off-the-records.com · 10mo ago

If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.

Yessss I love AsciiDoc, everyone should use it! It renders natively on GitHub too, by using the .adoc file suffix, so you can even use it for your readmes and the like

Yesterday I published Issue 45 of my monthly newsletter, and it's about why Markdown might not be the best way to implement content. Read it and subscribe to be the first to read next month's issue. https://newsletter.bphogan.com/archive/issue-45-markdown-is-holding-you-back/

You don’t say? https://www.psypost.org/frequent-ai-chatbot-use-associated-with-lower-grades-among-computer-science-students/#

Everyone wants corporate sponsorship of OSS until they find out that sponsorship means control. Do what we want or the money you depend on goes poof. No free lunch. Disappointing. https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

"Let's all band together to get consumer protections rolled back, and we'll say it will increase competition" is a hell of a sales pitch. https://tinyurl.com/2s44zc9j

Do you remember… The 21st night of September…

Vale is my go-to tool to catch style errors and enforce consistency in content, and after implementing it in multiple jobs and projects, it was time to create a guide anyone can follow. Now in beta. https://pragprog.com/titles/bhvale/write-better-with-vale/

Hyphen: - Underscore: _ Em-dash: — En-dash: – So many dashes…..

You “log in” with your login. Your users “sign up” for your service and you track “signups.” Go check your buttons.

Today, I used ChatGPT o3 to research two articles for my newsletter. Every article it found was current and relevant. Every fact it cited was made-up. The statistics did not appear in the article cited. Content without curation will be painful.

Some things I learned while using Claude Code on some personal projects over the last two weeks. https://bphogan.com/2025/06/19/2025-06-19-claude-code-tips/

With major providers down, this feels like a snow day, where the school's closed and all the work that was due today is now due tomorrow.