My wife is one of the smartest people I know, but she really struggles with math, particularly scale and volume. It's resulted in some funny purchases. A pallet delivery of healthcare products. 3 kilograms of cheese per person for a dinner party. This week she's making birthday cupcakes for Teddy.

Today is a good reminder of why I start almost all my new projects with this. github.com/artisan-buil...

Guin Guin is not a cartoon monster. It’s not a word in German, Swiss German, French, or Spanish. I checked. I’ve spent the past hour trying to figure out why Teddy won’t go to sleep because of Guin Guin. I finally gave up and asked Milo. It’s penguin. He’s convinced a penguin is going to get him.

I hope my wife is asleep because instead of bringing Milo straight home from the movie, we paused at the bar. He’s drinking sparkling water and eating a giant bag of candy while I knock back some cold beers and kick his butt at shuffleboard.

I’m excited to spend the evening seeing the new Minions movie in the original German. There’s a proper cinema (with real Swiss cinema prices) in the basement of this hotel.

I just had a funny getting older moment. I had the wife and kids with me in a pedal boat. Milo was in the copilot seat. I started feeling a bit overheated so I did the sensible thing. I jumped in the lake.

As Teddy has reached the “I can do it myself” stage, I will be 15 minutes late to everything until further notice.

Watching Laracon at home? Want to watch it with other Artisans? I've created an incredibly lazy virtual watch party (it's Google Meet). Come on in! artisan.build/laracon-watc...

Laracon Watch Party

We're watching Taylor's Laracon talk together — join us live.

artisan.build

Anyone from the Laravel FOMO crowd feel like attending a virtual after party for day one? I'm thinking I'll open a room of some sort before Taylor gives his talk and keep it open until the party winds down.

artisan.build/posts/what-s...

What Should We Be Building Today?

We're in a golden age of software development, and the barriers to building whatever we can imagine have vanished. So what should we be building today?

artisan.build

I have something a little controversial to say. The discourse about indie hacker B2C revenue drop-off is almost entirely missing the mark. Regular people aren’t vibe coding their own replacements. They’re simply choosing to stop paying for the service.

Claude: That binary run also caught a real bug: in a bare C/POSIX locale (minimal containers, cron, env -i) stdout is ASCII and the em-dashes in our output raised UnicodeEncodeError Me: You really do bring this on yourself, you know.

artisan.build/posts/why-we...

Why We Built Ballast

We built a fully deterministic tool that measures and monitors code durability, and it has changed how we talk about AI

artisan.build

The most enlightening part of my week in the US has been the extent to which people have been radicalized by AI data centers. It's disorienting listening to people in Trump hats rage against capitalism like they're reading from an Antifa supersoldier recruiting poster.

If soccer were like this all the time, we wouldn't need all those other sports.

America has lost its only trillionaire.

I have a real ghost in the machine situation going on here. I'm using Claude inside Solo on my Mac Mini back home in Switzerland via Jump Desktop. It's working on some layout stuff for a docs page. Somehow, the browser it's using to do its testing is on my Macbook here in Chicago.

When I landed in America and they told me it’s only safe to eat deep fried food, I could live with it. But now they tell me I have to mask up to walk to the deep fried restaurant.

It's nice to be back in my old hometown for a few days. I'm going to my favorite coffee shop, getting a haircut that won't include lighting any of my body parts on fire, and boiling up a nice salad for lunch.

It’s a lovely afternoon in the (booster) seat of American power, but it seems like everyone is just staying home. The United lounge is a ghost town. I’ve never seen IAD this quiet.

I’ve lived here for four years and I’ve just now floated down the river for the first time. I was waiting until Milo was old enough to join me. He floated 20 meters and bailed. Took the tram home leaving me to finish the journey alone. His loss. It was a great way to spend an hour.

The choice: Get two kids out the door at 5 am to catch a direct flight to Chicago or give myself until 7 am and change planes in DC. Two-hour layover, and we have lounge access. Another factor: Premium economy on the DC flight is cheaper than economy on the direct flight. I think I'm going to DC.

We're rolling out a new tool internally this week that adds us to our clients' agents via an MCP. When our clients are working in Claude and hit something that could use a little professional help, they can just ask Claude to hand it off to us so we can get them unblocked and ship it back.

Mmmm. Dogfood.

I’ll be on site with a client in Chicago on Tuesday and I haven’t booked a flight or even thought about packing. My 2026 resolution to reduce the chaos in my life has, apparently, not gone to plan.

It's interesting to see this President occasionally reach for socialism in response to a crisis while calling his opponents communists. The last time, all of the socialism introduced by Trump was undone by Biden, leading in large part to Trump's return to power.

USA TODAY@usatoday.com · 4w ago

The White House launched 25 Freedom Fuel gas stations, all selling fuel at $3.47 a gallon.

I worked late at the office yesterday, so I wasn't home for my usual after-dinner garden watering session. Milo helpfully did it for me. And then he left the garden hose running at full blast under a bush. Data centers are a problem, but we also need to look into regulating 10-year-olds.

It's 11:05 in the morning, and Claude just told me to "sleep well." I suppose I could use a nap.

My entire neighborhood is going to be late for work tomorrow.

I don't need to keep track of when Switzerland is playing. I know because my neighbor meets me at the door on my way in and says, "Entschuldigung für den Lärm." My man, you've lived upstairs from the world's loudest baby for three years. Yell at the TV all you want.