Kicking off Planet Nix with Kelsey Hightower and Ron Efroni talking about how the industry is changing with AI and what it means for technologies like Nix.

First time taking a Southwest flight with reserved seats and it feels really strange to go to just one seat.

Planning in software development has had artifacts and ceremonies that serve a purpose. This is a great summary of strain from AI-generated artifacts and pressure to adopt AI and what it does to erode a long-time carefully constructed culture of writing 6-pagers at Amazon.

Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI Muddying It?

Amazon’s famously writing-centric culture is being aided by generative AI. What does that say about the company’s culture, priorities, and future?

bigtechnology.com

I love stories like this one from Gladys West who helped with the foundations of the mathematics of GPS. The story was told so much later, similar to the movie "Hidden Figures." or “The Imitation Game”. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/s...

I just learned that Loophole Labs found a clever way to dramatically increase Linux container network bandwidth by over 12x. I ❤️ seeing innovation at low levels of the infrastructure stack with big payoffs! loopholelabs.io/blog/xdp-for...

Using XDP for Egress Traffic

XDP only works for ingress. We found a loophole that lets it work for egress. Here's how we did the impossible.

loopholelabs.io

I've had an open tab for a few weeks (link in comment) that AWS added RDS and Aurora instance type recommendations to the AWS Compute Optimizer. It's pretty wild that you can save somewhere around 10% across a big variety of database instance types.

Used Electrify America L3 charger for the first time and wow is that nice. Usually we charge at home, but this was fast, convenient, and not very expensive while we were far from home.

I believe in user-controlled privacy. I'm very disappointed in the lack of privacy laws in the United States. I love seeing this update from Google that they have open sourced a Zero Knowledge Proof library that can be used in support of technology standards that preserve privacy.

Last week Cloudflare launched Containers, which is a significant update to their serverless compute offerings. Cloudflare Workers support is limited to JavaScript and WASM, and this new Containers offering let's you bring a container to their global compute runtime.

I tried Wispr (wisprflow.ai) as a voice input method today on my Mac and it works really well. I really like the UX. They've done a nice job with it. MacOS Dictation also works decently so they'll have to be a lot better than that for it to really catch on.

Citing your sources is so important. I researched cloud network pricing and ChatGPT confidently told me that Azure charges from cross-AZ traffic within a Virtual Network. I thought changed, so I checked. Azure made cross-AZ traffic free in May 2024! Check the citations of these chatbots!

There are some amazing new images of a galaxy named NGC 253 that is 11.5m lightyears away that is generated from data captured with with the Very Large Telescope.

An Incredible read from my former colleague Jack about his experiences trying an alternative job to engineering after being on the HashiCorp rocketship from the beginning. A Year in EMS www.jackpearkes.com/posts/a-year...

A Year in EMS

My experience working as an EMT in LA County.

jackpearkes.com

Want to hide annoying cluttered menu-bar icons in MacOS? Hidden Bar is a simple, free, and OSS utility that hides menu bar items behind a simple expander. When you don't need to use the icons, they are hidden from view. youtu.be/Y8OmjbySFao

Ever needed to describe personas and roles involved in cloud decisions? I met the FinOps.org team at a conference and after looking around their website, I found that they had mapped out the Personas really effectively for various people at organizations that work on cloud.

It’s really common to use Postman to try and test APIs. Thanks to Corey Quinn’s weekly AWS newsletter to highlight this article. Be careful what you share with Postman because they are logging your secrets. anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-l...

Postman is logging all your secrets and environment variables

I was originally investigating this report that Postman is not HIPAA compliant. I found that Postman is not just wholly unsuitable for…

anonymousdata.medium.com

🚀 Heading to @AI & Big Data Expo next week? I'll be @Vultr booth 152 🎤 I’ll be speaking about Move to Vultr in Minutes, Not Months, highlighting how FluidCloud and Vultr are working together to power cutting-edge AI infrastructure. 📅 Stop by to learn, connect, and explore what’s next in AI. #AIExpo

This Bill Gates interview is a fascinating read on the state of global philanthropy.

The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation

nytimes.com

Today's Gemini let-down inside Google Sheets is expected, but still pretty disappointing.

Redmonk's Rachel Stephens has a great post describing how the job and expectations of the Product Manager is changing with AI. Recently, Toby from Spotify shared a company letter to employees that said AI is now part of their evaluation criteria. (1 of 2)

Vibe Coding is for PMs

Vibe coding is an extension of developers ability to tinker using LLMs, but its true power will come in enabling adjacent personas like product managers to more closely collaborate with their dev t…

redmonk.com

Today I transfered a domain name from Namecheap to Cloudflare. The name says it all, they should be cheap, but they charge 70% more than Cloudflare for a .com! Even though I had to divert time to do it, it's a principles thing to me. The internet, cable, and phone providers all do it.

Intercom posted about their big benefits (availability, sharding simplicity, cost) from switching to Planetscale DB Metal from AWS Aurora. Learned about this from Corey Quinn's newsletter.

Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure: Lessons and progress

An update on the progress we've made on the overhaul of our database architecture. Find out how PlanetScale Metal has unlocked greater scalability, performance improvements, and zero-downtime…

intercom.com

Got my first local MCP server example running today in Claude Desktop. The tutorial is pretty straight-forward. modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/s... I've seen some criticism from people I trust that MCP will be like SOAP and ws-*, but so far looks like it's enabling some cool integrations.

I'm super impressed with PlanetScaleDB's latest metal offering and website design. The performance numbers are incredible. Their main landing page is primarily text and super developer friendly. Kudos to them!

LastPass breach is so damaging years later. Recent news is that hackers have cracked LastPass Vaults from the hack over a year ago. I'm savvy enough to change passwords on my own, but people in my orbit that I'm helping struggle with the basics of changing passwords.

Have you ever wanted to create a short YouTube clip from a much longer live-stream or much longer YouTube video? I wrote a GDoc (kind of like a blog!) that covers some options.

Short clip from a long YouTube video

Do you want to make a short video clip of a long YouTube video? If the resulting clip will be under 1 minute, then there is a built-in way to do it on YouTube called “Clip”. However, if you want to…

docs.google.com

Friend asked for a computer backpack recommendation. Many years ago Adam Jacob swore by the GoRuck GR1 so I decided to spend the money on it. I'm pretty sure I've had it for a full 10 years and taken it all over the world and back.

Google Sheets with Gemini is...not killing it. 🤦‍♂️

Incredible write-up form someone really on the pioneering edge of pragmatic use of AI tools for coding assistance on practical everyday projects.

Harper Reed (@harperreed) on Threads

I wrote up how I am using LLMs to help me code. It has been a lot of fun and quite mad. I really like it. Let me know your workflow! https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

threads.net

this haptic display absolutely rocks. basketball is for everyone.

Basketball Jones❤️🖤🤍🏀@shawnjohn.bsky.social · 2y ago

This is super cool. The Blazers are the first professional sports team to provide OneCourt's haptic display at every home game! This cutting-edge technology enables fans who are Blind or Low Vision to experience live basketball action in real-time, at no additional cost. #RipCity #Blazers