So, what kinda job does one go into in their mid 30s after spending an entire career as a programmer? Looking around, everything even close in salary range obviously requires prior experience or degrees in different fields. I’m under no illusion that I’m badly specced, but where do my skills work?

Given that everyone in and around tech has gone insane, I propose we turn the internet off for a week and all go touch grass.

The Apple developer site is so good. When you log in it requires a code send by SMS and then gives you a prompt asking if you want to trust this browser. That prompt does nothing, you will still be auto logged out and have to enter the SMS MFA code again. Trillion dollar company!

I’m just glad we’ve always had hot summers or I would start to seriously worry

I was today years old when I realized that you can specify the overload std::clamp() and co should pick. I've always done something like std::clamp(foo, int16_t(0), int16_t(bar + 1)), but std::clamp<int16_t>(foo, 0, bar) gets rid of all the ugly casts from type promotion.

Takes quite a bit of guts to claim its a-okay to inhale every piece of human content ever made without paying for it and then turn around and cry foul when somebody else distills the resulting product into their own.

No shade at AMD (okay maybe a little), but before putting an MCP server into RGD, it’d be real nice to actually make RGD functional. I have not been able to catch one device loss with it, ever. Also the fact that it can’t be embedded like Aftermath for in the field diagnostics isn’t helping either.

Probably the greatest bit of satire I’ve read in a long time: nesbitt.io/2026/06/26/i...

Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM

A series of unfortunate agents.

nesbitt.io

Local graphics programmer discovers this one weird trick for fast tracking merge requests that Big Code Review doesn't want you to know about.

(fun fact only slightly related that not everyone seems to know, you can also use: `ptr,10` to view a pointer as an array of 10 elements)

Two Vulkan variable shading rate gotchas: On Nvidia, shading rate attachments get cleared to 0 after a dynamic rendering pass. On AMD, enabling pipeline shading rates disables MSAA completely even if the rate is set to 1x1. In unrelated news, guess who shipped VRS with MSAA and dynamic rendering.

Ran into this guy while out for a walk. He kept trying to fly away but it looked like he was caught on something, so I got a bit closer to see if he was injured. Nope, just a big, heavy fish. Sorry to have disturbed your lunch, buddy!

It’s 2026 and I just put in an alert box for the Raptor Lake instability issue into X-Plane. It was quiet for a while but it looks like those CPUs are back with a vengeance now, at least based on our crash reporter and support data. Cue the “all other games work fine, this is your fault” arguing

I can’t believe that it’s 2026 and I have (yet another) new Pebble on my wrist. This truly is a crazy timeline to live in. Thanks @ericmigi.com for bringing my beloved smart watch back.

As a person with a password manager, the friction of "We sent you a code to your email to login with" is insane. Can we just go back to passwords, please? The worst are the sites that want username/email + password and then send you an email.

New blog post: A Decade of Slug This talks about the evolution of the Slug font rendering algorithm, and it includes an exciting announcement: The patent has been dedicated to the public domain. terathon.com/blog/decade-...

Something that I've worked on is being shown at GDC, which is just hella cool. Wish our southern neighbours weren't so weird at the moment, I would've loved to be there in person. www.theverge.com/games/892436...

Apple’s Vision Pro will support playing iRacing and X-Plane from the cloud soon.

During GDC on Tuesday, Nvidia announced that visionOS 26.4, expected later this spring, will include support for Nvidia’s XR streaming platform CloudXR 6.0, allowing users to play games like X-Plane 1...

theverge.com

My GPC talk about X-Plane, OpenGL, Vulkan and regrets is now up on YouTube: youtu.be/Ju2TQyy6hGg If you are in the mood for what paid critics have called 'the worlds okayest' talk, look no further. If not, there are also great talks posted on the channel. Either way I had an absolute blast in Breda

The aircraft of Theseus - Shipping X-Plane for 30 years

YouTube video by Graphics Programming Conference

youtube.com

Windows Defender is apparently now marking netcat as a naughty program and just deletes it. Unfortunately that breaks shader reloading in X-Plane because that uses the built-in telnet server to execute the commands. Thanks Microsoft, it's the third time I'm downloading netcat again...

Of course Slack also needs to shove AI into everything whether anyone wants it or not. And of course the "Don't ask again" button doesn't work. Not in the sense that it ignores your request, it literally can't be clicked. The state of software these days is absolutely disgusting.

Finally some text books that I can understand

Had an absolute blast at GPC! Met a bunch of awesome people, all of them super nice. Also really nice to finally be able to put a face to an avatar for some. Really wish I could’ve stayed for the final bash instead of immediately running back to the airport.

On my way to the old world and #GPC2025 from the funny number gate

TIL that the Discovery tab is just a feed that can be unsubscribed from. Afterwards it no longer hangs around the tab area of the Home page. Dunno about everyone else but mine was an absolute train wreck of terrible hot takes, NSFW content and AI evangelists. Bsky is a lot more peaceful without it.

From a graphics programmer standpoint, Liquid Glass is so cool. Doing this effect in real time on a consumer phone is so cool. As a phone user though, what the actual fuck? Why are they shipping me a cool tech demo?

Sometimes it's easy to forget how far things have come. I'm putting some screenshots of various X-Plane versions together for no particular reason and the difference between v12 and v11 is wild. The v11 to v10 difference is a lot harder to see in this view but still there.

We have a quarterly user survey about feature requests and issues they would like to see fixed (it's always better AA and more perf), but this time around there apparently was a large enough crowd to get "AMD CrossFire support" on the board. I have extremely bad news for those users...

Looks like I’ll be giving a talk about working on X-Plane at GPC 🥳. Covering how we went from a GL 2.1(!) codebase to a modern Vulkan/Metal one and the challenges and advantages of working on a single product for 30 years, with an eye on the unique challenges of a small studio working on flight sims

I’ve been enjoying doing CAD work on the Surface with a pen, but the keyboard has been incredibly awkward. Figured this was a good opportunity to finally use one of the Pico Pis collecting dust and make a macro pad thingy. Quite pleased with how it turned out.