Juan Castillo

This post makes me feel like it’s 2015 and I love it.

On agency Or, how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly

Beautiful essay by @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social on learning to realise that what you want to do is, in fact, possible www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/agency

Blindsight

Je m’alloc

This applies to life in general, now that I think about it.

The game is more fun if you commit to the bit. But also: sometimes the “wrong” option turns out to be the best choice.

hope
springs
æternal

Copilot adds “nitpick” comments on PR reviews, therefore confirming my hunch that we have reached AGI (it is now indistinguishable from an unengaged engineer with bad communication skills).

I agree with Mehdi that I think we’re moving into a world that incentivizes smaller orgs and teams. You can do so much with very few engineers today

I don’t think I buy the argument that mid-sized companies are dying though. You’ll still need to scale up eventually, just later

Or very strong magnets!

10 pages a day, ~1 book a month. By the end of the year you’ll be 12 books ahead of the average.

Card art for Magic: the Gathering “Death’s Shadow”

Cover art for Witch Vomit “Funeral Sanctum”

Poster art for “Army of Darkness”

Poster art for Metallica

This is the official account for Matt Stikker, illustrator based in Portland, OR. Horror, fantasy & heavy metal art in ink & paint, and sometimes pixels. Past & present clients include Magic: the Gathering, Lurking Class, Metallica, Santa Cruz, more. I’m on IG @bargainbinblasphemy, but call me Matt

The world is going through some shitty stuff, but it’s so weird to see US people post about it on here all the time.
As far as I can see, everyone who sees your posts agrees with them, so what’s the point?
And even if they didn’t - I’ve never seen anyone change their minds because they read a tweet.

❤️

See y’all at @hytradboi.bsky.social ! Get your tix at www.hytradboi.com/2025

I was reading and annotating the Viewstamped Replication Revisited paper, and all of a sudden, Preview (on Mac) seems to have flushed all my notes down the toilet.
What are some good apps to read papers on? #pwl #ismacosthenewwindows #distsys

It’s hard to make a pretty diagram of a complex system.

People focus a lot on the law of diminishing returns, and not enough in the law of noob gains: when you have nothing (incl. knowledge), gaining anything is a ∞% delta.

Way higher

Gut feeling: if you have a big enough distributed system, and you aren’t using Kafka, you’re reinventing it.

Going through my private repos and apparently I tried to write a book about DevOps 9 yrs ago.
Yikes.

If you can estimate accurately how long it would take you to make something, leave it to an LLM and find something valuable to focus on instead.

The thing about software eng is that, unlike some other professions, many people get into this for fun. It's all about play and curiosity.
If you're just "working", people that are playing are gonna leave you behind in the time it takes to flip a bit.

On the word "easy" and getting closer to the things you want to know by taking detours. blog.0x5d.io/posts/easy/

Randomly thought about Mikito Takada (mixu.net) and his dist-sys book. It was so cool and concise, and such a great gateway into that world.

The main reason is honestly how much thought seems to go into how everything fits together. The language just feels consistent.
I’m looking forward to diving deeper after so many years!
❤️

Been watching @richhickey.bsky.social's talks again and I think I'm gonna just throw it all away and find a home in Clojure and @jeaye.bsky.social's Jank. Clojure is beautiful, there are no _cons_.

Haha which one is that?

It really is. I should have read it all those years ago when you recommended it to me!