Dispatch #40 (June 2026) (2026-06-06)

April bled straight into May, so it felt like a three-week month and flew right by. We celebrated Claire’s birthday and spent Memorial Day weekend at Lake Norman. Then summer kicked in – ran the Running of the Bulls 8K with the kids and a friend of mine, and went to our local pool for the first time this year.

Dispatch #39 (May 2026) (2026-05-12)

Man, what a month. Rich with the stuff of life. THICK. High highs (Nev’s first ballet recital, an incredible trip to Asheville), low lows (the death of our next door neighbor Joel, a major health scare – don’t worry, everyone’s alright). Impossible to capture the feeling of it as I sit here, and frankly it feels silly to document all the dumb stuff I get into alongside the heavy shit, but I’m committed to this project. Let’s go.

Dispatch #38 (April 2026) (2026-04-08)

Finally warming up around here (though we did get hit by the largest 24-hour temperature drop in recorded history while we were up visiting my folks). We took the kids to a Holi celebration, which was a huge mess and a ton of fun. The colors don’t come through here but I think the joy does.

Dispatch #37 (March 2026) (2026-03-15)

February was quick but full. We had a few things hit all at the same time – some good friends visiting from Canada, our company hackathon, and an extended visit from my family. It was hectic but we made it all work, and the month went by in a flash.

Dispatch #36 (February 2026) (2026-02-02)

Greetings from frigid Durham, North Carolina. We’ve had an uncharacteristic amount of winter precipitation this month (mostly ice last weekend but a few inches of snow this one). On the one hand, our work is pretty flexible and we’ve gotten plenty of extra time with the kids. On the other, my home office and all my hobbies are in the basement, where it’s presently around 40°F, so I’m about ready for things to get back to normal.

Local Docker Best Practices (viget.com, 2022-05-05)

Here at Viget, Docker has become an indispensable tool for local development. We build and maintain a ton of apps across the team, running different stacks and versions, and being able to package up a working dev environment makes it much, much easier to switch between apps and ramp up new devs onto projects. That’s not to say that developing with Docker locally isn’t without its drawbacks¹, but they’re massively outweighed by the ease and convenience it unlocks.

“Friends” (Undirected Graph Connections) in Rails (viget.com, 2021-06-09)

No, sorry, not THOSE friends. But if you’re interested in how to do some graph stuff in a relational database, SMASH that play button and read on.

Making an Email-Powered E-Paper Picture Frame (viget.com, 2021-05-12)

Over the winter, inspired by this digital photo frame that uses email to add new photos, I built and programmed a trio of e-paper picture frames for my family, and I thought it’d be cool to walk through the process in case someone out there wants to try something similar.

Why I Still Like Ruby (and a Few Things I Don’t Like) (viget.com, 2020-08-06)

The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey came out a couple months back, and while I don’t put a ton of stock in surveys like this, I was surprised to see Ruby seem to fare so poorly – most notably its rank on the “most dreaded” list. Again, who cares right, but it did make me take a step back and try to take an honest assessment of Ruby’s pros and cons, as someone who’s been using Ruby professionally for 13 years but loves playing around with other languages and paradigms. First off, some things I really like.

Just Be Normal About Things - by JA Westenberg - WESTENBERG (via) (2026-06-11)

Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.

Home | mise-en-place (via) (2026-06-06)

One tool to manage languages, env vars, and tasks per project, reproducibly.

The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book | Brain Baking (2026-06-06)

This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy.

It's time to talk about my writerdeck (via) (2026-05-26)

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert my old laptop into a writerdeck, a dedicated writing device free from the distractions of the modern internet.

Resident: vibe coding firmware (our new sandbox library for ESP32 devices) (Interconnected) (2026-05-21)

We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.

Key, in sight – Aresluna (via) (2026-05-18)

It’s fun to slam big keys without thinking, and it’s fun to experience the mastery of precise combinations of meticulous keyboard shortcuts. It’s great to see things on the screen that react to what you’ve done, especially if those are things that really understand how you work. And it’s magical to watch your fingers do things seemingly on their own while you’re preoccupied with deeper things, just because you set up something that allowed motor memory to blossom.

Optimism is not a personality flaw (via) (2026-05-12)

Whoever can list the most reasons something won't work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. If you say "I think this could go well," you get ~the look. That slight tilt of the head. Optimism is treated like a belief in astrology. Pessimism reads as intelligence now. Optimism reads as naivety. This has gotten so baked into educated Western culture that most people don't notice they're doing it. But it's toxic, all the same.

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like (2026-05-12)

There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them.

Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give - Kenneth Reitz (via) (2026-05-12)

I wish someone had told me this when I was twenty-three and staying up for three days straight because the code was flowing so beautifully. The code was beautiful. I was in trouble.

gilest.org: AI and the human voice (via) (2026-04-08)

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.