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Profane Writings
- The Catholic Church vs. the Turing Test - June 28, 2025 - Nobody expects the Roman Inquisition!
- AI art doesn't lack 'soul', it lacks signal - March 27, 2025 - When you experience a piece of art, you want to feel like there is somebody on the other end, with something worthwhile to say. With AI, that's often missing.
- MCP: REST reborn? - March 9, 2025 - Few know this, but *the entire web* is a battleground between these two competing visions: Hypermedia vs RPC
- P(user-hostile trash heap) - February 11, 2025 - just because something amazing is *now possible to build* does not mean that something amazing *will win*
- Pushing the boundaries of Streamlit - November 27, 2024 - I recently had the pleasure of using Streamlit for the first time
- Left Stripe, joined an AI start-up - October 15, 2024 - A month ago, I left my job of 5 years at Stripe to join an AI start-up.
- How thick should your SDK be? - September 10, 2024 - A 'thick' SDK method gives you all the responsibility and none of the control, it is the worst of both worlds.
- Big Datatype: why code tools like to be written with fancy types - September 10, 2024 - an expressive type system gives you more of an ability to *centralize your reasoning* in a single place
- Breaking changes: a tooling problem - August 23, 2024 - the library experience around breaking changes is poor and has room to improve
- Take your pragmatism for a unicycle ride - January 18, 2023 - Sometimes the tool that brings the best results isn't the tool that is "best" on the practical merits
- Fools! Stop Mysticizing System Dynamics - September 23, 2022 - A system dynamics model, properly considered, is just an analogy dressed up in a bit of formalism.
- Glamorize your problem domain - September 2, 2022 - You can hardly spit without hitting a configuration language that, frankly, deserves it.
- Engineer SHORT feedback loops - August 30, 2022 - speedy, hands-off, opinionated, reliable, and timely.
- Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven - August 26, 2022 - Is data-drivenness a psyop from Google?
- I hate NY: a rant by Richard - November 7, 2021
- Discriminated Unions and Exhaustiveness Checking - July 26, 2021 - Discriminated unions are, in a way, the *transpose* of interfaces.
- Please, Systematically Enforce Your Constraints - April 24, 2021 - Some software features add behaviors, others mainly constrain them.
- Monads and Mom - July 26, 2020 - Do you kiss your mother with that Javascript?
- Software culture as proof strategies - July 3, 2020 - Are you happiest when forward chaining or backward chaining?
- Building software is not a job scheduling optimization problem - March 28, 2020 - Lightweight, freeform, unstructured process wherever possible
- Beware Middleware - November 1, 2019 - Use the tools. Don't let the tools use you.
- Software Development and the False Promise of Science - October 13, 2019 - You cannot adopt the mindset of a pancreas in hopes of building an introspective understanding of its secretions.
- Richard's Guide to Irish Traditional Music - September 18, 2019
- Life is Too Short for Jenkins - June 21, 2019 - The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works.
- Not a real engineer - May 29, 2019
Inane Ramblings
- Video: Artisanal, Machine-Generated API Libraries, Strange Loop 2021