Hello again—been a while—I haven’t posted a newsletter since May. I’ve actually been really busy, in a good way. I started a new job in June and it’s the first time in a long while that I’ve actually been enjoying work. I’ve also just generally been spending less time at home.
At the start of the year, I set myself a modest target to write 12 posts in 2025. I’m completely off track! We’re almost in November and I’ve only written 6, so unfortunately I probably won’t succeed at that goal. I’m not happy with how slowly I’m getting posts out. I have probably hundreds of ideas for them, but that number keeps growing because it still takes me weeks to write something I’m happy with. I really want to improve on this next year.
Anyway, here’s what’s new since last time:
I wrote two posts:
Twitter/X is becoming less accessible to non-signed-in users, so I’m going to start re-publishing threads I particularly like. Here’s the first:
I added some links to the Self section:
- Introduction to Internal Family Systems: a Groundbreaking Psychotherapy, Self-Therapy, Communication Method and World-View - by Maija Haavisto
- How to Be Happy - by Andrew Shade Blevins: an introduction to “the Option Method”, a kind of existential inquiry which seems interesting
- Post-conceptual meta-goodness and changing in the deepest of ways - meditationstuff
- Hank Green’s description of his 80% rule for completing projects. Also: ivysly.com - on scope creep
- ‘Askers’ vs. ‘Guessers’ - The Atlantic
I added some links to the Misc section:
- If You’re So Smart, Why Can’t You Die? - Desystemize: on AI, spiky intelligence, and adversarial agents
- houmain/keymapper: A cross-platform context-aware key remapper: an easy-to-use and wildly underrated keymapping tool
I added some links to the From Mars section:
- The introduction essay to Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man
- Barbie in the Longhouse - Part 1 - by Jacob Falkovich
I added some links to the Software section:
- Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing - The Old New Thing
- Laurence Tratt: Which Parsing Approach?: a review of different ways to implement parsing, and their tradeoffs
- Common Misconceptions about Compilers
- Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt. - Irrational Exuberance
- newren/git-filter-repo: Quickly rewrite git repository history
- Two articles about what coroutines are really for: Philosophy of coroutines - Simon Tatham / research!rsc: Storing Data in Control Flow
- Quick takes on the GCP public incident write-up – Surfing Complexity: an insight into great incident response mindset
- Two articles about designing error handling: How do you cut a monolith in half? / Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them) (“Systems grow by pushing responsibilities to the edges”)
- Push Ifs Up And Fors Down - matklad
- Technical Debt — notes.doismellburning.co.uk - big catalog of articles about it
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to send a mail to tom@tmewett.com or leave an anonymous message.
Takk…
Tom