Writing Rust … by Hand. No LLMs.

I recently had a bit of a self-identity crisis; of course, it was tied to spending way too much time on social media. I do try to avoid the worst of it, got rid of Twitter (X) this year, and mostly stick to Substack, LinkedIn, YouTube, occasional Reddit, and Hacker News. Probably still too much.

I’ve always seen it as a form of self-preservation, probably due to growing up the youngest of five in the middle of the prairie next to the river, in the only county without a working stoplight.

I try to be pragmatic and never dogmatic, except when someone says “Production” and “Notebook” in the same sentence.

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Solution > Problem.

Cloudflare as a Data Platform? Yeah. No.

Don’t say “I found a problem.” Say … “I found a problem, here’s a solution .. and proof.”

A few things have not changed in the age of AI, where the LLM has replaced 3/4 of the brain power of a whole generation of engineers who once found their meaning in the code they wrote. I mean, I hate to say it’s true, but a lot of folk should have been finding their meaning in the code they decided NOT to write. It’s the classic mix-up of smart engineers and developers thinking that their “use” or “importance” to a company or product was the amount and cleverness of the code they put out. They worshipped at the feet of their own fingers, enamored with staring at themselves in the mirror, convincing themselves they were smarter and could write better code than those around them.

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Agentic Data Engineering Is Here — But Can It Close the Loop?

What Happens When a Software Engineer Builds a Company Alone

AWS Lambda MicroVMs: The Compute Nobody Asked For?

When AWS announced Lambda MicroVMs, I was genuinely excited. After years of incremental services and endless feature releases, it finally looked like AWS had built something that filled the awkward gap between Lambda and EC2. On paper, it sounded perfect. You get VM-level isolation, more memory, persistent state, and startup times measured in milliseconds, all without managing infrastructure. If you’ve ever wished Lambda had fewer limitations or EC2 required less babysitting, this looked like the answer.

Then I actually built something with it. Needless to say, I felt betrayed, lied to, and taken for a ride. Not a happy camper am I.

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From COBOL to Copilot: 30 Years of Data, BI, and AI with Dave Langer