20 random bookmarks

@msfjarvis@androiddev.social's personal link log, mostly revolving around tech and tech-adjacent culture.

2025-10-16

89.

Nix: Connecting to the sandbox

bmcgee.ie/posts/2025/10/nix-connecting-to-the-sandbox

TIL you can debug Nix builds interactively in the sandbox itself

2025-09-08

82.

Series: Learning GPUI

blog.0xshadow.dev/series/learning-gpui

A work in progress tutorial for GPUI, Zed editor's underlying GUI framework.

2025-08-27

79.

Forklifts Require Training

www.zacsweers.dev/forklifts-require-training

Great post explaining how the software engineering industry has been walking into a potential labor collapse by alienating junior engineers.

2025-08-10

78.

Mary Poppendieck's The Tyranny Of The Plan

chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan

Transcript of Mary Poppendieck's landmark presentation titled "The Tyrrany Of The Plan"

2025-06-13

76.

Teaching Tech Together

teachtogether.tech/en/index.html

How to create and deliver lessons that work and build a teaching community around them

2025-06-01

75.

How I like to install NixOS (declaratively)

michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-06-01-nixos-installation-declarative

For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network and fully declaratively.

2025-04-27

70.

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking

engineering.atspotify.com/2013/06/creative-usernames

An old-but-gold debugging story of how canonicalization of Unicode can often give unpredictable and confusing results, when you don't actually know how the canonicalization process works.

2025-03-27

67.

Things that go wrong with disk IO

notes.eatonphil.com/2025-03-27-things-that-go-wrong-with-disk-io.html

2025-03-11

63.

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)

ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html

2025-03-01

59.

How CouchDB Prevents Data Corruption: fsync

neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/02/26/how-couchdb-prevents-data-corruption-fsync

Very neat explanation of how databases work hard to keep your data safe. I was surprised to learn about the failure mode of reading from page cache twice and the database convincing itself that the data has been written out even though it really hasn't.

2025-02-19

56.

Someone has to save the Film and TV that Studios won't

aftermath.site/ricky-jay-defector-archive-preservation

A great interview with Chris Person of Aftermath, who has over the course of the past 2 years has become something of a VHS decoding savant

2025-02-08

53.

Install NixOS on a Free Oracle Cloud VM

mtlynch.io/notes/nix-oracle-cloud

Oracle provides some incredibly powerful hardware for free and this post explains a very straightforward and easy to follow way to get set up with NixOS on their servers.

2025-02-01

51.

Visualizing all books in ISBN space

phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space

Highly interactive and beautiful view of some 100,000 books, it's hard for me to describe what makes it so great to me. Seeing is believing!

2024-11-29

44.

Storing times for human events

simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/27/storing-times-for-human-events

Simon Willison draws on his past experience working on event management websites to explain the real world problems that arise when you try to keep time for humans, along with actionable advice to minimize both your own and your users' suffering.

2024-09-03

29.

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods

www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods

A somewhat dated but still quite useful list of things to look out for when diving into building distributed systems

2024-07-30

23.

Upgrading the JioCinema carousel

blog.jiocinema.com/upgrading-carousel-design

Surprisingly bullshit-free breakdown of all the considerations that went into creating a brand new front page carousel component for the JioCinema apps.

2024-07-06

17.

The history of Git

blog.brachiosoft.com/en/posts/git

Probably the most in-depth history of the events that led to the creation of Git by Linus. Great read!

16.

Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures

matklad.github.io/2024/07/05/properly-testing-concurrent-data-structures.html

2024-06-25

9.

Compose-ur-Pres

github.com/KodeinKoders/CuP

Being able to make slides with Compose sounds fun!

2024-06-08

1.

CodeSandbox's approach to cloning microVMs blazingly fast

codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-scale-our-microvm-infrastructure-using-low-latency-memory-decompression