Again DHH is a bit of an asshole but some of his software engineering based views are interesting and challenge conventions. I have not watched the whole 6 hours of this!

DHH has some wild things to say but his push for Linux is backed by facts.

Linux has slowly been increasing in popularity in the USA. His reasoning around the Steam Deck as well as a couple of popular influencers for the growth in Linux is 100% a factor.

If I had the money to buy a new computer today I would very much consider a Framework and run Linux on it.

Great article on why fast matters in software. Linear is always a good example.

Fast eliminates cognitive friction. Raycast surfacing the right application before you finish typing feels like an extension of your mind. Superhuman's sub-100ms rule—plus their focus on keyboard shortcuts—changed the email game in a way that no one's been able to replicate, let alone beat. I recently used Mercury to pay another business that uses Mercury, and its instant settle felt surprising in a world where bank transfers usually take days.

This is because the effort to make software fast often requires stripping away non-essential features. Compare how fast a streamlined project management tool like Linear loads versus an enterprise app like Workday (or worse… Oracle). In a world obsessed with adding rather than refining, speed becomes the ultimate expression of respect. It says, "We've thought deeply about what matters and eliminated everything else."

There's still no Switch 2 game yet that I'm desperate to play. I still just want Metroid Prime 4 and Silksong. Both of these should be Switch 1 games.

This is the direction education is heading. Not getting the answer straight away but being "taught" the concept is a super cool use of AI.

I have a new synth setup.

Sadly my Yamaha Reface CS broke; the internal speakers stopped working and it would randomly turn off about 5 seconds in to powering it on. I looked into getting it fixed but the repair shops all seemed to be north-side of Melbourne (at least an hour drive from home) and it realistically could have cost anything to actually get things fully fixed.

So I decided to go with a more robust computer based setup.

Here is the list of what I now have:

• LPK25 MKII 25-key Keyboard Controller
• USB‑C to USB‑B cable
• Arturia Mini V4 (demo version currently)

The LPK25 is a small but mighty keyboard. It instantly connects to my Mac and I just needs some kind of software instrument to get up and running. The octave buttons work well which I'll likely need to use a bit given the small size.

What has been the biggest surprise for me is exploring different software instruments available on macOS. Whilst there are a lot of cheap options out there the quality of Arturia's software instruments immediately stood out to me after giving a few instruments a demo.

The sound of the Mini V4 is just magical; it sounds thick and warm just like a good synth should. I usually set the patch to default and then tinker from there. It's so fun messing with the different knobs. There's a lot for me to learn but there are a million tutorials.

Owning your own physical Minimoog Model D would be so awesome but also crazy expensive. So emulation is very much a better option for hobbyists.

In terms of my little art project replicating game music we are now full steam ahead. I also now have a subscription to musescore so I can access the sheet music I need.

On my Mac I can run Mini V4 as a plugin in GarageBand and record as MIDI. I do also love the flexibility Mini V4 gives you in that you can run it as a standalone app just for playing.

This does low key make me want to switch to Firefox. A lovely little write up.

One of the best games of footy I've ever seen. Melbourne just completed switched off and St Kilda came home like a steam train.

Something that stands out for me was how accurate Wanganeen-Milera's kicking was. Both set shots at goal were gun barrel straight. The way he was able to calm himself down after clunking some huge marks and slot the goals was unreal.

Looking forward to the DDF podcast tomorrow. Ollie looks up and about.

What a madman but also such an interesting story.

We are truly lucky in Melbourne to get beautiful crisp winter evenings where you can go and do things outdoors.

Also known as "Hairy Creature". This will be an emoji I'll use for sure.

I'm trying to get on a bit of a movement streak right now. I have 3 different activities that I want to do at least once per day:

1. Round of golf (at least 9 holes)
2. Pilates
3. Bike ride

The round of golf is what I've been doing for a couple of years now. I really just need to maintain what I'm doing or even cut back a bit.

Pilates has been a recent change and a nice little activity to do with Emma. I've found the classes hard but also very mindful. It makes you feel good at the end of the class but you're not completely cooked. My legs get very shaky on some of the exercises so I clearly have some work to do to build up strength.

I want to get my bike riding fitness up again. At some point in the next few months I'd like to do a big ride; at this stage I'm thinking from my place in Bonbeach to the Portsea Hotel. According to Apple Maps there seems to be a route where you can mostly take bike paths from my place. You go along the train line to Seaford cutting along Skye Road to the Peninsula Link Trail and this takes you to Mornington. From Mornington you ride along the coastal road. It's a 71km total ride which isn't too far.

It must be a crazy place to work at right now at OpenAI. From a human resources and political standpoint there is just so much going on.

The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago.

An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there. If you aren't organized, you will find this incredibly distracting. If you curate your channels and notifications, you can make it pretty workable.

Leadership is quite visible and heavily involved. This might be obvious at a company such as OpenAI, but every exec seemed quite dialed in. You'd see gdb, sama, kw, mark, dane, et al chime in regularly on Slack. There are no absentee leaders.

OpenAI uses a giant monorepo which is ~mostly Python (though there is a growing set of Rust services and a handful of Golang services sprinkled in for things like network proxies). This creates a lot of strange-looking code because there are so many ways you can write Python. You will encounter both libraries designed for scale from 10y Google veterans as well as throwaway Jupyter notebooks from newly-minted PhDs. Pretty much everything operates around FastAPI to create APIs and Pydantic for validation. But there aren't style guides enforced writ-large.

OpenAI runs everything on Azure. What's funny about this is there are exactly three services that I would consider trustworthy: Azure Kubernetes Service, CosmosDB (Azure's document storage), and BlobStore. There's no true equivalents of Dynamo, Spanner, Bigtable, Bigquery Kinesis or Aurora. It's a bit rarer to think a lot in auto-scaling units. The IAM implementations tend to be way more limited than what you might get from an AWS. And there's a strong bias to implement in-house.

The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted. It reminded me of being back at YC.

There's lots of really interesting nuggets in there.

Note: this piece is also a great advertosment for Codex. I really want to give it another go. Maybe I use the GUI this time rather than the CLI.

In the last couple of years I've played a bunch of games with fantastic sound tracks. The one's that come to mind are:

• Undertale
• Stardew Valley
• Pokemon Ruby
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Super Metroid

What I'm thinking of doing as a little art project is recreating some of these tracks on my synth and actually recording them into Logic Pro as audio. A lot of these songs are chiptunes which was easy enough to replicate on a synth using the different waves.

I can also get the sheet music from musescore but it does seem like I'll need a subscription to get everything.

Nice little data visualisation from personal Strava data. Also very inspiring to keep a workout streak alive for so long.

Me and Emma are back to work this week.

Everything sucks and I think about Boots a lot but we have to move forward.

Some things keeping my spirits up this week are:

• Watching the Test cricket in England, was another cracking match at Lords
• Playing Pokemon Ruby for the first time in OpenEmu
• Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for probably the hundredth time
• Thinking about and planning future travel plans, me and Emma are currently trying to figure out a way we can do a big Australia driving trip in a van
• Doing more pilates with Emma

This past week has been the hardest week mentally I've ever had to deal with.

My beautiful baby boy Boots passed away peacefully on the 9th of July.

He was a wonderful dog and he gave me some of the happiest memories I've ever experienced.

He was someone that I loved with all my heart and I'll always cherish the time we had together.

He was smart, loyal and cuddly in moments when I needed his affection.

He was my dog and he truely had some of my personality in him from tugging on my sleeve to digging multiple holes in the backyard when we left him home alone.

The quick decline in his health was a huge shock. It was hard to accept. I still can't really believe he's gone.

I also know I need to be positive. I know his spirit will guide me and be a force for good. It's the circle of life.

This experience is sadly part of being a dog owner. You'll likely be there on their first day (when you pick them up from the breeder) and their last.

As horrific as it seems to be at the vet to say goodbye it was also in a way peaceful knowing he was no longer in pain and was going to a better place.

I love you so much Boots. See you some day soon and I'll let you pull on my sleeve again.

This was an excellent read. I liked that it stayed high level and just covered concepts that any software engineer could interpret and understand the why.

This looks like a beautiful venue for AFL. Come on Tassie make it happen! It would be so sad if this doesn't happen.

This is 100% a date day me, Emma and Boots should do sometime. We're very lucky to have these parks and walks so close.