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Articles & Rants
Every now and then I write up my thoughts on the projects I'm building and how the way I work has
changed over the years. Nothing official, just one programmer's opinion. 12 articles and counting.
algorithms: Why I Still Solve These by Hand
Posted November 2025 |
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algorithms is where I keep my solutions to classic data structure and algorithm problems,
and it's another repo I keep off-limits to AI assistance on principle. The value isn't the working
solution - I could get that instantly - it's the wrong turns I take getting there. Every failed
approach teaches me something about the problem shape. If I let a model hand me the optimal
solution first, I'd have the answer and skip the part where I actually get better at this.
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Why loony_os Doesn't Get the AI Treatment
Posted October 2025 |
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I'll admit it - I use AI assistance for most of my day-to-day code now. loony_os is the
one repo where I deliberately don't. Writing a toy operating system in Rust means fighting the
borrow checker inside a #[no_std] environment, hand-rolling a bootloader handoff, and
debugging with nothing but a serial port and stubbornness. The whole point of the project is to
understand what's actually happening below the abstractions I use everywhere else. If I let a
model write the interrupt handler for me, I'd have a working interrupt handler and zero idea why
it works. Some projects are about the destination. This one's entirely about the walk.
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Four Repos, One Blog Engine: The Story of Lily
Posted November 2022 |
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Lily started as a single repo and split into four - lily-post, lily-search,
lily-image, and lily-wysiwyg - once I realized I wanted the search index and the
image pipeline to scale independently from the post storage. This whole thing predates my vibe
coding era, and it shows - every service boundary was argued with myself over several nights before
I wrote a line of code. I still think that upfront thinking is the part AI can't shortcut for you.
It can write the HTTP handler once you've decided the boundary. It can't decide the boundary.
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Splitting loony Into Crates: core, web, db, redis
Posted November 2021 |
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loony is my personal web framework, and back when I first split it into
loony-core, loony-web, loony-db, and loony-redis, I did it the
slow way - reading a lot of other people's crate layouts, sketching module boundaries on paper,
and rewriting the split twice before it felt right. It's the oldest project on this page and still
the one I'm proudest of, mostly because every design decision in it is one I actually made, not one
I accepted from a suggestion. That's the tradeoff I keep coming back to across every article here:
speed when the stakes are low, my own hands when they aren't.
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since March 3, 1998
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