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The best thing that happened this week I haven't had the best week since I fell sick with the flu which prevented me from getting any kind of quality sleep in for the past six days in a row now. It's been a struggle to get anything done at all. What we did do though is we finally went to a place to look at new doors for our house. The current ones are cheap and bending because of humidity from when the house was built. Next week someone will come to our house to measure the doors and then…
A little over two weeks ago I released Burst and since then I added in a ton of bug fixes, and a completely new Zen mode for people who want to play without sweating the leader boards. Zen mode was born from the realisation that I was wrong about game development. I thought making a game was all about what it looked like, how it played and how it felt. And in thinking that, I was so close to the truth, but also so far away. The thing I overlooked and underestimated was how hard it is to get the…
The best thing that happened this week It's been a really productive week with a lot of meetings (yes, those can be productive) and work done. I'm currently moving slowly on the migration of our production cluster to use Envoy Gateway. So far so good. It's almost suspicious how smooth the migration is. My iPhone game Burst is doing very well in the App Store. I've got people saying it's quite addicting and a great game overall. Especially the fact that it's free and doesn't show any ads is…
There's roughly a billion videos on YouTube about how great a device the Steam Deck is, so I'm not going to sell you one. I'm also not going to tell you about its specs, because spec-for-spec it's already long been beaten by the likes of the ROG and the MSI Claw. What those other devices have in common though, and the sole reason I'll never buy one, is the fact that they run Windows. I'll have you know that I turn down job offers when the company forces me to use Windows. I literally can't do…
After CalAction I wanted to experiment a bit with SpriteKit and try to make a small game for iPhone. I don't usually play any games on my iPhone myself, because most are overrun with garbage like ads and loot boxes. With Burst I wanted to do things differently. The bubble shooter genre (if you can call it that) has a lot of games in the App Store currently, but again most are either overrun with ads and scammy in-app purchases, or they haven't been maintained in many years. Burst has zero ads,…
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about my new Garmin Forerunner 570 and how it compared to my previous 255. I partly bought it for some new features and metrics, but also because I was experiencing some rather annoying bugs on the 255. Chief of which was the fact that my alarm wouldn't go off most of the time. The problem followed me from a Forerunner 255 to the 570. Now imagine you have a family who all like sleeping in, and you have this weird hobby which makes you get out of bed at ungodly…
Version 1.6 marks the biggest upgrade to CalAction since its release in March, adding additional ways of ingesting and managing events in your calendar. Of course, in the meantime some bugs have been squashed and some rough edges have been fixed, but this release adds some, I think, meaningful features. Photo and text recognition CalAction can now use on-device AI through Apple Intelligence and its Foundation Model to recognize and ingest events from photos and text. Point your camera at a…
The best thing that happened this week This week we had our quarterly offsite with the entire tech team. Of course we talked a lot about AI, visited the Google offices in Amsterdam, and had a ton of fun. We've got such a good team going and the momentum never stops. 10/10! It's also been a busy week on my website as a few of my latest posts went viral, resulting in about 45k visitors in a very short amount of time. It's great to see the traffic, people sharing and discussing. Maybe my small…
A couple of days ago I published Life is too short for a slow terminal. It got quite a bit of traffic, and someone sent me the kind of feedback you actually hope for. The gist of it: A stripped-down config isn't the only way to a fast shell anymore. I simply didn't know about a lot of this stuff, I just worked with what I knew. Luckily, the Zsh community has a lot of smart people. So here's where the post falls short, point by point, because a correction is more useful than a defense. I…
I'm sorry, but we have to talk about AI. Especially AI use in engineering teams. It's all everyone's talking about right now. It's the hype du jour. LinkedIn thought leaders won't shut up about how not using AI will put you at a disadvantage. If you're left behind even a little bit, don't be surprised when your job doesn't exist anymore mere months from now. Recently a new project saw the light of day. It looked finished, it worked, the happy path was clean, the code read well at first, it had…
Practically all of my work happens inside a terminal. Git, kubectl, tmux, ssh'ing into a server, open practically the entire day. Something I use that much has to be fast. Any lag in opening a new tab, typing a character or hitting tab for a completion is something I feel hundreds of times a day. It's death by a thousand cuts. My shell starts in about 30 milliseconds: $ for i in {1..5}; do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done 0.03 real 0.02 user 0.01 sys 0.03 real 0.02 user 0.01 sys ... That's a…
I don't enjoy editing my photos, never have. The part I like about photography is being out with my camera. The part I don't like is coming home to Lightroom and having a billion options to make my photos look a different way. For years, that made me use my Sony camera less, because I knew that every photo I took was just more work for future me. The fix wasn't a better editing workflow or a different camera. It was deciding not to edit at all. No more RAW, just JPEG. Anyone who goes down the…
If you have a multi-cluster EKS deployment for your development, QA and staging environments, those generally don't need to run at 3AM. No one is using any of that, except for maybe a few cronjobs to refresh data. Everything else is wasted idle compute. The math is simple. A dev cluster running 24/7 bills for 168 hours a week. Trim it to office hours, weekdays only, and you're down to roughly 55. That's about two thirds of the compute spend on every environment nobody actively uses, and it…
If you're even remotely into Kubernetes, you've probably heard about the ingress-nginx retirement. It's no longer maintained so it has to get replaced with something else. That something else is obviously something to do with Gateway API because it's the new hot thing everyone should be using. I tried a bunch on a separate EKS cluster, like HAProxy and Traefik, but eventually I landed on using Envoy Gateway since to me it felt like the most approachable and stable solution for our use case.…
The best thing that happened this week This will be a long update because quite a few things happened! The best thing that happened this week is that I made another side project public this week. I created a thing that takes an RSS feed, goes through each link in the feed, downloads the article, and generates a new RSS feed including the full article. I mostly wanted this to exist for myself, but I decided to open source the thing because I think it's useful for other people as well. That's…
RSS feeds are really great and I use them a lot for keeping up with personal blogs, corporate tech blogs and what's new at AWS. I don't think there's any other medium, apart from maybe email, that's so scalable, easy to understand and has such a rich ecosystem of readers and other tools. That said, there's nothing worse than an RSS feed that just returns a headline and the first paragraph of the article. Or sometimes you don't even get that, sometimes it's just a short description of the…
A proud dad moment at a dance show, running progress, getting hooked on Shelldiver, new Jack White music, and a week off with family.
Replace Hugo shortcodes with Render Hooks for automatic responsive image generation — a modern approach using WebP-first srcset with JPEG fallback
Easter weeknotes: website overhaul with new layout, projects section, and stats page. Plus gaming, reading Bill Gates' memoir, and training updates.
A Terraform/OpenTofu module for creating AWS Service Control Policies
