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Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin)

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🔥 All about software design, development, and culture. A mix of insightful and funny. Goes great with coffee. ☕

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Weekend Reading — The Cone of Uncertainty

Weekend Reading — The Cone of Uncertainty

Dinosa Labs "Bueno, ahora sí, os presento a CLOROPLASTO, la minúscula ciudad de la fotosíntesis 🪄✨🌱😌"


Tech Stuff

npmx If you search for npm packages frequently, give npmx a try. It's much faster and the UI is an

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Weekend Reading — Load bearing post

Weekend Reading — Load bearing post

David Zinn "Jen’s response to winter is to wear big boots and keep on stomping."


Tech Stuff

pandoc for the people The pandoc wasm web-app is now available and allows to run any kind of document conversion that pandoc supports in the browser. The documents never

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Weekend Reading — A very British problem

Weekend Reading — A very British problem

Stéphane Bortzmeyer


Tech Stuff

Craft Agents Claude Cowork is the Claude Code brains for working with office documents (Word docs, presentations, etc) which I think is a powerful idea. Yet, I just started using Craft Agents and I like it much better—similar in spirit to Cowork,

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Weekend Reading — Universe closed, use Rainbow

Natasha In "Albuquerque, NM, Rainbow road runs parallel to Universe blvd."


Tech Stuff

Pencil The demo looks amazing, basically an MCP server that can design your product with pixel-perfect precision. Let Claude Code be your canvas. (via Vinicius)

Ian Betteridge

Then, in 1999, Adobe InDesign was released, and

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Rentail.space Launches AI-Powered Marketplace Connecting Businesses with Short-Term Retail Spaces

Rentail.space, an AI-powered specialty lease marketplace, today announced its official launch, transforming how businesses discover and secure short-term retail spaces in shopping centers across the United States and Canada.

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Weekend Reading — A server raclette

Weekend Reading — A server raclette

MTV Rewind If you miss MTV from back when it was a TV station that plays music, aka the good old days.


Tech Stuff

dbreunig/whenwords This is seriously cool. A library that provides timeago ("in 3 days"), duration ("2h 30m"), parse_duration, human_date ("

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Weekend Reading — So close to the end of the world

Weekend Reading — So close to the end of the world

Laura Manach


Tech Stuff

Convert & Compress When you need to process a batchload of files: convert them to a different format, limit their width/height, compress with specific quality loss, etc.

(* To make sure my webapp is performing well, I run a script that goes through all files in

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Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces

Weekend Reading — Sparkling spaces

ARGVMI~1.PIF "Well, you can't say you weren't warned."


Tech Stuff

How I wrote JustHTML using coding agents

Yes. JustHTML is about 3,000 lines of Python with 8,500+ tests passing. I couldn't have written it this quickly without the

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Weekend Reading — This heater is from space

Weekend Reading — This heater is from space

Street Art Utopia "Painted Octopus! By Lumen Street Theatre in Limerick, Ireland."


Tech Stuff

Building a Toast Component This is the story of Sonner, why they came up with that name, how they managed animation and stacking, momentum-based gestures, and more. I love Sonner, the API is so

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Weekend Reading — The “Can that wait till January?” club

David Zinn "Claude’s secret to surviving winter is having a grandma who knits."


Tech Stuff

W4G1/multithreading The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript. Supports modern browsers, Node.js, Deno, and Bun.

voici.js Print tables on the terminal — more evolved than console.table

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Weekend Reading — Torment Nexus is financially sound

Slirt "Don't forget to save enough SPACE for dessert... Nanu-nanu!"


Tech Stuff

Respinner For when you need React spinner components.

Rebane 🤯

cursed CSS trick: use the Q unit instead of px, it looks almost the same and saves a character

doxx You can now view

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Weekend Reading — Increase time in the bathroom

Real Life Bog Person "My SIL has informed me that this exists in Auburn WA. I have a new place to visit!"


Tech Stuff

Grila If you calendar a lot you're going to love this app: a keyboard-driven calendar.

Pure CSS Tabs With Details, Grid, and

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Weekend Reading — 404 bragawatts

John S Russell "Where I post from."


Tech Stuff

Zod + TypeScript: Schema Validation Made Easy Learn how to use Zod, a TypeScript schema validation library that allows you to validate external data at runtime.

abbiistabbii

ftw you realise that pacman is short for Package Manager and you start

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Weekend Reading — Aggravation is observed

Wilhelm Gere "This should explain things"


Tech Stuff

Cursed Knowledge Immich shares their experience and I love that their product website (it's not a dev tool!) has this page. (via archiloque)

You Should Write An Agent In the mantra of "you only think you understand

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Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves

Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves

Kevin Beaumont


Tech Stuff

I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong I'm using Alabaster to see how I like it (PS it's an extension, not a theme):

The problem with that is, if everything is highlighted, nothing stands out. Your eye adapts and

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Weekend Reading — More relevant ads

Weekend Reading — More relevant ads

Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025 – in pictures Collection of amazing photos for your enjoyment.


Tech Stuff

Your data model is your destiny

Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it

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Weekend Reading — And a ghostty October to you

Weekend Reading — And a ghostty October to you

The Autistic Innovator "Someone didn't think that design through"


Tech Stuff

LaunchOS Launchpad is back! Not my favorite UI, I never cared to use Launchpad, but I know a few people who swear by it, and now you can brew install launchos on your macOS 26.

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Weekend Reading — Prime minister of France for 15 minutes

Lizzy "You guys i did a thing"


Tech Stuff

Folder Quick Look fixes an all-time Mac grievance for free This is pretty slick, very useful, and free to use.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI Coding Agents Mirrors my experience as well. Differnet problems, different

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Weekend Reading — Ancient Ruins

link (t)wink


Tech Stuff

How I Use AI An ever growing list of ways in which David Bauer uses AI for work, life and play. Includes some interesting prompts. I took one to help Claude write for brevity.

Nine HTTP Edge Cases Every API Developer Should Understand If you&

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Weekend Reading — KVICK SÖRT

KVICK SÖRT


Tech Stuff

Tangled Interesting 🤔 If GitHub bumped into Bluesky, a social-enabled git collaboration platform using atproto.

LLM Rankings: The New Battleground Welcome to the mention economy!

If you want to appear in AI search results, your brand name has to show up often, in credible

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Weekend Reading — The Yeet Sheet

Laura Manach


Tech Stuff

How to keep package.json under control With the latest npm hacks adding a cooldown period to installs should be regarded as standard security practice. Now available in pnpm, npm-check-updates and hopefully other package management tools.

Your First 10 Users > Your First 10 Features: Hard

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Weekend Reading — The battle at Git's Hub

elle "All I saw was cheesecake boat and ocean for at least 5 minutes"


Tech Stuff

sonner When you want a nicely designed React toast component. I just started using it in my project and it's pretty slick looking with an elegantly simple API.

Apple’

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Weekend Reading — Geiger counter

Weekend Reading — Geiger counter

brettezeleliquide Spoonbill bird in flight.


Tech Stuff

Vibe Coding as a Coding Veteran The road from 8-bit Assembly to English-as-Code:

This gives an entirely new meaning to Knuth’s “literate programming”: Rather than interspersing natural language specification and its corresponding artificial language implementation in a story over

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Weekend Reading — First rule of Eight Club: no typos

Weekend Reading — First rule of Eight Club: no typos

Natasha Jay “Biker gang - believe this group are leaders in the illegal cat nip trade ...”


Tech Stuff

looks-same Nice library for visual regression testing, when you need to compare images from different platforms (dev, CI, etc) that are not pixel for pixel identical, using a fairly simple

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Weekend Reading — Is it me you're calling for?

Weekend Reading — Is it me you're calling for?

MostlyHarmless "The bloody hipsters have gone too far."


Tech Stuff

Embeddable When you need a little widget on your website that converts traffic (newsletter signup, posted review, discount checkout, etc), why not let AI do the walking? This doesn't look horribly expensive, $19/month for 100

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Weekend Reading — I'm back and I miss you all! 💋💋💋

Weekend Reading — I'm back and I miss you all! 💋💋💋

Syulang "Soooooo.... capitalism is at it again."


First the good news: 10 days ago was the 20th year anniversary of this very blog! 🎂 Many happy returns!

Unfortunately, I spent last weekend in the hospital — it took them 4 days to queeze me into a one hour

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Weekend Reading — "big" is smaller than "small"

Weekend Reading — "big" is smaller than "small"

Meanwhile in Canada "You know it's hot when the cat melts"


Tech Stuff

Kiro "Tame complexity with spec-driven development" Smart use of generative AI: Kiro turns your prompt into a requirements document, and then uses that to build your code, so when you get

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Weekend Reading — Swipe right

Weekend Reading — Swipe right

diana "Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip"


Tech Stuff

daisyUI What goes around comes around and this Tailwind plugin brings back proper CSS classes. And it comes with CSS classes for buttons, cards, modals, avatars, alerts, footers, you name it, there's a class

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Weekend Reading — Eat plenty of fiber

a beautiful bitch "This is why i make sure i eat plenty of fiber"


Tech Stuff

kompressor macOS image convertor with a very interesting UI: drag & drop images into the wormhole, then toggle the kind of processing you want, and away we launch!

secretlint/secretlint Linting tool

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Weekend Reading — a24z

Information Is Beautiful "Seems to fit?"


Tech Stuff

kepano/defuddle When you need to clean up a web page and extract only the important contents. This library claims to offer some benefits over Readability.

Sindre Sorhus

You don’t need a roadmap, you need caffeine and unreasonable