Interesting Links Archive
Here are all of the interesting links I have collected in my time blogging.
Weekly Brain Dump #30
Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts: I'm not surprised by these results at all, people want to read what humans wrote.
The Omni-Death of Gaming: I like this retrospective of gaming culture, it's heartwarming.
Very Average Prototypes: It makes sense that LLMs would generate statistically average game prototypes.
Genders.WTF: This site is a gold mine of terrible user interfaces. Good for a hearty chuckle.
Payphone Tag: Conquer territories by using payphones in Australia.
How to call Linux code from a Wine process: This is the sort of deranged nonsense I live for.
Weekly Brain Dump #29
How to Write an Effective Software Design Document: Definitely a lot of useful advice in this one, I'll be referencing the linked design doc a lot.
Hanami 3.0: In full bloom: Hanami has it's 3.0 release!
Why Tetris the Grand Master is the best Tetris: A brilliant breakdown of what I love about Tetris the Grand Master.
Weekly Brain Dump #28
One possible introduction to hokusai-pocket: An intro to using hokusai a tool for building cross platform gui apps with mruby
Understanding the Go Runtime: The Reflect Package: Another fun look into how Go handles things internally, this time how it knows what your structs and types are in the compiled binary.
Godot 4.7 Release: Lots of exciting development in Godot, it's an amazing game engine.
Help us test the Hanami 3.0 release candidate: Hanami 3.0 is coming!
Weekly Brain Dump #27
Chili Peppers of the World: All of these chili are hand drawn with amazing detail. Absolutely beautiful.
`rv` plan and progress update: Very exciting times, `rv` is proving to be very cool.
Signals, the push-pull based algorithm: This dive into reactive systems has helped me understand them quite a bit better.
Software as Craft: a First Look at Syntropy: An interesting framework for web development in Ruby.
Lies We Tell Ourselves About Email Addresses: Email addresses are much more complicated than you assume.
The University In The AI Era: I don't envy educators in the current LLM craze.
curl summer of bliss: It's nice they're taking care of their mental health. It's funny to think that an open source project can "close their doors" so to speak but on reflection it makes a lot of sense.
Weekly Brain Dump #26
What it actually costs to run a one-Rails-app SaaS per month: An insightful breakdown into starting to host an application in the modern day.
Breaking what a program is: A fun breakdown of what Linux looks at when executing a binary.
Cool down before you install: give new gems a few days to be vetted: Finally, cool downs arrive for ruby gems!
How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name?: It's pretty crazy that 61 hyphens are valid.
Weekly Brain Dump #25
Creating games entirely on Android!: It is now possible to create and export a Godot game entirely from your Android phone.
Factorio 2.1 will be the last major update as Wube Software are moving on: I've still never played Factorio but know it's a great game. It's good to see the studio actually able to move on and not feel like they have to support the game forever.
I'm switching to a dumbphone this summer: An interesting experiment and one I've considered doing myself.
Weekly Brain Dump #24
Little.Webby.Press: A tool to generate ebooks directly in your browser.
novelWriter: A FOSS tool for writing novels that has a Vim mode!
Jira is Turing-Complete: This is hilarious.
It's time to talk about my writerdeck: I've been tempted to do a terminal only machine as I think it'd be an interesting experience.
Weekly Brain Dump #23
Coding on Paper: I love e-ink and am excited to see these monitors even if they're too expensive for me.
Discourse Will Never Block You From the Web: It's really nice to see people fighting for an open web.
What happened when one game writer tried making a game in 30 days with Godot: A fun read, I should try out the game. I'm impressed they made something so nice in 30 days.
You think you've seen it all and then there's a Wayland Compositor inside Minecraft on Linux: This is the crazy sort of nonsense I live for.
Weekly Brain Dump #22
THE BORING INTERNET: A bit of hope during these dark days
The Digg Lesson: Why Moderation Infrastructure Matters: I love learning about how moderation works for projects like this.
Making your own programming language is easier than you think (but also harder): More temptation to build my own programming language.
Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary: A fun look at how Finnish can be compressed using `FST` and compressed 3GB of data down to 10MB.
The Go Compiler: A Deep Dive Into How Your Code Becomes a Binary: Feeding the "build a programming language" beast inside of me.
Weekly Brain Dump #21
Welcome to Hanakai: Exciting news for Hanami, Dry, and Rom getting a new brand.
Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse: Someone discovering why they like the Fediverse so much compared to big corporate social media.
A Tale of Three WebAssembly Runtimes: I only skimmed his as my brain has been a bit mush this week, but it's a very interesting breakdown of interpreting WebAssembly.
Agentic Coding is a Trap: Another post about how not programming actively makes your programming skills deteriorate.
Dirty Optimization Secrets (C for Playdate): Some nice technical optimisations for Playdate development in C.
The Complexity of Simplicity: A refreshing look at the different types of complexity in software.
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility: As a person who doesn't currently need accessibility aides I find it hard to remember there are people that *do* need them. So when I come across an article like this I try to pay close attention.
Weekly Brain Dump #20
DragonRuby's Seventh Year - Where We Started and Where We're Going: DragonRuby is an amazing project and I can't believe it's already been seven years!
Using Rust to Build a $1 Handheld Gaming Console: Amazing results and an impressive use of Rust. Sometimes I wonder if I should pick Rust up.
Ruby Concurrency: What Actually Happens: I love a good Ruby deep dive and this one doesn't dissapoint.
Technomancy in which more paths are charted towards code independence: Sometimes I feel like I've only just scratched the surface with git, this post is one that makes me feel that extra hard.
Let’s Build an RPG: Quest 3 – Quest Tracking: The series continues! I think making a GameBoy game is a great place to learn about programming.
Weekly Brain Dump #19
Crystal 1.20.0 is released!: A new Crystal release, a fantastic language I really need to go back and check out again.
Why Crystal, 10 Years Later: Performance and Joy: This post has been a big driver behind my desire to go deep on Crystal again.
Optimizing Ruby Path Methods: A great deep dive on how Ruby path methods work and how they've been sped up. This is also an amazing blog and you should follow it.
Weekly Brain Dump #18
Finding inspiration and a bit of hope in CorgiSpace: Making many small games is such a great way to grow as a developer and have fun. I need to do more of this myself!
How Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke ext4 Hardlinks: It turns out hardlinks have limits on EXT4 (among other filesystems).
ZFS helped to remove code: I love it when an off the shelf solution works well enough to replace a homebrew solution.
TruffleRuby 34 is Released: Full compatibility with Ruby 3.4!
Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes: The little language that could, I love seeing new Zig releases. It's an incredibly interesting language.
Add DOS platform support (DJGPP): SDL3 now runs on DOS!
The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client: It's great to see people actively developing simple tools for the Fediverse.
Weekly Brain Dump #17
Sailing The High Seas: An Interview with Chantey Dev K.C. Gortyn Code: This game seems really fun, I will have to buy a copy.
The Kirby Frame: A damn good way to actually stop misinformation and bad faith arguments.
JRuby 10.0.5.0 Released : Always good to see alternative Ruby implementations going well.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the art education: This frames AI content in a way I haven't seen yet and is well worth the read.
Rethinking HTTP Benchmarking: Why I Built cryload with Crystal: A new web server benchmarking tool written in Crystal.
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU: I love seeing how old games overcame limitations with clever code.
Making of words.zip: Very cool breakdown of how their infinite word search MMO game was made
Weekly Brain Dump #16
A eulogy for Vim: An impressive amount of effort dedicated here to avoiding LLM generated code. I won't be switching any time soon but it's nice to see people fighting even harder than me.
How to Install a Gem: A great dive into what actually happens when you type `gem install`.
I used AI. It worked. I hated it.: Another article about LLM usage, but one that hits close to home for me.
Weekly Brain Dump #15
Squeezing Every Frame from Godot on Mobile: A great dive into optimising Godot.
I'm OK being left behind, thanks!: I needed this reminder that you don't have to jump on every new trend, you can wait and see how things pan out before making a decision.
Go Home, Windows EXE, You're Drunk: Just absolutely bonkers things you can do with Wine and an EXE.
How ZJIT removes redundant object loads and stores: Definitely not feeding the "let's build a compiler" bug in my brain right now…
The Social Smolnet: Such a wholesome reminder you can do things the simple way.
Weekly Brain Dump #14
Some Words on WigglyPaint: This really saddens me, people will steal anything for a quick buck.
From Heroku to Render: Render sounds nice, I like the sound of the Database URL button.
Introducing Loom: A nice new TUI framework for Go that's more reactive.
Weekly Brain Dump #13
Why do NES colors look so different in emulators?: This taught me about how colours worked for over the air television.
I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform: A pretty good take on LLMs.
So you want to write an "app": A painful look into building a GUI application on a bunch of systems.
Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it: A fun journey of building a text editor.
The Complete History of Tetris the Grand Master: An amazing documentary series of the history of Tetris the Grand Master.
Weekly Brain Dump #12
Never Buy A .online Domain: Horrifying how much power google and centralised systems can have.
Element: setHTML() method: setHTML is exciting, no longer is HTML sanitization an extra dependency and is hopefully going to be in the JavaScript standard library.
Why is WebAssembly a second-class language on the web?: Making WASM a first class language is very exciting, it'd finally mean a real alternative to JavaScript
snakes.run: rendering 100M pixels a second over ssh: Performance improvements of snake over ssh and taught me some ANSI escape tricks I didn't know.
3 years of Crystal Lang programming: The good, the bad, the ugly: Looking into Crystal ORMs I found this interesting breakdown of Crystal.
Your first PICOTRON cartridge in 10 minutes: A 10 minute intro to Picotron, a really cool little fantasy computer.
Enable CORS for Your Blog: Enable browsers to fetch your rss feed directly, I'll hopefully get this done for my blogs soon.
Build your own Command Line with ANSI escape codes: A cool intro to what's possible with ANSI escape codes and how to build a REPL with it.
An Interactive Intro to CRDTs: A fun intro into CRDTs with lots of interactive examples.
Weekly Brain Dump #11
Farewell, Rust: Another article about how low level languages aren't ideal for writing web services.
High-level is the goal: The premise here is that high level languages have nicer tooling and if low level languages had better tooling more people would write efficient software. I dunno if I completely agree with the article, but it's interesting.
Most Developers Don’t Build New Things: A nice reminder that most software development work is overwhelmingly maintenance and not greenfield projects.
How I made a shooter game in 64 KB: Wow, this was amazing. So many amazing tricks including "just writing a new language because it's more effecient".
mruby-examples: A repository for examples of how to use mruby - which is what Taylor uses for scripting.
How We Fixed YAML Comment Preservation in Ruby (And Why We Sponsored It): I had no idea this was possible.
The Death of the Software Craftsman: A great take on the current state of software development with regards to LLMs. I'm not sure I agree entirely with the three options at the end, but it's interesting.
Roguecraft GB: The process of porting Rogecraft DX to the Gameboy Colour, a truly impressive feat of engineering.
Weekly Brain Dump #10
You are being misled about renewable energy technology.: I was initially skeptical of this video but it helped enlighten me on something I was very naive about, battery recycling.
THREE.js-PathTracing-Renderer: Every single demo here is mind blowing to me, the fact this runs in a browser so smoothly is amazing.
The Handoff Test: Something I try to live my life by, making sure I'm not the sole keeper of any knowledge at work.
Weekly Brain Dump #9
Disney Comic Strip Artist Kit: Came across this on Mastodon and thought it could apply to game design too.
I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color: A very cool tech demo. (CW: minor AI usage)
Let's compile Quake like it's 1997!: Running through how to compile Quake using an approximation of the tech stack originally used.
SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes: I mean, you just gotta read this one.
On Building Communities in Public: Why I Chose Discourse Over Discord: This gave me some great ideas for the Taylor community site I'm building.
Against the protection of stocking frames.: Look at AI through the lens of it already being a failed technology.
How I Cut My Google Search Dependence in Half: An extremely interesting new idea of using your browsing history as a search engine. The tool is very early days and buggy, but the idea is amazing.
Ubuntu Live CD was Based on Knoppix: A thread on Mastodon showing that the original Ubuntu Live CDs were built on top of Knoppix.
The open source design stack: A look at FOSS tooling for doing design work.
Weekly Brain Dump #8
Mecha Comet: This might be the most perfectly designed handheld Linux computer, we'll see if it lives up to the hype.
NES.css: This was nearly the CSS framework I used for my website.
Kemal Website: This is the Sinatra of Crystal and I have been meaning to build something with it.
Lichendust Blog: An interesting blog I found that also does an "interesting links" section!
CapRover Deploying with the Wrong Platform: How I solved my CapRover issue with the help of the developer.
gem.coop update #4: cooldowns beta: An awesome idea to hold back updates for 2 days. This has been shown to minimise most compromised packages reaching you nearly entirely. I'll be switching my projects to this.
The cost of running OpenBenches.org: This does a great job of showing just what it takes to run a site like this.
Weekly Brain Dump #7
Why there’s no European Google?: A look into the differences between European success and American success.
Reviving Life is Strange: Before the Storm on Modern Linux with a glibc Shim: This shows us how brittle binaries on Linux can be thanks to glibc but does show an interesting trick to get this specific game to work.
Ruby::Box: Rethinking Code Reloading with Isolated Namespaces: Looking into the new Ruby::Box feature and how it can be used to do hot reloading safely and how it's not quite there yet.
You might not need a sync server for real-time collaboration: How to write real time JavaScript projects without needing a server.
Weekly Brain Dump #6
Infinite Coffee Glitch: This is a great reminder for back end validation. Never trust clients!
Strudel: A live music coding platform that's free and open source
This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser.: An interesting approach to a polyglot executable. Sadly it's three separately made implementations of the one application, but still cool.
Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux: I think about this article frequently.
mruby on Zilog Z80: Yuji is the person who introduced me to mruby, they're currently writing an implementation that runs on a Z80!
Infinite Mac: I was watching this Action Retro video and he used this site to create a bootable system for his Mac.
Minecraft GBA port: Absolutely bonkers port to the Gameboy Advance.
The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button: A look into how complex a single radio button is using shadcn.
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots: An amazing article about how to handle education and exams in the age of Large Language Models.
I decided to make a worse UUID for the pettiest of reasons.: Redesigning UUID to improve developer experience. I especially like the 7 bits for type identification.
'AI' is a dick move, redux: This article summarises a lot of the pain points I've personally felt when discussing LLMs with people.
LLVM Adopts "Human In The Loop" Policy For AI/Tool-Assisted Contributions: A sensible approach to handling pull requests in the LLM era for open source software.
The Illusion of Intelligence: Large Language Models vs Human Cognition: I came across this article during a discussion on Slack for Ruby Australia and felt it summarises the technology behind LLMs excellently.
Weekly Brain Dump #5
Texudus: This is a social network that is incredibly close to the one I've theorised about. It's a very interesting approach to a distributed social network.
An Introduction to Ruby Parsing with Prism: A great guide on how to use Prism to do interesting things with Ruby
15 Years of Indie Dev In 4 Bits of Advice: Interesting insights into how an indie game development company remains afloat
Announcing `rv clean-install`: rv is a tool to keep a close eye on
Doom WAD on a DAC: Just plain cool
RatatuiRuby: A port of Ratatui to Ruby. Yet another cool Text-based User Interface (TUI) framework for Ruby
Picotron Noodling: Making a small game prototype in Picotron
Xfce is great: Singing the praises for the excellent Xfce desktop environment
TruffleRuby 33 is Released: TruffleRuby gets a new release and switches to a different versioning system
Weekly Brain Dump #4
Create Your Own Programming Language with Rust Book: This book has been in development for 6 years and just released this week. I've had a strong desire to make my own language recently and this has only added fuel to that fire!
Writing Windows 95 software in 2025: A fun guide on setting up a development environment for Windows 95 on MacOS.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins: Why blogs are still relevant and what needs they fill versus social media.
Pico-View 2025: Reflecting on everything that happened with PICO-8 during 2025. This is a magazine made by teachers and is always amazing, I absolutely recommend following them.
Portable mruby binaries with Cosmopolitan: I love seeing people doing interesting things with mruby and I had never heard of Cosmopolitan before.
How I beat Factorio on 1,000 Floppy disks: A YouTube video showing DocJade building a filesystem on top of 1,000 3.5" floppy disks and running Factorio from it.
How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem: A stark reminder that GitHub is a single point of failure and has warped people's perspectives of open source software.
Weekly Brain Dump #3
Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi: Nina's journey to get Windows 2 running on an interesting computer.
Revisiting HTML streaming for modern web performance: Streaming HTML to the browser in chunks with web components.
Web Dev with Rust: An interesting thread on Mastodon about using Rust for web development that is eerily similar to my experience using Go.
Charm for Ruby: A new library porting Charm to Ruby. It currently segfaults on my machine but I'm very excited as I've been envious of Go having Charm.
FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands: I love a good story about using a cheap Virtual Private Server to do a lot.
Weekly Brain Dump #2
Why My Newsletter Costs $2.50: A great read about why charging a small amount can make a lot of sense for creators. It really gels with my opinions on pricing indie games.
I Am An AI Hater: An article that pretty well summarises my feelings towards Artificial Intelligence (AI).
State of Hanami 2025: It's been an amazing year for Hanami and I really need to get off my bum and try it out.
Weekly Brain Dump #1
Harper Language Server: A language server for English. It's an interesting project that I've setup in Neovim and found quite useful.
js.html-builder: A DSL for writing HTML in JavaScript.
Sunbeam: A slick command line launcher.