Cool Things - April 22, 2026

Had a process lose its mind, and then tabs started dying in Safari. So before I force quit the process, here’s the open tabs that pass ‘yup, this is cool’ test.

From Safari

• How I Run a Fully-Remote Software Engineering Standup – I always have “Thing that looks suspiciously like a standup but isn’t because Scrum is too slow” for my teams. I think I agree with all these points.
• IPv8 – ‘Every manageable element in an IPv8 network is authorised via OAuth2 JWT tokens served from a local cache.’ Wait, what? Oh. Actually, that is quite clever.
• Why aren’t we uv yet? – Spoiler, it is because the robots are trained on pip. Same reason why they reccomend Stripe. And Next.js. And React. Etc. You have to tell it to forge a non-default path. And as more people are producing more code the robots create, the robots will train more and more on the existing patterns reinforcing it in the model as the desirable path. This is why I really worry about things in our AI hellscape.
• How do AI agents use S3 Files to persist memory and share state? (2026) – I don’t need this, though I do think the Agent Memory Problem hasn’t been fully cracked yet. But ‘S3 Files is a read/write cache on top of S3’ sounds like something to mentally bank for later.
• Programming used to be free – ‘And so it bothers me that this might regress computing back to the plutocracy of 1970s.’ Yup.
• For Lent, I gave up using my phone in the car.

  This reminds me of the first day of any training that I run, in which I land the class by forcing a few seconds of silence. I instruct everyone to turn off Zoom video and then I count down from 10; when I hit 0, people turn their cameras back on and we begin. The way folks smile or lean back in their seats or even tear up a little when we officially come back on video is oh-so-endearing. It’s a lot; everything is a lot right now and I know how important it is to be cared for via quiet.

• Does the New York Times Need a Magazine? – Lots of juicy bits in here about the halo effect a magazine has, how loss of identity often precludes loss of relevance, etc.
• A curated list of PHP Attributes available in Laravel Framework. – available as a Boost skill
• Print Doesn’t Scale? Let’s Redefine What Scale Actually Means – ‘And the question being asked, “how many people does this reach?”, is not the only one worth asking.’ – This is rapidly becoming my favourite weekly newsletter.
• Two Years of Valkey – An interesting observation. And one I think other projects that have had forks should do.
• Don’t wing it. Here’s how to behave on a plane – I love everything about these rules. (My wife would get called out for at least one of these. I’ll leave it to you to decide which.)
• 5 Incident Response Principles for CTOs – If you’re lazy, just scroll to the bottom of the page for a summary chart. But there are some good sentances in there. Like ‘So the question is never whether they’ll happen. It’s whether you’re prepared when they do.’
• AI-generated code ships fast, but runtime control hasn’t kept up – Obviously LaunchDarkly has skin in the game, but their list of runtime controls is good. And should be a key part of your deployment pipeline once you hit ‘scale’. (Whatever that means.)
• Why End-to-End Testing Fails in Microservice Architectures – As Charity Majors says, ‘Test in production or live in a lie’
• Context Anchoring – Why document? ‘Because code captures outcomes, not reasoning.’ I really need to do this.
• My Take on Vibe Coding VS Agentic Engineering – ‘Vibe Coding optimizes for immediate output. Agentic Engineering optimizes for correctness, maintainability, and confidence.’ I think I like this distinction.
• Under the Hood: How Blaze Speeds Up Blade Templates – Super nerdy, but cool explanation of Blade optimizing.