• If you are in retail, the easiest scheduled post should be ‘$month Best Sellers’. Is there a Saas equivilent? Maybe. But it won’t be as simple to derive.
• Why I Stopped Arguing With People – some people in the testing world need to read and take this article to heart. Like 25 years ago (so it would, selfishly, be better when I showed up a few years later.)
• git worktree gotchas – agents == worktrees == a whole new set of ‘oh shit git’ problems
• This is a modern motherfucking website. – I need to add this to my robot instructions. But also, this is an ongoing trend. Why need a composer package when you make one api call from one place? Or WordPress when GH static hosting works?
• Amped up – I’m going to use Bloom I think as the agentic framework, but the rules in this are pretty good. I’ve been tweaking mine, including what models to use for what things.
• Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor – This is a much nicer way to phrase my ‘manage by fire (because everything in a startup is always on fire)’ approach. But it is the same outcome.
• Logarithmic auto-scaling for Laravel Horizon – Putting this here for later. At $dayJob we’ll need to be sending 30k+ messaging s on the 1st of every month. All queued.
• A Series of Unfortunate Jobs – #6 is one I need to really worry about at $dayJob since I have the force eager loading flag turned on in production. Yes, I am a monster.
• Blush Cuff Leather Eyes Gloves – do I think these would fit me? Not for a second. But they are great. (But also, I prefer mittens.)
• The Quality Halo Has a Price Tag. Here Is What It Actually Costs to Ignore – why I am so bullish on print media. They are simply the environments where a reader’s brain has already decided it does not need to defend itself.
• The One Spreadsheet Tab Most Magazine Founders Are Missing – I think this applies to SaaS as well. People talk about churn, but I’ve not seen a discussion (that I can remember) that slices the churn metrics and/or risk against acquisition channel. And I think that’s important.
• ‘Entry Level Luxury’ is a phrase living rent-free in my head. There is a whole shift in the market apparently where people while anguish over the purchase of a $4000 bag, but have no problem with buying 4 pairs of $1000 shoes. There is a parallel to SaaS somewhere here.
• Why restaurants still matter in an enshittified world – Good restaurants move beyond signaling. Lighting, acoustics, service choreography, experiential design, and, of course, artful food, combine into a multi-disciplinary encounter that nourishes at a slower, human pace. A great restaurant doesn’t just feed you, it engages you tangibly through their vision—a menu can be a manifesto. Now swap our ‘restaurants’ with ‘SaaS’.
• The perfect lobby can be many things but a buzzing, multi-purpose room is not one of them – this trips a lot of my things-I-believe flags to the on position.
• Innotrans – while I’m not a ‘train nerd’, I’m also not not a ‘train nerd’. This industry fair would be fascinating.
• The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon – Toronto needs a museum that has exhibits here. I actually don’t like trench coats preferring instead perferring the Mac Coat, but…
• As fashion struggles in today’s economic realities, it’s time for brands to cultivate a true following – the same applies with SaaS companies.

• Amazon kept shutting down my tablet, so I spent $266 on four AI models to own it – hitting these guardrails reminds me when I was at HP and we got flagged by security for ‘possessing hacking tools’. You know, debuggers, network tools, etc. The kind of thing you use developing and testing security apps. Like the one we built.
• The Laracon Archive – I’ve been tempted to try and do this with Selenium before. But that’s a lot of work…
• via Matt Verlaque’s ‘Midweek Mashup’
  • ‘The tech that wins is the tech that disappears.’
  • ‘Decide next month’s headline now and spend the month making it true’ – I’ve long been a fan pof press-release driven development
  • ‘Don’t sell the plane ticket when you should be selling the vacation’
• The. Best. Game.
  
• 20× the CI traffic without getting slower: How we rebuilt Git serving at Datadog – git nerdiness

I’ve had Just Make Your Magazine on my desk for almost a year. It reminds me a lot of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work!. It has been staring at (mocking/) me the whole time. I flip through it occasionally. But do I have a topic? Theme? Or even an idea? No.

Well, until this week at which point something bubbled to the surface. For context;

• I’ve mentioned before that my final art portfolio theme in high school was ‘Things Adam Thinks Are Cool’. My teachers were not impressed. But it was accurate.
• I am not a maximalist. Maybe a medium-ist. Certainly not a minimalist. I love my office and how I’m surrounded by things.
• It isn’t clutter if your stuff is cool.
• I love that there are books like Behind The Blue Door exist
• There is a social media trick of talking to bartenders and asking what their favourite watering hole is and the drink they should get. And then repeat, drinking their way through the city. I’m pretty sure I read an article in a magazine or newspaper doing this as well. (For some reason it is always NYC.)

So my idea is to document people’s art collections. One collection per issue. Each issue would have three articles; one by me around why this issue’s collection was chosen, one by the owner of the collection about the overall collection, and one at the end for recommendations of other interesting collections. (More on that in a second.) Is this essentially ‘Art Thursday On Steroids’? Yes. Yes it is. But in physical form.

The layout would be a nice image of the piece on the left and a paragraph or two about it. Which means the size of each issue would vary. But I’d likely have to define what a ‘qualifying’ collection means. Is one piece a collection? Sure. To paraphrase Warhol, ‘a collection is anything you can get away with.’ And the pieces don’t even need to be on display. Part of my collection is in a bin in storage. (Now, those are pieces I’ve made and largely am proud enough of them to keep, but not proud enough to display. Oh, personal standards…)

‘Nice image’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’d probably need to contract a professional photographer to take the images. ‘Nice’ also means the paper needs to be nice too. Would I trust they would do it properly or should I travel to the collection to art direct it. Should I ‘trust’ the collection owner to do all the blurbs about the pieces? Or should I interview them and transcribe / edit it? And should I give an honorarium for participating?

(Can you tell that I read In Real Life Media? ‘Know thine budget!’)

Back to the recommendation article. The underlying conceit of the whole thing is that subsequent collections would be based on the recommendations from the current issue. I’d ask them for 5 since not everyone would want to participate.

Disclaimer: do not expect this to arrive in shops any time soon. I have day-job, not-day-job, at least 1 other side projects I want to build, plus learn how to use my 3-d printer before I get around to this. But depending on how much it demands attention in my brain it might get escalated. Even if it is just one issue.

Normally one would end with a ‘Would you buy this magazine? leave a note in the Comments.’ – but I don’t have comments. But it is my hypothesis that the majority of people reading this know how to get in contact me.

• The Utopia of Rules
• What an SSH Tunnel Actually Does and When You Should Use One
• Double – new library from JMac. He does Good Stuff[tm]
• NGINX S3 Gateway – I might need this next week
• The Route Table Is the Contract: Claim Checks Behind a Gateway – Or maybe this
• The Local Gallery – Fun gallery (that has something I want)
• 
• “A Very Unnoffical and Definitely not Definitive List of Principles of Timeless Design” by James Shackell in Never Too Small is really good. (NTS is likely my favourite magazine discovery of the year.) Spoiler, here are the principles
  1. Timeless Design /needs a story/
  2. Timeless Design /is simple/
  3. Timeless Design /has emotional durability/
  4. Timeless Design /is quality design/
  5. Timeless Design /is revolution/
  6. Timeless Design /is loose fit/
• Yvonne Hung’s fans – I’m a fan
• Fifteen Tics – One thing I miss from the RSS heyday is Rands. Yes, he still has a feed, but I don’t have an offline reader I like. And yes, that is an Adam shaped problem.

• “There is a special level of hell for taking away a competent person’s confidence.” – Mike Monteiro
• “ultra-saturated fuchsia” – listed with no context
• Basmati has quite a bit of interesting history, etc. around it
• Mad Honey – wait, what?
• Looking to the sky reveals much about what’s happening on the ground – flights to Europe are at night partly because of the jetstream? I call BS and say it is just a nice coincidence. But what do I know…
• “But we’re respecting the DNA of the house. We don’t want to be a fashion brand.” – Alessio Lillocci, Canali’s first Creative Director. As one should.
• 
• “And this is why good urban wayfinding matters – because when it becomes muddled, disjointed, it triggers a loss of confidence in people. Once that happens, there are all manner of consequences. Buildings need to staff up information desks, tourists jump on the crammed hot Metro rather than walk, people give up on life and throw themselves in the Seine (at least it’s clean now).” – Andrew Tuck, EiC, Monocle
• Dissecting the Denkiburo – Hop, skip and jump to get to this article, and along the way read an NIH paper about how a woman used one and had complications with her pace maker. Ya think?!
• “In short, don’t just reach for the AI Botox; show your writerly wrinkles.” – also Andrew Tuck

From Mail

• The Three Questions Every Magazine Founder Should Be Able to Answer – also applies to startups
• ‘Every founder is a marketer whether they like it or not, and this is the cheat sheet for the part most of us are winging.’ – from Matt Verlaque’s ‘Midweek Mashup #36’ in why you should lean about human nature. But I’m still that guy who doesn’t link to Twitter. (So dissapointed the Laravel community stayed there, but that’s a whole other thing.)
• 12 Factor Companies – did I cheat and find a person’s tweek as a substack? Yes, yes I did.
• Sales is like golf… – Matt also linked to a guy who screenshot this comment from Hacker News and didn’t credit it. I know, y’all are shocked at such a thing on Twitter.
• 
• 

From Safari

• A Tour of WebAuthn – I still don’t get the Passkey hype. I know I should, but…
• What are git worktrees, and why should I use them? – worktrees are a must with agents
• Stacked pull requests – I only just learned of this feature last week. Another of those things I think we need to likely understand to effectively use the robots
• i-have-adhd – I appreciate the need to optimize token burn, but I dislike caveman mode, etc.
• The Laravel Scheduler Under the Hood – File under ‘know your tools’
• PHP Attributes: What, Why, How and When – Again, thing I know I should use
• UUIDs, ULIDs and Sqids: A Practical Deep Dive – This site is on fire with the articles.
• Multi-Account AWS Is About Ownership, Not Accounts – I like this framing
• Release on Demand – Is this oversimplified? Maybe. But also, this has been true for at least 25 years.

From Safari

• The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool – Yup. It is tiring.
• Your Google Maps API Key Now Has Access to Gemini Al - And You Were Never Told – Check your keys kids. One of the Good Things[tm]? of SOC2 is you have to do this ish quarterly.
• Magazine Publishing Essentials – ‘on‑demand 101‑level sessions, curated and hosted by Joyce Byrne, break down the fundamentals of running a small magazine today’
• Architecture Decision Record – As I help migrate an app, I’m thinking more and more about ADRs to feed into the robots.
• 
• How PHP Attributes Changed the Way I Write Livewire – Attributes and Enums are being surprisingly hard to get my brain to adopt. Using robots to write code isn’t helping.
• Multi-Agent Orchestration in Laravel: When You Actually Need It – More real examples like this please. There are infinite gotchas using LLMs for things.
• Using property hooks in PHP – ‘I tend to reserve methods for behaviours or complex logic, and defer to virtual properties for simple derived values’
• Prompt-Injection Guardrails in Laravel: Defend the Tools, Not the Prompt – see above gotchas comment.
• Working Effectively with Claude Code – Claude Code moves so fast. /btw is super cool.

From Safari

• Dune as an operational model – I vots that ‘DuneOps’ officially becomes A Thing[tm]
• Two People Exchanging Saliva – Odd, but gorgeous short film. And the dress she wears is fantastic.
• Why LLMs Write Incorrect SQL (and What That Means for Your Database) – This is why I worry more about changes that involve sql directly rather than an ORM.
• RBAC in Laravel: A Practical Deep Dive – Feels like AI wrote it, but still a good overview. Personally I would just use Laravel Permission and be done with it.
• On pricing – Pricing is a story. I don’t link to Seth Godin enough.
• How I write feature specs – How to use multiple levels of AI to produce a document for AI. I still bump into this trend of fully fleshed out specs as being ‘waterfall for robots’. But interesting none the less.
• Searching multiple columns with one URL parameter in laravel-query-builder – Looks good. I’ve used similar packages but not that were as elegant.
• 💵All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous. – This is going to be a bigger and bigger thing.
• Useful memories become faulty when continuously updated by LLMs – Now I feel like I need to audit the robot’s memory. I never wanted to be a programmer, I just knew how to program. But I see why people miss just writing code.
• In a quest to becoming AI-independent – Now, I would spend disposible income on art, not hardware, because I’ve never been a hardware nerd. But I’m glad people are doing this work. I would absolutely buy a $5k local inference rig to sit on my desk at the office.
• How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer – The is zero-tolerance, and then there is ‘humans in a can on the other side of the moon’ tolerant.
• 10 trillion downloads are crushing open-source repositories - here’s what they’re doing about it – My hunch is that someone will create something that lives in the AWS Marketplace that acts as the local cache between the repositories and will be able to make a lot of money. Yes, there are things like this already, but aimed at Big E Enterprise. What about the rest? No, I don’t have time to build this myself.
• Debugging Audio Artifacts Caused by… a Serial Port? – The really amazing part of this post is that they figured it out at all. Magic!
• How AWS Trainium actually works (2026) – Chip design decisions are neat. See above for running local inference things. Ideas proven at hyperscaler scale will eventually come to prosumer gear
• Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks – Yup, beware of defaults, and understand what you run. Also, Pintrest is still a thing?
• Your Container Is Not a Sandbox – Indeed. This is k8s heavy, but again, someone could wrap this all nicely with a bow that sits in your toolbar and be laughing.

From Phone

• SaaS Lens – I thing the AWS Well-Architected Framework is super handy. Since I specialize in SaaS, this is useful. Even if some is for a scale I don’t operate at.
• Fermi ROI: Fixing the ROI rubric – An interesting approach to a hard problem
• The Fascinating Stories Behind 5 of the World’s Big Currency Symbols – In completely alignment with my collection of useless facts interests
• Chinese Etiquette: Fist and palm salute – I’m amused that so many greeting rituals evolved to show that they are not attacking you
• 30 Of The Funniest Menu Translation Fails Ever – This is very much Asian menus getting English wrong, but ‘white people getting characters’ is as equally funny variant of this
• Guard rail (rail transport) – In case you ever wondered why there are sometimes extra rails on the track
• The shape of the new 1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S – Ligature nerdiness
• What’s Inside The Bean? Photos Show Construction Of ‘Cloud Gate’ – A) Did you know that is what is is actually called, B) So cool.
• Kit spent over $1 million on AWS in 2021 – An old (now) breakdown, but still useful. Understanding your cloud spend is part of senior tech leadership’s responsiblity
• The 50 Best Quotes About Men’s Style & Fashion
• Make Boring Plans – I aspire for boring. Except for shoes. (Of course!)
• Sending weekly 5-15 updates – I accidently do this with my “What’s New” posts every Monday
• Data diffs: Algorithms for explaining what changed in a dataset – Science has a reproducability problem. This is part of it.
• Growth and Power – Understanding Big-P Power is important as you ladder up
• Deconstructing a Waterpark – if you want a more technical name for ‘the pink slide’ or ‘the yellow one.’