Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-14.


The Last Quiet Thing

Tags: tech, ux, design, business, attention-economy

A good piece, well designed too. Shows how demanding our current devices are. So much attention requested and so much complexity the user has to deal with. We clearly lost the plot as an industry.

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing


What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem

Tags: tech, philosophy, learning, reading, design

Indeed it’s not simply books vs screens. It’s about design and how our attention gets fractured (on purpose). We need to recognise there are many ways to learn and to produce ideas, then design for it. We’d be better off as a civilisation rather than staying with the current attention economy.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem


Here’s why I’ve installed a Dead Man’s Switch on my home server

Tags: tech, self-hosting, life, death

You’re self-hosting? Better keep in check what happens to the people who depend even indirectly on your services when you’re gone.

https://www.androidauthority.com/home-server-dead-man-switch-3648903/


LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer

Tags: tech, linkedin, surveillance

Are we surprised? Of course depends on the browser and they’re looking mostly for extensions. Clearly they try hard to map what people use, it’s corporate espionage.

https://browsergate.eu/


DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

Tags: tech, embedded, memory, economics, ai, machine-learning, gpt

The price hike on RAM due to the LLM as a service bubble is really killing interesting fields. Can’t we have nice things? Will the arm race end soon?

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/dram-pricing-is-killing-the-hobbyist-sbc-market/


Nations priced out of Big AI are building with frugal models

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, innovation, economics

Real innovations come from constraints. The frugal AI movement is clearly where we will see interesting things emerging. Interestingly, those approaches are closer to what AI is about as a research field than the industrial complex which got unleashed with all its extractive power.

https://restofworld.org/2026/frugal-ai-big-tech/


The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, git

We’re not helped much by our tools here… Clearly provenance needs to be double checked.

https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-03-24-the-comforting-lie-of-sha-pinning/


handymkv: A tool to simplify use of MakeMKV and the HandBrakeCLI tool

Tags: tech, bluray, video, codec, tools

You got bluray discs to encode for use on your NAS? This looks like a nice option.

https://github.com/dmars8047/handymkv


Running out of Disk Space in Production

Tags: tech, architecture, storage, failure

Are you sure your understand how your reverse proxy works and the impacts it can have in production?

https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-04-01-running-out-of-disk-space-on-launch.html


your hex editor should color-code bytes

Tags: tech, hex, data-visualization, debugging

Interesting color coding for hex editor. It indeed brings interesting properties.

https://simonomi.dev/blog/color-code-your-bytes/


Git Bayesect

Tags: tech, git, tools, tests

Git bisect won’t help much for flaky tests… but maybe this bayesian approach can.

https://hauntsaninja.github.io/git_bayesect.html


slowql: SQL static analyzer for performance, security, compliance and cost

Tags: tech, databases, sql, tools, performance, security, ci

Looks like an interesting tool to check your SQL queries on the CI.

https://github.com/makroumi/slowql


Joins are NOT Expensive!

Tags: tech, databases, performance

Interesting article which goes deep in comparing joins vs denormalised big tables. The conclusion is in the title, bit it’s worth a read for the other insights.

https://www.database-doctor.com/posts/joins-are-not-expensive


C++26 is done!

Tags: tech, c++, standard, reflection

The new standard is upon us and it’ll be massive. It indeed looks like another C++11. If used it’ll feel like a very different language.

https://herbsutter.com/2026/03/29/c26-is-done-trip-report-march-2026-iso-c-standards-meeting-london-croydon-uk/


What happens when a destructor throws

Tags: tech, c++, exceptions

A good reminder of why destructors shouldn’t throw. It really has to be a last resort measure and only carefully considered. There’s a reason why they are nothrow by default since C++11.

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2026/04/01/when-a-destructor-throws


Why Don’t You Use String Views (as std::wstring_view) Instead of Passing std::wstring by const&?

Tags: tech, c++, c, memory

Indeed be careful at how you use strings when interacting with C APIs. String views are likely not what you want in that context. There is a reason why they don’t have c_str().

https://giodicanio.com/2024/05/14/why-dont-you-use-string-views-like-std-wstring_view-instead-of-passing-std-wstring-by-const-reference/


Watch out for missed warnings on vendor C++ toolchains

Tags: tech, c, c++, compiler, embedded

Vendor toolchains should see only a limited trust. Like in this case they’re often partial or old.

https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/2026-03-31-watch-out-for-missed-warnings-on-vendor-cpp-toolchains.html


Why Fakes Beat Mocks and Testcontainers

Tags: tech, tests, fake, failure

I vehemently agree with this piece. Fakes are unfortunately underrated. They’re the most powerful test double, I wish more projects would invest in them (can be quite an investment, which the article doesn’t quite show unfortunately).

https://pierrezemb.fr/posts/why-fakes-beat-mocks-and-testcontainers/


Working software runs locally

Tags: tech, developer-experience, tests

This is indeed very important to ensure the tooling around your project supports running the whole thing locally. Too often projects sacrifice the ability to do this, it’s clearly a hindrance to testability and a short feedback loop.

https://nickmonad.blog/2026/working-software-runs-locally/


Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons from Tech Lead to CTO

Tags: tech, architecture, debugging, observability, orm, backend, frontend, organisation, leadership

Lots of good insights in here. Of course YMMV and some definitely depends on your context. That’s a lot of dimensions to keep in mind though.

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/articles/scaling-a-monolith-to-1m-loc-113-pragmatic-lessons-from-tech-lead-to-cto


Why the verb “to be” is so irregular

Tags: linguistics, history, english

Fascinating origins of “to be”. As usual to understand this kind of phenomenon, or at least start to build a theory, you have to go back quite far in history.

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-the-verb-to-be-is-so-irregular



Bye for now!