read_list

List of resources (any medium) that caught my attention this year (2025 edition). If curious check also:

• 2022
• 2023
• 2024
• 2025

• 1. JAN-2026
  • 1.1. Prepare for That Stupid World
  • 1.2. I Program on the Subway
  • 1.3. Understanding Query Execution with the Analyzer
  • 1.4. Your Supabase Is Public
  • 1.5. Creator of Go Crashes out - YouTube
  • 1.6. Legendary Game Dev Jonathan Blow
  • 1.7. Assorted less(1) tips
  • 1.8. Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport
  • 1.9. I’m addicted to being useful
  • 1.10. How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
  • 1.11. Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes ::
  • 1.12. Bridges - by Kent Beck - Software Design: Tidy First?
• 2. FEB-2026
  • 2.1. Opinion
  • 2.2. A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: Monarch’s Philosophy on AI in Dev – Somehow Manage
  • 2.3. The future of software engineering is SRE
  • 2.4. Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025 – Wiki Education
  • 2.5. The gentle obsolescence - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack
  • 2.6. When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
  • 2.7. (AI) Slop Terrifies Me – ezhik.jp
  • 2.8. I Started Programming When I Was 7. I’m 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
  • 2.9. Your Job Isn’t Disappearing. It’s Shrinking Around You in Real Time
  • 2.10. AI makes you boring
• 3. MAR-2026
  • 3.1. The AI Vampire. This was an unusually hard post to…
  • 3.2. How I Use Claude Code
  • 3.3. (3) The Iran War: How America, Israel and Iran Got Here
  • 3.4. AI Coding is Gambling
  • 3.5. (3) we’re so back - YouTube
  • 3.6. Opinion
  • 3.7. Compacting - by Benn Stancil
  • 3.8. Thoughts on slowing the fuck down — Mario Zechner
  • 3.9. Rome’s Greatest Enemy Part 3 - Bloodbath in Africa
• 4. APR-2026
  • 4.1. JFK: The Road to the White House (Part 1) - The Rest is History
  • 4.2. How the KKK Turned the South Into a Terror State - The Rest Is History
  • 4.3. Is Iran Winning? - The Ezra Klein Show
  • 4.4. The machines are fine. I’m worried about us. - Minas Karamanis
  • 4.5. ClickHouse v26.3 Release Webinar
  • 4.6. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess (Aphyr)
  • 4.7. Anna Gát: Review of The Drama (film)
  • 4.8. An Unfinished Life: JFK biography (Robert Dallek)
  • 4.9. Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for Reinventing
  • 4.10. SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File
  • 4.11. Punch-Drunk Love - Wikipedia
  • 4.12. DHH’s new way of writing code
  • 4.13. I Still Prefer MCP Over Skills — David Mohl
  • 4.14. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Culture — Aphyr
  • 4.15. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Information Ecology — Aphyr
  • 4.16. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Annoyances — Aphyr
  • 4.17. Blowback S1E00: Iraqnophobia feat. H. Jon Benjamin
  • 4.18. The Moral Cost of Trump’s War — The Ezra Klein Show (w/ Fareed Zakaria)
  • 4.19. IDS#03 - Database Storage: Files & Pages (Andy Pavlo, CMU)
  • 4.20. Monster SCALE Summit 2026 — Building a Database Replication Platform at Scale by Joy Gao
  • 4.21. The Rest is Politics ep.18: Iran War — The Art of the No Deal
  • 4.22. Do You Even Need a Database? — DB Pro Blog
  • 4.23. The Forever War — Dexter Filkins (Afghanistan 1998, Taliban, Northern Alliance)
  • 4.24. The Illusion of American Omnipotence — D.W. Brogan (Harper’s, 1952)
  • 4.25. Sherry Turkle — We’re losing the raw, human part of being with each other
• 5. MAY-2026
  • 5.1. Tinybird vs. ClickHouse — What’s the difference?
  • 5.2. JSON Lines — On The Web
  • 5.3. Dave Rupert — When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break
  • 5.4. The 1000x faster financial database — Joran Dirk Greef (TigerBeetle) on The Changelog
  • 5.5. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History 62 — Supernova in the East
  • 5.6. Laws of Software Engineering
  • 5.7. Trump Fought The Pope, And The Pope Won? — The Rest Is Politics
  • 5.8. xkcd 1172 — Workflow
  • 5.9. Opinion — Does Israel Want to Be Saudi Arabia? (NYT)
  • 5.10. Index Sharding in ClickHouse Cloud — Petabyte-scale data indexing
  • 5.11. The West Forgot How to Build — Now It’s Forgetting Code
  • 5.12. Kent Beck — Genie Tarpit
  • 5.13. Why I Still Reach for Scheme and Lisp Instead of Haskell
  • 5.14. What the heck is the event loop anyway — Philip Roberts, JSConf EU
  • 5.15. Benn Stancil — Leaderbored
  • 5.16. Kuku TV, Reelies — Why micro-dramas are going mainstream
  • 5.17. Good developers learn to program — not a language
  • 5.18. The AI Economy is about to change — ThePrimeagen
  • 5.19. Martin Kleppmann on Kafka, DDIA, and data integration pain — Interview
  • 5.20. His Majesty and Our Travesty — NYT Opinion
  • 5.21. Perzia ep1 — The Rest Is History (Greco-Persian Wars)
  • 5.22. How Economic Calamity Led To Thatcher’s Rise — The Rest Is History ep.32
  • 5.23. Mitchell Hashimoto — The Pragmatic Engineer
  • 5.24. (32) Germany Defied Donald Trump — Here’s Why
  • 5.25. This Is The Most Important Skill You Can Have In Life — Ryan Holiday
  • 5.26. The Revolution Will Be Ticketed — Benn Stancil
  • 5.27. (33) The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism
  • 5.28. Easy is Overrated — Cal Newport
  • 5.29. perzia ep1 — Greco-Persian War, Miletus, Darius, Persian Ideology
  • 5.30. The Log — What Every Software Engineer Should Know About Real-Time Data’s Unifying Abstraction — Jay Kreps
  • 5.31. Přepište dějiny — Brno válečné a účtující — Meeting Brno
  • 5.32. The Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox — Cal Newport
  • 5.33. Getting Closer to ‘Her’ — From Moshi to Thinking Machines
  • 5.34. Why Programmers Adopt Bad Ideas — Casey Muratori
  • 5.35. Mitchell Hashimoto — AI Psychosis and the MTBF/MTTR Reckoning
  • 5.36. The Bonfire of Our Vanities — Benn Stancil
  • 5.37. Hardcore History 56 — Kings of Kings — Dan Carlin
  • 5.38. The Emacsification of Software — sockpuppet.org
  • 5.39. How Trump’s China Trip Could Trigger A New Global Order
  • 5.40. Latency Numbers Programmer Should Know — Crash Course
  • 5.41. SCIM — The Identity Protocol You Use Every Day
  • 5.42. FANG Interview Question — Process vs Thread
  • 5.43. Real-Time Decisioning for AI Agents — Why you Need a Customer Context Layer First
  • 5.44. Source of Truth is back — Alex Dean on AI agents and behavioural data
  • 5.45. Prompts are technical debt too — Sean Goedecke
  • 5.46. Hardcore History 62 — Supernova in the East I
  • 5.47. Pragmatic Engineer — TypeScript, C and Turbo Pascal
  • 5.48. The Elephant in the Room — Josh W. Comeau
  • 5.49. I’m Going Back to Writing Code by Hand — k10s blog
  • 5.50. Tyler Cowen — Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI
  • 5.51. I’m Tired of AI-Generated Answers — Orchid Files
  • 5.52. Simon Willison — Anthropic and OpenAI Have Found Product-Market Fit
  • 5.53. Kent Beck — Still Burning — WorkOS founder Michael Grinich on enterprise trust
  • 5.54. Nolan Lawson — Using AI to Write Better Code More Slowly
  • 5.55. Tyler Cowen — Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI
  • 5.56. TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg — The Pragmatic Engineer
• 6. JUN-2026
  • 6.1. The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next — Brian Cantrill — The Pragmatic Engineer
  • 6.2. Japan on the Road to WW2
  • 6.3. A Life After AI Psychosis — TheStandup
  • 6.4. Fork Yeah — The Rise and Development of FreeBSD (LISA11)
  • 6.5. Introducing multi-stage distributed query execution in ClickHouse Cloud
  • 6.6. TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal — Anders Hejlsberg
  • 6.7. Hamming — You and Your Research
  • 6.8. Casey — But it happened. (Eric Schmidt, AI discourse, and responsibility)
  • 6.9. Julia Evans — How much memory is my process using?
  • 6.10. Julia Evans — Swapping, memory limits, and cgroups

1. JAN-2026

1.1. Prepare for That Stupid World

• https://ploum.net/2025-12-19-prepare-for-that-world.html

  normalising the fact that “even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!”

1.2. I Program on the Subway

• https://www.scd31.com/posts/programming-on-the-subway Creative use of time. Like Ryan Holiday’s suggestion to be extremely careful about interstinial/do-nothing time.

1.3. Understanding Query Execution with the Analyzer

• https://clickhouse.com/docs/guides/developer/understanding-query-execution-with-the-analyzer Something I’m learning by heart these days. Combining with https://roundup.getdbt.com/p/the-evolution-of-databases-w-wolfram

1.4. Your Supabase Is Public

• https://skilldeliver.com/your-supabase-is-public

1.5. Creator of Go Crashes out - YouTube

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9i3VTFxd_Q Prime’s contrarian take. +1

1.6. Legendary Game Dev Jonathan Blow

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHfdUqLmPNU The only reasons why games may ever be interesting again and this is because of rants in The Future of Code podcast.

1.7. Assorted less(1) tips

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464120 Learning less!

1.8. Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport

• https://calnewport.com/be-wary-of-digital-deskilling/
• I keep coming to this concept, it’s memorable and somewhat valuable

1.9. I’m addicted to being useful

• https://www.seangoedecke.com/addicted-to-being-useful/

1.10. How I estimate work as a staff software engineer

• https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-i-estimate-work/ Sean again :) The standard way of thinking about estimates is that you start with a proposed piece of software work, and you then go and figure out how long it will take. This is entirely backwards. Instead, teams will often start with the estimate, and then go and figure out what kind of software work they can do to meet it.

1.11. Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes ::

• https://dlt.github.io/blog/posts/introduction-to-postgresql-indexes/ Bookmarking for later, because we started PG managed service starting 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpBA13nQxAk

1.12. Bridges - by Kent Beck - Software Design: Tidy First?

• https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/bridges important

2. FEB-2026

2.1. Opinion

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-henry-farrell.html Great analysis!

2.2. A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: Monarch’s Philosophy on AI in Dev – Somehow Manage

• https://somehowmanage.com/2026/01/22/a-step-behind-the-bleeding-edge-monarchs-philosophy-on-ai-in-dev/ Looking at what a quick smartphone adoption done to the genZ, I’m not adopting AI too quickly. Only where it sharpens the old skills.

2.3. The future of software engineering is SRE

• https://swizec.com/blog/the-future-of-software-engineering-is-sre/?utm_source=changelog-news robustness, robustness, robustness

2.4. Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025 – Wiki Education

• https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipedia-editing-what-we-learned-in-2025/ Bookmarking pangram.

2.5. The gentle obsolescence - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack

• https://benn.substack.com/p/the-gentle-obsolescence Interesting re-framimg and trashing the “Intern” frame around AI. Timely?

2.6. When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown

• https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/03/badnas/

2.7. (AI) Slop Terrifies Me – ezhik.jp

• https://ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifies-me/ A series of journey(code) enthusiasts accepting the end of engineering as we knew it since the birth of hFortran. This is the end, beautiful friend.

2.8. I Started Programming When I Was 7. I’m 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed

• https://www.jamesdrandall.com/posts/the_thing_i_loved_has_changed/ Another in the series of mourning/grieving and ACCEPTING the end of death of coding as the essence of software engineering. New chapter’s here. Death deserves grief.

2.9. Your Job Isn’t Disappearing. It’s Shrinking Around You in Real Time

• https://newsletter.jantegze.com/p/your-job-isnt-disappearing-its-shrinking The adaptation strategy is to use new technology as an enabler or doing things previously unforeseen. Not fight it. Not learn it. Kind of “Gas Town” move? Still, it’s too amorphous to spend time with, in my opinion. Rather, read the structure of scientific revolution by TS Kuhn again and other histories of technologicial revolutions. This is not the first time, it’s going to rhyme.

2.10. AI makes you boring

• https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_132_ai_bores/ exactly

3. MAR-2026

3.1. The AI Vampire. This was an unusually hard post to…

• https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163 On the dark side of Agentic Engineering, it being too exhausting. But is not everything in the amorophous/berserk mode?

3.2. How I Use Claude Code

• https://boristane.com/blog/how-i-use-claude-code/ A bit waterfall-y, but better than berserk. Waiting for AIAgile.

3.3. (3) The Iran War: How America, Israel and Iran Got Here

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKWMrpQOh7Y Good, sobering, not as deep into Islam as The rest is history series on Iranian revolution from early this year but awesome.

3.4. AI Coding is Gambling

• https://notes.visaint.space/ai-coding-is-gambling/

3.5. (3) we’re so back - YouTube

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DP0az1q_8M Mitchel Hashimoto’s wowed by latest Codex - another ‘its so over’ moment and Primes skepticism. We shall see said the zenmaster.

3.6. Opinion

• https://archive.is/r9Dkt As-of-now, the most essential piece on the impact of AI on the quality of mind

3.7. Compacting - by Benn Stancil

• https://benn.substack.com/p/compacting

3.8. Thoughts on slowing the fuck down — Mario Zechner

• https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/
• AI agents create compounding complexity without friction; slow down, keep humans in the loop

3.9. Rome’s Greatest Enemy Part 3 - Bloodbath in Africa

• https://youtu.be/Wd-3I9qqLbc
• Second Punic War: Scipio’s African campaign, fire attack, Battle of Zama 202 BC, fall of Hannibal

4. APR-2026

4.1. JFK: The Road to the White House (Part 1) - The Rest is History

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb5M3ax9cxg
• JFK’s Irish-Catholic origins, Joe Kennedy Sr., PT-109 heroism, health struggles, rise to politics

4.2. How the KKK Turned the South Into a Terror State - The Rest Is History

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPkpTc5xJs
• Rest Is History KKK pt.2: voter suppression, Colfax massacre, Compromise of 1877, Birth of a Nation

4.3. Is Iran Winning? - The Ezra Klein Show

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUhi5b8aj7U
• Suzanne Maloney on Iran’s time strategy, Hormuz toll booth, failed decapitation, no Plan C

4.4. The machines are fine. I’m worried about us. - Minas Karamanis

• https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/
• AI tool-use vs cognitive outsourcing, Alice vs Bob, Schwartz experiment, Dune quote

4.5. ClickHouse v26.3 Release Webinar

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bY0ucNB1lQ
• ClickHouse 26.3 LTS: materialized CTEs, sharded maps, WASM UDFs, 31 SQL dialects, async inserts default, ALP codec, data lake 40-100x speedup, chDB v4 zero-copy pandas

4.6. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess (Aphyr)

• https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess
• Kyle Kingsbury (Jepsen) on LLMs: improv machines, jagged competence frontier, bullshit with confidence

4.7. Anna Gát: Review of The Drama (film)

• https://x.com/TheAnnaGat/status/2041911589851345080
• Kierkegaard meets American self-creation: love begins where social roles end

4.8. An Unfinished Life: JFK biography (Robert Dallek)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Unfinished_Life:_John_F._Kennedy,_1917%E2%80%931963
• Dallek’s biography — first access to sealed medical records, PT-109, Cuban Missile Crisis

4.9. Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for Reinventing

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs8J1ZD0CE
• TDD more valuable in AI age, skepticism about skepticism, craft shift from code perfection to domain understanding

4.10. SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File

• https://ultrathink.art/blog/sqlite-in-production-lessons
• Rails 8 + SQLite WAL on Docker, lost orders during blue-green deploy, file lock limits

4.11. Punch-Drunk Love - Wikipedia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch-Drunk_Love
• PTA’s 2002 absurdist romance, Tati + musical influences, Sandler’s dramatic turn

4.12. DHH’s new way of writing code

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiWgKRgdgpI
• agent-first workflow, aesthetics is truth, peak programmer, centaur mode is transitional

4.13. I Still Prefer MCP Over Skills — David Mohl

• https://david.coffee/i-still-prefer-mcp-over-skills/
• MCP as API abstraction vs Skills as CLI wrappers; hybrid: Skills as cheat sheets atop MCP connectors

4.14. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Culture — Aphyr

• https://aphyr.com/posts/413-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-culture
• Aphyr on how LLMs reshape culture — missing mythologies, new AI aesthetics, corporate content arbitration

4.15. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Information Ecology — Aphyr

• https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-information-ecology
• Aphyr on LLM-driven trust erosion — web pollution, spam economics, propaganda at scale, democratic consensus collapse

4.16. The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Annoyances — Aphyr

• https://aphyr.com/posts/415-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-annoyances
• Aphyr on LLM customer service erosion — replacing humans with unreliable chatbots, cognitive atrophy

4.17. Blowback S1E00: Iraqnophobia feat. H. Jon Benjamin

• https://youtu.be/3mpyfw-RySg
• Blowback podcast S1 intro — Iraq War counter-history, cast of characters, cultural amnesia thesis

4.18. The Moral Cost of Trump’s War — The Ezra Klein Show (w/ Fareed Zakaria)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5hU0VHM1-M
  • Fareed Zakaria on Trump’s Iran war, predatory hegemony, and liberalism’s exhaustion

4.19. IDS#03 - Database Storage: Files & Pages (Andy Pavlo, CMU)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxV5Sob5V8
  • Storage hierarchy, heap files, slotted pages, Neon flash talk (Heikki Linnakangas)

4.20. Monster SCALE Summit 2026 — Building a Database Replication Platform at Scale by Joy Gao

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYQe2wcNSQ
• ClickPipes internals: no Debezium/Kafka — S3 buffer + Temporal orchestration + ReplacingMergeTree dedup, CTID-based parallel snapshots, error classification system

4.21. The Rest is Politics ep.18: Iran War — The Art of the No Deal

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoP-oHVTWrs
• Campbell & Stewart on Trump/Vance blowing up Iran negotiations after 21 hours vs Oslo (9mo), Dayton (5mo), Good Friday (22mo), JCPOA (10yr)

4.22. Do You Even Need a Database? — DB Pro Blog

• https://www.dbpro.app/blog/do-you-even-need-a-database
• FS vs DB: ACID gap (only D, and shaky), Greenspun’s 10th rule for databases, concurrency myth

4.23. The Forever War — Dexter Filkins (Afghanistan 1998, Taliban, Northern Alliance)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War_(Filkins_book)
• Filkins’ ground-level account of US wars, Taliban origin myth, Massoud, Afghanistan 1998, Forever War vs Permawar

4.24. The Illusion of American Omnipotence — D.W. Brogan (Harper’s, 1952)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Brogan
• 1952 essay naming the American exceptionalist fallacy — if we are supreme we can’t simply lose, so failure must be treachery (fuelling McCarthyism).

4.25. Sherry Turkle — We’re losing the raw, human part of being with each other

• https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/may/05/rational-heroes-sherry-turkle-mit

5. MAY-2026

5.1. Tinybird vs. ClickHouse — What’s the difference?

• https://www.tinybird.co/blog/tinybird-vs-clickhouse

5.2. JSON Lines — On The Web

• https://jsonlines.org/on_the_web/

5.3. Dave Rupert — When moving fast, talking is the first thing to break

• https://daverupert.com/2026/04/more-talk-less-grok/

5.4. The 1000x faster financial database — Joran Dirk Greef (TigerBeetle) on The Changelog

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr8Y2EYnxJs
• TigerBeetle founder on why general-purpose SQL tops out at ~1000 TPS (rowlocks across network latency), why OLTP is multi-row-major, batched debit-credit interfaces, LSM forest, and deterministic simulation testing (DST) giving ~2000 years of test time per day.

5.5. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History 62 — Supernova in the East

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oErYYBNCHh4

5.6. Laws of Software Engineering

• https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/
• Collection of software engineering laws, including premature optimization (Knuth)

5.7. Trump Fought The Pope, And The Pope Won? — The Rest Is Politics

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fs2H-pPJMQ

5.8. xkcd 1172 — Workflow

• https://xkcd.com/1172/
• <Hyrum’s Law illustrated: user depends on CPU overheating as a feature>

5.9. Opinion — Does Israel Want to Be Saudi Arabia? (NYT)

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/israel-us-public-opinion.html

5.10. Index Sharding in ClickHouse Cloud — Petabyte-scale data indexing

• https://clickhouse.com/blog/index-sharding-clickhouse-cloud-petabyte-scale-indexing
• <ClickHouse blog: index sharding for petabyte-scale workloads>

5.11. The West Forgot How to Build — Now It’s Forgetting Code

• https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things

5.12. Kent Beck — Genie Tarpit

• https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/genie-tarpit
• <LLMs naturally produce low-quality code on both features and flexibility axes, landing below even mediocre ‘muddling’ teams>

5.13. Why I Still Reach for Scheme and Lisp Instead of Haskell

• https://jointhefreeworld.org/blog/articles/lisps/why-i-still-reach-for-scheme-instead-of-haskell/index.html
• <Backlog: return to SICP and Scheme after IDS (Intro to DB Systems) is done>

5.14. What the heck is the event loop anyway — Philip Roberts, JSConf EU

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ
• <Classic JS concurrency talk: call stack, event loop, callback queue, async I/O explained visually>

5.15. Benn Stancil — Leaderbored

• https://benn.substack.com/p/leaderbored
• <AI whiplash is structural: leaders shift compute to inference, ceding training ground to challengers — the real moat is compute, not models>

5.16. Kuku TV, Reelies — Why micro-dramas are going mainstream

• https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v2k3xvr04o

5.17. Good developers learn to program — not a language

• https://evilgeniuslabs.ca/blog/good-developers-learn-to-program-not-a-language
• <Mechanical empathy over syntax: master one system deeply, then compare with a structurally different second>

5.18. The AI Economy is about to change — ThePrimeagen

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-e_nczWqM
• <Compute as the real AI moat; Google vs Anthropic marketing; AI economy structural shift>

5.19. Martin Kleppmann on Kafka, DDIA, and data integration pain — Interview

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVOrURyOu_U
• <kleppmann on why kafka was built - integration pain at linkedin, ddia book origin>

5.20. His Majesty and Our Travesty — NYT Opinion

• https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/opinion/king-charles-america-visit-trump.html
• <king charles visit to trump era america - peak of life after diana’s shadow>

5.21. Perzia ep1 — The Rest Is History (Greco-Persian Wars)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63d-gjFTKZo
• <Darius rise to power, Ionian Revolt background, Aristagoras & Naxos, setting up Marathon>

5.22. How Economic Calamity Led To Thatcher’s Rise — The Rest Is History ep.32

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pn5yGnrbxk
• <Britain 1975: oil shock, 26% inflation, trade union barons, Ted Heath collapse — context for Thatcher becoming Tory leader>

5.23. Mitchell Hashimoto — The Pragmatic Engineer

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjckELpzLOU
• Context switching, best engineers profile, AI agents, open source future

5.24. (32) Germany Defied Donald Trump — Here’s Why

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcliSqa97E0

5.25. This Is The Most Important Skill You Can Have In Life — Ryan Holiday

• https://ryanholiday.net/this-is-the-most-important-skill-you-can-have-in-life/

5.26. The Revolution Will Be Ticketed — Benn Stancil

• https://benn.substack.com/p/the-revolution-will-be-ticketed

5.27. (33) The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHYBLxMPMok

5.28. Easy is Overrated — Cal Newport

• https://calnewport.com/easy-is-overrated/

5.29. perzia ep1 — Greco-Persian War, Miletus, Darius, Persian Ideology

• https://youtu.be/63d-gjFTKZo

5.30. The Log — What Every Software Engineer Should Know About Real-Time Data’s Unifying Abstraction — Jay Kreps

• https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying

5.31. Přepište dějiny — Brno válečné a účtující — Meeting Brno

• https://www.meetingbrno.cz/event/prepiste-dejiny-brno-valecne-a-uctujici/

5.32. The Dark Side of the Jevons Paradox — Cal Newport

• https://calnewport.com/the-dark-side-of-the-jevons-paradox/
• <efficiency gains cause demand explosion + unforeseen side effects — applied to AI and jobs>

5.33. Getting Closer to ‘Her’ — From Moshi to Thinking Machines

• https://polymath707.substack.com/p/getting-closer-to-her-from-moshi
• <two-model architecture splits presence (fast) from intelligence (background) to enable real-time AI voice assistants>

5.34. Why Programmers Adopt Bad Ideas — Casey Muratori

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8B4BSi35CI
• <adoption ≠ quality; cargo-culting in programming culture; fewer LOC = better; modern heroism fights avoidable abstractions>

5.35. Mitchell Hashimoto — AI Psychosis and the MTBF/MTTR Reckoning

• https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2055380239711457578
• <AI psychosis = MTTR-only thinking applied to software; mirrors Netflix chaos engineering debate; local metrics mask global decay>

5.36. The Bonfire of Our Vanities — Benn Stancil

• https://benn.substack.com/p/the-bonfire-of-our-vanities
• <vibe coding as escapism — excitement → disillusionment → open question: will anything remain?>

5.37. Hardcore History 56 — Kings of Kings — Dan Carlin

• https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-56-kings-kings/comment-page-2/
• <Achaemenid Persian Empire — Dan Carlin’s epic series on Persian Kings>

5.38. The Emacsification of Software — sockpuppet.org

• https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

5.39. How Trump’s China Trip Could Trigger A New Global Order

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htwADRlI4Rw
• <geopolitics — Trump China trip and potential new world order>

5.40. Latency Numbers Programmer Should Know — Crash Course

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqR5vESuKe0
• <orders of magnitude for L1/L2/RAM/SSD/network latencies every engineer should know>

5.41. SCIM — The Identity Protocol You Use Every Day

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRaDQTcZRW8

5.42. FANG Interview Question — Process vs Thread

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rLW7zg21gI
• <process vs thread differences — memory isolation, creation cost, communication, use cases>

5.43. Real-Time Decisioning for AI Agents — Why you Need a Customer Context Layer First

• https://www.databricks.com/blog/real-time-decisioning-ai-agents-why-you-need-customer-context-layer-first
• <Alex Dean (Snowplow) on composable CDPs, AI agent decisioning, and the customer context layer>

5.44. Source of Truth is back — Alex Dean on AI agents and behavioural data

• https://sourceoftruth.substack.com/p/source-of-truth-is-back-with-a-new
• <composability won the war; next frontier is AI agent decisioning + real-time customer context layer>

5.45. Prompts are technical debt too — Sean Goedecke

• https://www.seangoedecke.com/prompts-are-technical-debt-too/
• <LLM prompts decay silently across model upgrades — prefer minimal customization with third-party maintained tools>

5.46. Hardcore History 62 — Supernova in the East I

• http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Supernova-in-the-East-i
• Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Japan’s road to WW2, China and Russia context pre-WW1

5.47. Pragmatic Engineer — TypeScript, C and Turbo Pascal

• https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/typescript-c-and-turbo-pascal-with
• void — newsletter article, podcast URL to be processed separately

5.48. The Elephant in the Room — Josh W. Comeau

• https://www.joshwcomeau.com/email/wham-launch-005-elephant-2-p/
• AI amplifies expertise, doesn’t replace it — Iron Man suit analogy; vibe-coders hit walls

5.49. I’m Going Back to Writing Code by Hand — k10s blog

• https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/
• 7 months of AI-only coding → 1690-line god object, unmaintainable — rewriting from scratch; AI builds features not architecture

5.50. Tyler Cowen — Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

• https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-seven-ways-to-avoid-losing
• Tyler Cowen on AI-proofing careers: pursue messy jobs, be cautious about remote work

5.51. I’m Tired of AI-Generated Answers — Orchid Files

• https://orchidfiles.com/im-tired-of-ai-generated-answers/
• Critique of AI misuse as substitute for human judgment — people forwarding AI outputs without critical thinking

5.52. Simon Willison — Anthropic and OpenAI Have Found Product-Market Fit

• https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/
• Enterprise coding agents + human sales hires = PMF; consumer ChatGPT (900M users, 5.6% paying) failed to monetize

5.53. Kent Beck — Still Burning — WorkOS founder Michael Grinich on enterprise trust

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh24KYFfH5Q
• Consumer email app loved but couldn’t monetize; enterprises pay and buy through human relationships — same lesson as Willison/Anthropic PMF

5.54. Nolan Lawson — Using AI to Write Better Code More Slowly

• https://nolanlawson.com/2026/05/25/using-ai-to-write-better-code-more-slowly/
• Multi-model PR review (Claude+Codex+Bugbot) for quality over velocity; bugs as learning side-quests; human triage still essential

5.55. Tyler Cowen — Seven Ways to Avoid Losing Your Job to AI

• https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/05/seven-ways-to-avoid-losing-your-job-to-ai.html

5.56. TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg — The Pragmatic Engineer

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Xv8D8NjTk
• <Anders Hejlsberg on 40 years of language design: Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript, async/await, and AI’s impact on programming>

6. JUN-2026

6.1. The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next — Brian Cantrill — The Pragmatic Engineer

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn_P9nG0zsA
• <Brian Cantrill on Sun/dotcom boom-bust, AWS dominance, Kubernetes origin, and building Oxide Computer from a clean sheet of hardware>

6.2. Japan on the Road to WW2

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEIvQTMJawY

6.3. A Life After AI Psychosis — TheStandup

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVUVfn8OF5k

6.4. Fork Yeah — The Rise and Development of FreeBSD (LISA11)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

6.5. Introducing multi-stage distributed query execution in ClickHouse Cloud

• https://clickhouse.com/blog/multi-stage-distributed-query-execution-clickhouse-cloud

6.6. TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal — Anders Hejlsberg

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Xv8D8NjTk&t=1189s

6.7. Hamming — You and Your Research

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
• <Hamming’s 1986 Bell Labs lecture on what separates first-class researchers from the rest — luck, preparation, confidence, working on important problems, open doors>

6.8. Casey — But it happened. (Eric Schmidt, AI discourse, and responsibility)

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ7EoJDTQY
• <Casey on Eric Schmidt’s Arizona commencement speech: active voice for tech’s promises, passive voice for its harms — ‘it happened’ as moral escape hatch>

6.9. Julia Evans — How much memory is my process using?

• https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/12/03/how-much-memory-is-my-process-using-/
• <Virtual memory, RSS/VIRT/SHR, page tables, TLB, COW, mmap, page faults — foundational Linux process memory>

6.10. Julia Evans — Swapping, memory limits, and cgroups

• https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/02/17/mystery-swap/
• <Production mystery: why swap with free filesystem cache? Answer: cgroup memory limits are independent of system RAM>