One of my favorite (technology) books I've read in the last few years has been A Philosophy of Software Design by John Oosterhout.

In the README above, there is an ongoing discussion between John and Uncle Bob, the author of Clean Code. Also a great book, but I personally found APOSD more aligning with how I see software design.

I'd highly recommend reading the entire link. I agree with John on comments.

How is Cloudflare this good?

I set up R2 object storages with django-storages in about 5 minutes.

Now I can drop a file in my markdown editor and it will upload it to R2 and host it on my media subdomain.

Cloudflare R2's Free Tier is incredibly generous.

Here is a photo of a sourdough bread I made recently:

When I saw the Gumroad website I felt something. That design spoke to me. I finally found out the name of the style: Neo Brutalism.

I wish there were more sites like this.

Sepideh Yazdi wrote a really good article about it. You should check it out.

For the longest time I've ran my websites using a VPS and set up everything from nginx to gunicorn using Ansible. This worked great but is kind of outdated.

Then I tried Coolify. The ease of which I could add a new Postgres database, Umami instance or Redis instance blew my mind. I'd been using Ansible for that, too! After a few days of using it though, I realized there was too much magic going on for my liking.

On x.com, Ben Katz posted an article about self-hosting. While I don't do everything in that post, I extracted immense value from his investigation into different self-host options.

This lead me to try Dokku. A week later I have 5 of my (Django) applications running on Dokku. Including a complete monitoring stack (Loki, Grafana, Prometheus).

My takeaway is this:

• If you're a beginner getting into self-hosting, Coolify is really good. It does a lot of "magic" under the hood such as registering SSL certificates. You can easily back-up your container data to S3. It's a really great tool.

• If you're comfortable around the command line, Dokku is the superior experience. It requires a bit more effort (e.g. you need a separate redis, postgers and letsencrypt plugins) but you have complete control over how you run your containers. I had the idea for jilles.link after reading Simon Willson's blogmarks post and had a Django application (this one!) up and runnning in production in a few hours.

Amazing.

A lovely article by Sean Goedecke.

LLMs excel at writing code that works that doesn’t have to be maintained.

Really resonated with me. Overly relying on LLMs turns into your code not really being yours anymore. I look at my code from some years ago and go like "I wrote that? Eww". With LLMs it's more like a week ago.

The article is definitely worth reading.

It reminds me of Stephen Fry's naration of Nick Cave's stirring letter about ChatGPT.

That songwriter who is using ChatGPT to write his lyrics because it is faster and easier is participating in the erosion of the world's soul and the spirit of humanity itself. And, to put it polity should f*cking desist if he wants to call himself a songwriter.

What a wonderful idea! Just what I was looking for. When I write something on my blog I want it to bring a certain level of value. Writing to learn or teach.

When I saw this HackerNews thread about Simon's link blog, I realized this is what I need.

These will be links to things I find worth sharing. Like a personal Twitter or X. Hopefully to build up a repertoire of links over my lifetime.