Featured articles

Returning to Rails in 2026: Building a modern application with the web framework that shook everything up in the early 2000s.

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

It’s Only When You Look Back

I remember talking to my Grandfather shortly before he passed away about the changes he’d seen in his lifetime. Born in 1911, the thing he said that really stuck with me was that when he was a child people were barely puttering around off the ground in aeroplanes; A few years before his 60th birthday, men walked on the moon. When I look back at the simple 8-bit microcomputers of my childhood, compared to the modern world in which my daughter is growing up, I can’t help but...

Sloppy Copies

Last month, I wrote an article about my recent experience creating a hobby project in a web framework - Ruby on Rails - that hasn’t been “in fashion” for some time. The blog post gathered some interest and made it to various discussion sites like Hacker News and others. It caused a pretty big spike in traffic and my post got linked from some more places and generated some interesting conversations. I had fun, talked to some new users of my app (a simple, no-strings-attache...

Returning To Rails in 2026

I love a good side-project. Like most geeks, I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes when faced with problems - give me a minor inconvenience and I’ll happily spend weeks building something far more elaborate than the situation warrants. There’s joy in having a playground to explore ideas and “what ifs”; Building things just for the sheer hell of it, as Richard Feynman put it “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”.

Stop Breaking TLS

Rant ahead: I hate TLS “Inspection” software with a burning passion and I wish we collectively as an industry would just knock it the fuck off and stop pretending it’s some great security benefit. Every time I encounter it, in whatever form, it’s a gigantic headache that makes everyone’s life worse off and as far as I am concerned offers next to zero tangible benefits.

AmigaGuide Reference Library

As I slowly but surely work towards the next release of my setcmd project for the Amiga (see the 68k branch for the gory details and my total noob-like C flailing around), I’ve made heavy use of documentation in the AmigaGuide format. Despite it’s age, it’s a great Amiga-native format and there’s a wealth of great information out there for things like the C API, as well as language guides and tutorials for tools like the Installer utility - and the AmigaGuide markup synta...