Viewing profile — diamondap

It is extremely mentally demanding to do both, even for someone with an overactive brain. I reached a point of severe burnout in 2025 and cut back to part-time work. I'll have to r…

Ha! I started my career in a company where I had to pump out custom web apps as fast as humanly possible. The apps were successful, and then I had to maintain them for several year…

I tried make my PDFs X-1a compliant with WeasyPrint, then ran them through Adobe's PDF/X validator and they kept failing. I was in a bit of a hurry and found a way to do it with gh…

Kudos to you for doing that. I've been publishing print and ebooks since 2015, and I can attest to the fact the Word to PDF X-1/a to epub/kindle pipeline is painful. Making minor e…

> Humans are objectively quite cheap. I disagree with that statement when it comes to software developers. They are actually quite expensive. The typically enter the workforce with…

I think AI will substantially thin out the ranks of programmers over the next five years or so. I've been very impressed with Claude 4.5 and have been using it daily at work. It te…

Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/AkgMN

OK, maybe it isn't capitalism but US society that implies that promise. Many (insensitive) people respond to tales of economic woe by saying, "Get a job!" As if that's going to sol…

There are more people struggling these days than the mainstream news reports. The lines at the food banks where I live are much longer than they were before COVID. One of the local…

My all-time favorite flippant description of a programming language: someone once described Java as "a domain-specific language for converting XML files to stack traces."

I love this part: > A workman could check the stone size himself by seeing if the stone would fit into his mouth. They're probably laying down over a million stones per mile. Do al…

Amazon recently bought a data center in Pennsylvania that comes with a guaranteed 960 MW of power. (See https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-acquires-talens-nuclear-data-…

> "And if yes, who cares?" One of my managers used to say that the only reason people write software is because there isn't already an emacs or Excel macro to do what they need.

After 25 years of coding primarily in emacs, I switched mainly to VS Code for larger, more complicated projects last year. I did it mainly because it eases navigation through large…

A few years ago, I talked to three retired federal law enforcement agents who had each spent 20+ years fighting the cartels that were bringing drugs into the US from Mexico and Sou…

Actually, one software-developer-turned-writer did something close. Check out Chris Fox's book "Write to Market" on Amazon. He sat down and analyzed sales figures for different boo…

Basically any company offering special services that work with very large data sets. That could be a consumer backup system like Carbonite or a bulk photo processing service. In ei…

> Only the affluent can learn these things because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. I can't say I agree with all the author writes, but that statement is spot on.…

Interesting. Thank you! And the about page has some useful links to other projects. https://www.marginalia.nu/marginalia-search/about/

Are there any search engines out there that limit results to useful sites instead of content farms and SEO-optimized garbage? There are tons of blogs, forums and hobbyist sites fil…

One of the great lines of 18th century theater comes from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's "The School for Scandal." Sir Peter, alarmed at his wife's extravagant spending, asks her why …

Thanks for posting that. That's pretty cool.

To all you folks complaining about the quality of POD books, you should know that the book designer has a lot to do with the book's readability. Many self-published authors who des…