The Strays
Some Links and Stuff (2026-05-26)
May 26, 2026
It’s been awhile so I’ve got a bunch of fresh, new links plus some updates
Some fun blog posts from my favorite bloggers
https://www.drcathicks.com/post/on-craft
- Dr. Cat Hicks is a psychologist who specializes in studying software teams and tech work. They have a podcast, this blog, and post frequently on Mastodon. Dr. Hicks spends this post talking about their Grandpa’s love of his Craft for the craft’s sake. It’s so well written and touches on a lot; taking pride in your work, the importance of mentorship, avoiding gatekeeping in communities of practice. The talk dovetails really nicely with Vicki Boykis’ “Build Yourself Flowers” keynote at the annual Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville last month.
https://piechowski.io/post/how-i-audit-a-legacy-rails-codebase/
- Last year, another director at my former employer left and I suddenly found myself the owner of a Ruby on Rails monolith despite never having written any Ruby. This post has a good mix of practical advice on auditing the health of an existing Rails project using specific tools (and AI, responsibly!). But the author also walks through some questions you should ask the people around the project and puts that first! Great approach.
https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/
- Blain details brief histories of some giants in Computing and argues how most, if not all, these luminaries rigorously studied various domains and areas outside computing and other technical disciplines; be they Philosophy, Foreign Languages, Literature, etc. We programmers need to read and do things beyond the keyboard! Especially things that don’t appear obviously applicable to tech. This is hard, but essential to being good developers but more importantly good people.
https://evanhahn.com/all-tests-pass-a-short-story/
- Evan here tasked an AI with writing a small compression implentation in a language new to him called Arturo. Evan gave the bot a AGENTS.md file plus some Go test cases and let it loose. He beamed when the agent finished with all the tests passing, but then he realized the agent just wrote an Arturo shell to call Python. Sigh :( very funny though!
https://belderbos.dev/blog/rust-made-me-a-better-python-developer/
- Not sure if I’ll ever learn Rust. I guess if someone every decides to make me a systems programmer or if I do one of my crazier projects on one of my neverending lists. I like the mindset here. I do have plans to learn basic C, not necessarily because I’m gonna be using it at work. Learning other approaches to working in your field naturally exposes you to new ways to think, new ways to solve problems. And I don’t think we’re going to run out of problems anytime soon.
I added a live reload feature to mysite!
Since I moved away from Hugo earlier this year, I lost my live reload feature. So when I’m adding something to my site or writing my blog, I have to manually run the make build command to refresh the files. Not a huge burden, honestly, but I wanted to track a crack at setting this up myself.
Naturally, there are numerous approaches since we are using Python here. A couple months ago I used one of the Copilot models with OpenCode to make me some options for adding live reload to my local development server. One of the options was FastAPI, which is a popular Python library I’ve never used so I asked it to build me a first attempt. It…did not work.
After coming back to my branch after a couple months, the dev_server.py file it made just seemed way too heavyweight to me. I went back to the drawing board and came across the livereload package, which seemed a much better fit. After hacking away at it and a couple other miscellaneous things for an hour or so, I had a working live reload. The code below is the entire dev_server.py file.
import logging
from livereload import Server, shell
logging.basicConfig(
level=logging.INFO, format="%(asctime)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s"
)
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
if __name__ == "__main__":
server = Server()
server.watch("src/", shell('make build'))
server.serve(port=8000, liveport=8001, root="public")I could make it a little smarter if I really wanted to. It’s very greedy and watches everything in src. Right now, it just builds the entire site anytime something changes. But since my site is small and takes about 2 or 3 seconds to build, I’m not too worried about it. The changes won’t be difficult if I ever decide to make them (or have an LLM do it). Don’t overengineer!
New job!
My last day at 2U was May 22. I’ve got a little time before I start my next gig, which I’m using to blog and make site enhancements as you can see! I’ve been at 2U almost 4 years and it was first time programming with a team of fellow programmers. I met and worked with incredible people who helped me develop into a competent engineer (and manager)!
Over last 12 months, I went from being a first time manager of less than 10 people to managing nearly 30 across 3 different teams. I received a lot of great feedback from my colleagues and higher-ups about my performance and the experience helped me realize that I do like managing and supporting developers. Ultimately, I decided to pursue other jobs because my remit continued to grow and I felt I wanted to be more hands-on for the current stage of my career, rather than a mile wide and an inch deep. While I’m sad to be saying goodbye to some great people, I’m excited to work in a new org with new challenges.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!