As a general rule, large established codebases produce 90% of the value. In any big tech company, the majority of the revenue-producing activity (i.e. the work that actually pays your engineering salary) comes from a large established codebase. I’ve seen multiple cases where a small elegant service powers some core feature of a high-revenue product, but all the actual productizing code (settings, user management, billing, enterprise reporting, etc) still lives in the large established codebase.

So you should know how to work in the “legacy mess” because that’s what your company actually does. Good engineering or not, it’s your job.

This was a great read as I’ve been immersed inside a large (but not too large) codebase at my new gig for the past few months now.

It’s funny: I never wanted a job as an engineer. But it turns out I kinda actually like this work? ?

I’ve come to trust my instincts. When I see something interesting, I can simply observe, appreciate, and move forward. If something I’ve encountered holds value, it should resurface naturally in the most fitting form when the time is right.

I’ve been approaching my media libraries like this. If an album doesn’t interest me now, then why continue to hold up space with it? It should surface organically when the time is right.

It’s why some of my new favorite albums of the past year speak to what I experienced in the past couple years (grieving the past, discovering myself, reckoning with my decisions, simply being, etm.).

I will insist on using this for my CAPTCHA purposes from here on out.

Really not a whole lot to add here, other than once again, I am so pumped to get my own 3d printer and make ridiculous art like this.

Nothing is black and white. Code is not precious, nor the be-all end-all. The end goal is a functioning product. All code is eventually thrown away. LLMs help with some tasks, if you already know what you want to do and give you shortcuts. But they can’t help with this part. They can’t turn on the radio. We have to build our own context window and make our own playlist.

When LLMs can stream advice as clearly and well as my Alphabet Radio, then, I’ll worry. Until then, I build with my radio on.

A significant contributor to my depression last year was a conviction that LLMs could do what I could do but better.

I’m glad I’ve experimented with them heavily over the past couple years, because exposure to these tools is the only real way to understand their capabilities.

I use LLMs heavily in my job, but they are not (yet) able to replace my human teammates.

Last year, I jumped on a fun blogger tradition of listing out my default apps. I'm glad Matt remembered haha! The side-by-side comparison was another great idea I borrowed from him.

I added a ? emoji next to the ones that changed this year.

An unsurprising number of adjustments this year, considering how typically stodgy and unadventurous I am with new software.

• I love using Fantastical on the Mac, but I just can't bring myself to paying for the subscription to use it on my phone. Which is fine, because the built-in Apple Calendar app is nearly perfect. I haven't played much with Apple Intelligence, but if it can match Fantastical's NLP, I might be able to switch completely.
• I made a choice to keep Dropbox off of my new Macbook Pro. So far, iCloud Storage works great for what I need: a basic folder that magically syncs files across machines. I miss that about Dropbox. There's some weirdness to it that I can't be bothered to investigate further¹, but on the whole, I haven't had any problems.
• Yeah, I can confidently say that I no longer watch the news. I should probably write a blog post about this topic soon. There's gotta be some correlation between the decline of my news intake and the resurgence of my optimistic nature.
• My music player situation remains complicated. I use Apple Music to discover new music, and I'll buy MP3s of my favorites off of Bandcamp and add it to my Plex library. I've been on a big media cleaning adventure over the past few months, and it's honestly exhilarating to feel fully safe inside my Plex library again. It's a lot like spending a weekend and deep cleaning your house. It's surprisingly painful to spend hours agonizing over which music you no longer need in your crawl space.
• I added a category for AI Chatbot this year, and I'm pretty comfortable using ChatGPT's o1 model for nearly everything. 2025 may be the year where I finally figure out how to incorporate Ollama with Alfred.
• Speaking of application launchers: while setting up my work computer, I decided to give Raycast a try. I had to abandon it after two months. I couldn't handle going between Alfred and Raycast on my two machines, and there were a bunch of defaults with Raycast that my brain wouldn't turn into muscle memory.
• The new Retro Bowl rules. I'm 167 seasons into the original Retro Bowl, so it's fun to build back up from nothing.

I’m increasingly noticing Swedish culture, and I am constantly intrigued by it.

Also, everything about this video makes me want to start getting better at building things. I sometimes still feel like I am renting this house rather than living in it. This means I have a list of small, annoying things about my house that I just deal with rather than experiment with and fix them.

(Paul, since you’re just about the only person I know who reads this blog, I’d love to hear what you think ?)

Fun exploration of why <font color=“chucknorris”> gets converted into <font color=“#c00000”>.

Apparently timbornholdt gets converted into #0b00d0, a lovely shade of blue.

Genius. A list of all the various services that AWS offers, but a basic explanation of what they do.

I’ve implemented OAuth in both directions, and I still learned something new from reading this article about how OAuth works.