Notes

Three weeks of adding SIMD to a small self-hosted language with five backends: hoisting bounds checks so clang can vectorize, two 128-bit types, and RISC-V vector instructions on a CPU the language wrote for itself. What paid, what did not, and the four properties of a loop that decide which.

A measurement note. Ruby has SIMD in its JSON extension and its parser, but not in the encoding scan that every string from a file or socket goes through. On this machine, reading 4 MiB of Japanese text costs 15 ms of scanning; the same file in ASCII costs nothing. Here is how that was verified and what it would take to fix.

An attempt to define the best possible web application framework from first principles — eight problems derived from the definition of a web app, nine design decisions each paired with the evidence that would overturn it, and seven gates that almost nobody ships.

Every company that clamped down on AI spending in 2026 did it in the same order — and got the question wrong. Notes on allocating AI budget across roles.

A subscription leak in a small app turned into a question about the language, and the answer was no. Two starting premises — faster is better, do not depend on a collector — were a purchase, and the things Mere cannot do are the invoices arriving one at a time.

Adding a fifth backend sounds like more capability. The truer story is a loop closing: a self-hosted compiler met a CPU the language had already written, and most of the new power was recombination — not a new target, but two old dogfoods finally allowed to meet.

A survey of recent trends in programming language design and implementation across five axes — memory safety, concurrency, type systems, implementation toolchains, and cross-cutting design philosophy — followed by an honest look at whether effect systems, the hottest topic in the field, will actually turn out well: their tailwinds, headwinds, and most likely landing place.

Adding a feature is visible work. Deciding not to add one — and being able to show why — is the harder half of language design.

Now that AI tools have made 'the ability to build' itself cheap, value shifts to everything *other than* building. Sorting what gets commoditized from what stays scarce, and reasoning from four sources of hard-to-copy-ness — physical/regulatory reality, proprietary data and trust, taste, and the compounding of time — toward what is actually advantageous to build.

Key signatures, relative keys, diatonic chords, and progressions all connect on a single wheel. An interactive circle of fifths that plays sound when you click.

A survey of how modern web UIs are actually built — VDOM, signals, compile-time reactivity, web components, server-driven, FRP, islands, resumability, state machines, functional UI — collected while deciding what frontend story my own programming language should aim for.

What determines whether a sequence of characters can be heard as music? A note on character-to-pitch mapping, the cognitive ceiling around 5–9 pitches, and why Japanese hiragana is unusually well-suited to sonification.

Integrating Bedrock and shipping an MCP server is the minimum bar in 2026. Everything beyond is a waiting game.

Other people's casual evaluations don't matter. What matters is whether the problem in front of you gets solved and what you wanted to make actually gets made.

A tool that generates Live2D-ready PSDs from YAML layer structure definitions. Register the result as a Clip Studio Paint template, and the layer scaffolding step disappears from every new character.

After reading the novel and watching the film, reflections on the beauty of visual storytelling and the irreplaceable power of a novel's inner voice.

Metronome, note flash cards, scale reference, and practice timer — four browser tools built to address common piano practice challenges.

Apples in curry aren't just a Japanese quirk. Three layers of science and history explain why fruit and spice meet in kitchens worldwide.

Should you spend time crafting AI tool configurations, or building things with them? A framework for deciding.

How the Maillard reaction works when food is heated, and how to use it to make your cooking better.

Why I chose Astro, Cloudflare, and Drizzle ORM — and how they fit together.

In 2026, AI tools made individuals fast again. But this window probably won't stay open for long.

Pokemon's first slow-life sandbox. A fusion of Minecraft and Animal Crossing, with the highest Metascore in series history.

On accepting what can't be done, even when you want it badly.

What should individual developers build when AI can write code?

A CLI tool for tracing the 'why' behind code. Built it in a day, and it immediately became non-ideal.