Kris Walker

In the long run, playing it safe is more dangerous than taking risks. Playing it safe builds in the status quo to the point where it can't be overcome.

I switched my default search engine to @duckduckgo.com and it is soooo much better than Google. Most of the searches I do on the web are software dev related, it DuckDuckGo is so much better at this.

We've spent way too many brain cycles on creating low friction ways to sling slop. Time for a change.

Vercel is a plague on the web.

A world with fewer things (less software, fewer products, less production), but things which are designed well, work exceedingly well, and bring joy to their users, is a better world. There is another world, flourishing in slop now. But, we don't have to be a part of that world. It's a choice.

"My product is my garden" I absolutely love this concept: herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-i...

The home cooked independent web is thriving!

I think this means JavaScript 5 is gone. The announcement made me feel nostalgic. Remember when Array map, filter, and reduce were introduced? And "use strict"; Object.create , Object.defineProperties? We didn't have const and let yet, but we knew it was coming! babeljs.io/blog/2026/06...

Absolutely, 100%, true. I've been working in the streaming industry for 10 years, and every year end up in contract negotiations or app rejections with Roku over the collection of data.

The AI bubble is different than the dot com bubble. I don't remember corporations shoving new technology down our throats in 1999. It felt like we were the rebel rousers back then. HT @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/t...

Among the over-hyped agentic coding workflows this thoughtful post by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant, Terraform, and Ghostty terminal, among others) is one of the best illustrations of how we got here, one possible way to work, and how he gets quality results: mitchellh.com/writing/my-a...

Spend more time living in the now.

I vibe coded a habit tracker ;-)

Novel idea: Build websites with HTML, first. Hypermedia as the engine of application state. Thanks to @moh-kohn.eurosky.social for writing the post mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html... Which got a good discussion on HN news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847...

There are a *lot* of software organizations laying people off and the remainders are choosing to leave and do something else. Don't take a job just because it was offered. I've made this mistake too many times in my career. Times will change, and you'll have opportunities you won't want to miss.

It has now been 3 months since I've had to attend a meeting. I went from 100 to zero, almost overnight. I get to live in the now, this moment, each day, every day.

Portability is absolutely critical for a truly open framework. While it is true that Cloudflare and AWS Lambda are proprietary platforms, it's hard to image how else the edge compute and tiny isolated container concepts could exist.

I love the web.

The Small Web is Beautiful: A Study of Web Development as if People Mattered. Ben Hoyt wrote this in 2021 and I can't get it out of my mind these days. It's a take on E. F. Schumacher’s "Small is Beautiful" economics treatise benhoyt.com/writings/the...

Code is cheaper now. "Everyone wants to be the sorcerer and not the apprentice. But a sorcerer must understand the code." Great, thought provoking post (as usual) by Carson Gross htmx.org/essays/code-...

Compelling idea: Create a small language model, trained on a single software development framework. Keep it extremely domain specific. This is in contrast to the scorched earth approach taken by frontier models. Cool project by @theletterf.bsky.social got me thinking passo.uno/fine-tuning-...

80% of good software is deleting the thing you were proud your agents wrote yesterday.

Common folks. We can do better. I know we can. Also, everyone wants to blame this on AI slop, but the enshittification has been happening for a while.

Ugghhh

The software eng team at LinkedIn is shipping some real garbage lately. Terrible page load times - I mean the real page load time, not the time it takes to print a <body> tag. Failed DB transactions without rollback. Race conditions while I'm using the same browser tab

I'm making my SVG favicon by hand today. Because there is nobody to tell me not to ;-) That's what I love about the solo builder thing. I can prioritize crazy stuff just because I think it's important.

Working too much leads to busy work, which then occupies all the headspace that could be used for creative thinking. Everything I've ever done which was actually valuable, came from a long walk, a vacation, a trail run, and car ride. It *never* came from a prioritized checklist.

Be accessible We all started our software journey somewhere, and now we have a responsibility to pass our craft along to new practitioners. Our community must be welcoming and the tools we build must be friendly for new developers.

Forgot about this little gem of a CLI tool: brew install aspell aspell -c path/to/file.md A command line spell checker!

Keep things minimal Single developers and small teams have the most to gain from minimal, high quality tools. Large teams, architecture astronauts, and big enterprises move slowly and use bloated tools. In contrast, developers without that mass can move faster and build higher quality software.

Was introduced to the german Brauhaus movement by @mb21.bsky.social blog post on web quality, and I think it captures my sentiment on the software development landscape perfect right now. Craftsmanship and quality matters. But so does efficiency and production. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus

Opus 4.8 seems to be writing *a lot* more code documentation for my projects. I like it.

The jq command line tool for working with JSON is one of those simple little software tools that bring so much delight into my day :-) jqlang.org

Why are modern web apps sending a code to my email instead of a magic link? Is there some sort of security thing I'm not aware of, or is this lazy product development?

There is nothing good about this

This is one of the primary reasons I left Disney. There is so much senseless anxiety about things that really don't matter to customers, the product, or to shareholders. All of that anxiety is pushed onto managers, who can't possibly keep it all from leaking into their teams.

The latest models seem to be converging on overfitting to software developers and programming workflows. Maybe loosen the reins on them a bit in the next post training round?

Painkiller products are hard to explain to your parents. Vitamin products are easy to explain to your parents. I identify with this. And it shows the paradox of the Mom Test

I like the idea of the "zebra" company: In contrast to unicorns, zebras are black and white: Profitable and have a higher order purpose. - Sustainable growth + long-term stability - Bootstrapped and "calm" - Prioritize quality over growth