Roy Lindauer

for the shits and gigs

2026-05-06T22:27:00-07:00

for the shits and gigs

2000s acid techno set from dave the drummer live at templehead

2026-05-05T14:32:00-07:00

DJ Templehead · Dave the Drummer live at Templehead 9.6.00 The Cockpit Leeds

what is observability

2026-05-05T10:03:00-07:00

Observability is not for debugging your code logic. Observability is for figuring out where in your systems to find the code you need to debug.

should I have tacos in 2026?

2026-05-05T07:31:00-07:00

Should I have tacos in 2026?

Slot Canyon Hike

2026-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Last week I was at a work retreat in San Diego, California. We were given four options as to which non-work activity we would like to join. There was a “Tacos and Tequila” walk, a katamaran trip, an ocean kayaking trip, and a slot canyon hike. I chose the slot canyon hike because first of all it would be fewer people and I knew a week of socializing would be quite exhausting for my poor nervous system, and secondly, I looked up the wrong fucking hike and thought I was getting into a chill, easy-going, nature hike.

Long story short. I was very wrong. I had to sign a waver. Our guide gave us gear. It was definitely on the very challenging side. Had I known, I would not have done it, but I am so glad I did. Feeling quite chuffed.

Our guide took some pictures for us (as we were a bit focused on not falling 70 feet into the canyon slots).

Bjork - Possibly Maybe

2026-04-17T21:45:00-07:00

I want every room I spend time in to look and feel like this video.

Bjork Hyperballad

2026-04-17T21:45:00-07:00

The video projection effect is excellent this whole video is amazing.

Daft Punk - Around the World

2026-04-17T21:45:00-07:00

Watching Director’s Label, Volume 3: The Work of Director Michel Gondry. Lots of memories of watching MTV, of dancing around the living room with friends, and just having so much fun. Music videos are just so fucking cool. This song in particular has a soft spot for me, so many friday night dance parties at friends houses and this song would just be the jam.

Kylie Minogue Come into my World

2026-04-17T21:42:00-07:00

More insane work by Michel Gondry.

Cibo Matto

2026-04-17T21:39:00-07:00

Insane work by Michel Gondry.

Marketing Agency Claude Plugin

2026-04-06T12:27:00-07:00

Something I have been noodling on is how to integrate AI in ways that can help alleviate some of the burden of running your small business as the sole person responsible for all of the business operation. When you have to be sales, marketing, and admin, it leaves less time for doing the work that made you want to run the business in the first place. I don’t think you can eliminate or entirely abstract away all of those roles, but you can extend your capabilities. AI being the great equalizer of mediocrity means, at the very least, you have the ability to get a decent baseline of service for say, web marketing initiatives, that you simply wouldn’t necessarily have had the time for before.

I tinkered with a plugin for Claude over the weekend that acts as a mini “Web Marketing Agency”. Very simply there is a director role that acts as orchestration and final say, with sub agents for various specific roles such as CRO, Copywriter, Growth, SEO, Strategy, with an adversary type role to push back on assumptions, find gaps, and iterate back and forth with the subagent until there is consensus. If consensus cannot be found, the Director takes over and acts as final arbiter to ensure the plan aligns with bigger picture goals and such. The end result is a plan for executing some web marketing initiative.

The few tests I have run have been pretty good, if maybe a bit verbose. Nothing that cannot be fine tuned.

To take this a step further would be to hand off the plan to content and developer subagents to actually implement on a website, then hand off for approval and revisions by a human.

MiddlemanApp CMS Companion

2026-03-25T16:03:00-07:00

Heck yeah, I can slop out a tool for my blog in absolutely no time now. I’ve manifested a very simple CMS UI for my Middleman based static website. It’s a TypeScript+React companion app that uses TipTap markdown editor that I can run when I am in bloggy mode.

software on demand

2026-03-22T21:37:00-07:00

It’s kinda weird that I am now able to materialize software on demand.

structured events

2026-03-22T21:27:00-07:00

https://charity.wtf/2022/08/15/live-your-best-life-with-structured-events/ Live Your Best Life With Structured Events.

If your tool set no longer works for you, friend, it’s time to go all in. Maybe what you wanted was a faster horse, but it’s time for a car, and the sooner you turn in your oats for gas cans and a spare tire, the better.

In brief: if you aren’t rolling out a solution based on arbitrarily wide, structured raw events that are unique and ordered and trace-aware and without any aggregation at write time, you are going to regret it. (If you aren’t using OpenTelemetry, you are going to regret that, too.)

shared reality in ai

2026-03-04T14:40:00-08:00

https://sterlinghamilton.com/en/shared-reality/ Good article about how to think about and work with coding agents. Simply said, adopt a spec-driven, test-driven, pair-coding model with your agents and you will have far better results. Define the shared reality in which we, both humans and coding agents, operate. Much like developing the ubiquoutous language required under a domain-driven development model. Crucial for deep understanding.

teddy diary

2026-02-16T10:40:00-08:00

Well, I officially have 2 users on Teddy Diary – myself and my wife 😂. She excitedly asked if she could also use the app after I shared the weekly summaries and entry suggestion/prompt.

Burning Man

2026-02-12T17:59:00-08:00

We may be going home this year )‘(

Teddy Diary

2026-02-10T22:10:00-08:00

I was inspired by the consistent habit of Theodore Roosevelt to log his daily events in a pocket diary and so I have built, for myself, a simple Rails app to do just that. To offset the slight inconvenience a digital version has over simply carrying a notebook around (as I already often do), this version will gently nag me when I do not enter anything for the daily entry. Additionally I get a weekly summary outlining key events, missed opportunities, and some more gentle nudging around goals and actions, which are generated by a locally hosted LLM running on Ollama. I am calling it “Teddy Diary”.

The intention is not to reflect, or to vent. It is write facts only, to focus on the verbs (met, walked, wrote, read), and to track effort, not outcomes, just as Mr. Roosevelt himself did.

thinking about speaking

2026-02-10T17:46:00-08:00

Currently I exist in a strange place where I know a thing, but cannot explain said thing deeply and technically. Frustrating. Perhaps too much embodied cognition, not enough dialogue, not enough discourse.

The good news is that this a learnable skill. Something to practice.

I am reading too much about 19th century men who had a gift for speech. They were built different. I am built from passive consumption of soundbites and infotainment.

Anyway. Lots of thinking about, thinking, and a lot of thinking about speaking.

personal computers

2026-01-15T10:30:00-08:00

Personal computers have become too good and that is why there is a powerful effort by big tech to take that away.

Why own when you can rent? Why freedom when you can “walled garden”?

the web

2026-01-09T23:13:00-08:00

The Internet is awesome. It’s the web that sucks.

firekeeper

2026-01-09T11:04:00-08:00

The Firekeeper doing a little spin when you use certain emotes is the most adorable shit I have ever seen in any fromsoftware game. 10/10 darksouls 3 is the best game.

discourses 2.5.4-5

2026-01-01T12:23:00-08:00

The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.
~ Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5.4-5

post american internet

2026-01-01T10:33:00-08:00

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

Cory Doctorow delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany.

The door is open a crack, the wind is blowing, the post-American internet is upon us: a new, good internet that delivers all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 so that our normie friends can use it, too.

Fuck yeah let’s go!

obsidian and git

2025-12-31T09:52:00-08:00

https://rob.cogit8.org/posts/2025-03-25-obsidian-git-quick-setup-for-developers/

Some good instruction for setting up Obsidian to use Git.

Thinking About PHP Toolchain

2025-12-30T19:45:00-08:00

Juggling multiple runtimes for various projects has me thinking about how much dealing with PHP is a huge pain in the ass.

Why is that though? Maybe it’s not? Maybe it’s just me? I don’t know.

Why is the Ruby ecosystem so much more pleasant from the developer experience? Why is Go more pleasant? Why do they seem more developer friendly?

And I mean developer friendly as in the operational sense:

Easy to install
Easy to switch versions
Easy to reason about environments
Easy to reproduce across machines

Not:

Syntax Friendliness
Language ergonomics
Learning curve

PHP is very beginner-friendly as a language, but not as a toolchain.

Anyway, I think I can answer the question of why.

Ruby and Go assume the runtime belongs to the project.
PHP assumes the project belongs to the runtime.

From that lens all of the frustration I have with PHP become obvious that I am doing it wrong. I keep trying to manage PHP as if the runtime belongs to the project. The PHP ecosystem feels fragile and unsupported when trying to move responsibility from ops to dev because it is. It is still quite early in the evolution of PHP from an infrastructure based ops managed runtime into a developper managed part of the toolchain.

Some other thoughts:

Composer solved only half of the problem. It has made PHP feel modern without modernizing the runtime model. Dependencies are nicely handled though.
Docker is an excellent solution for PHP development because it restores PHP to its comfort zone as an ops managed infrastructure.

update

Thinking about how to support my team at $dayjob. We use Macs exclusively for development. We use Lando for the WordPress projects, which is docker based, so there is need to even have PHP installed on the host machine. For Laravel projects we use Docker Compose, again no reason to even have PHP available locally. Our build tooling can execute composer and other tools in the docker container. Could not be easier.

On my personal projects I write more Ruby and Go than I do PHP. I have been doing a lot more with PHP lately though and am running into the friction of installing different versions of PHP on baremetal. Mise-en-place (and similar tools) have made it so easy to manage and switch platforms on my projects that I have taken for granted how much complexity there is under the hood to make my dev life so easy.

more updates

So much <3 to all of the folk trying to make this work. Not an easy task. And a thankless one at that.

douglas adams reactions to technology

2025-12-29T18:57:00-08:00

Douglas Adams:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

solstice

2025-12-21T22:43:00-08:00

The darkest of nights passes and the sun is reborn.

no heroes

2025-12-19T10:40:00-08:00

There are no heroes.

That was a reaction I had to some news. Meditating on this phrase for just a moment I take the meaning to be: men are faliable and flawed and are not to be worshiped. We should look elsewhere for inspiration and guidance in our lives.

While we shouldn’t perform any hero worship to these flawed people, we should aspire towards the idealized hero myth. Those myths exist for a reason. We see the potential for greatness in ourselves.

We should aspire to be like Hercules.

rent seekers

2025-12-18T16:57:00-08:00

everyone wants a dollar, goddamn.

my favorite way to play soulslikes

2025-12-17T13:55:00-08:00

My favorite way to play a soulslike is to become hilariously over-leveled and steamroll through every boss.

firefox in 2025

2025-12-17T12:26:00-08:00

I’ve been using firefox for probably 20 years now and have not really questioned the choice. Now I am. The Mozilla news has me reflecting on my choice. See also is mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

What even is a “web browser” today?
What does AI powered mean for a “web browser”?
What sort of interface do I require to the internet?
Is a pi-hole enough in my home network to mitigate malicious ads and trackers?
If I opt to use a “more supported” browser such as Google Chrome (or Chromium I suppose) should I run it inside a VM, isolated from my main machine?
Should I run Firefox in a VM once it is “ai powered”?
Is Waterfox a good fork of Firefox?
Is this a battle I really want to fight?
If the internet is just tv and ads are paying the bills, does it really matter since I can choose to not engage with it at all?

The message I am receiving from reflecting on the state of, things, is that I no longer want to engage with the corporate web. It does not enrich me, or improve my life in any way, or bring me any joy. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Mozilla directing Firefox down a path that seems counter to what the kind of people that use Firefox actually want from a browser is a clear signal that I have no fucking idea what is going on XD Best to just, walk away, and focus on the things that actually bring me joy in this world.

You should never build a cms

2025-12-15T08:06:00-08:00

You Should Never Build a CMS, a response to Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets

“Man who owns company says you need their product and not the other guys product.”

Joking aside, the sanity blog post is pretty good. As is Lee Robs. And as a sales pitch of the Cursor product, Lee did a great job of migrating their site off Sanity. In true vibe coding fashion the green field project was pretty good. Let’s check in in 6 months and see how things are holding up. Considering that what Lee Rob at Cursor did when he “migrated cursor.com from a CMS to raw code and Markdown”, is he built a fucking CMS. Just one without any of the features that will inevevitably be requested of him as the site grows and he left behind at Sanity.

Sanity makes some good arguments for a CMS instead of a single file = single page model. Content publishing is usually not as simple as creating a new markdown file in your git repository. There may be approval workflows, legal and compliance considerations, internationalization and localization work. Actually managing your content in a way that is not relying entirely on grep such that you can find all references to a specific product, or are dealing with esoteric content siloing rules dictated by a search performance team.

Neither are bullet proof solutions to building a website. Depending on your scale, your goals, your audience, and so many other factors, you may ONLY need a flat file static site that is managed by your team of coders, or you may need a structured content storage to emit and generate web pages and content across a variety of devices and screens.

The curse of knowing how

2025-12-15T07:23:00-08:00

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything.

Like Camus’ Sisyphus, we are condemned to push the boulder of our own systems uphill—one fix, one refactor, one script at a time. But unlike the story of Sisyphus, the curse is not placed onto you by some god. We built the boulder ourselves. And we keep polishing it on the way up.

I want to quote the entire post. This may be the best thing I have read this year.

The author quotes Marcus Aurelius to frame an argument that this boulder we have created and are cursed to push uphill has a deeper emotional core.

You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Programming lures us into believing that we can control outside events. We self-soothe by building. We need the small victories that building a new tool or writing a script bestow. We refactor that tool we built, not because it is messy, but because our lives are messy. This technical work becomes emotional regulation.

Reflecting on the past and taking inventory of the projects started, tools rebuilt, systems tinkered with, and the times in which I did those things, the authors reality become my own reality. His truths become mine. The burnout he warns of is only a few steps behind me. I do use programming as emotional regulation. I too want to defy what is real. I want to assert control when things are out of control.

Nietzsche warned of gazing too long into the abyss. But he did not warn what happens when the abyss is a Makefile or a 30k line of code Typescript project.

lmao.

There is a light at the end. Recognition of the patterns is a good step to changing them. The author also calls for learning to let go as we are not responsible to fix all the things. I agree.

MacOS is a Unix

2025-12-06T09:00:00-08:00

I often forget that macos is a unix and that many of the underlying tools are just bsd tools. auto_master for example, to configure auto mounting various network shares and disks.

I also forget that i can use apropos to figure out where to learn about a tool and of course use the man pages.

so i guess, friendly reminder (to myself) that macos is a unix.

gem.coop

2025-11-22T09:00:00-08:00

Gem.coop is a new server for sourcing Ruby gems. It's easy to switch.

I switched because Ruby Central's actions left me feeling uncomfortable. Supporting the folk who are doing the work rather than, whatever Ruby Central does, feels better and better aligns with my values.

  -source "https://rubygems.org"
  +source "https://gem.coop"

We aim for fast, simple hosting, that is compatible with Bundler but optimized for the next generation. It’s built for the community by the former maintainers and operators of RubyGems.org.

Indieweb Website Updates

2025-11-15T09:10:00-08:00

A website is a garden to tend to, and the IndieWeb is a guide for how to grow a garden that yields higher quality. Or something like that. Anyway, lots of updates here.

Templates have been tidied up. The website structure has revealed itself to me and struturally I am quite happy with it.
Microformats have been added where appropriate.
Webmentions are now being fetched and displayed.
HTML comments have been added to the source code to help not only me remember what I am doing, but to help others who are learning how to build websites.
Tailwind CSS has been removed

There is now a page where I document some of the tools and processes I am developing to support my participation in the indieweb.

SEP

2025-11-15T09:00:00-08:00

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy A good resource to support reading and learning philosophy books. They can be a lot. The SEP is a translator for the language of philosophy, a resource that provides a trusted, academic-level overview of key terms, thinkers, and schools of thought.

Affinity

2025-10-31T10:00:00-07:00

The affinity news kinda sucks. On the surface it looks like a good deal but there is a lot of historical precedence that this is just another step on a path to full enshittification of the software suite. This is not a move that will benefit users long term. Then again, such is the cycle of software.

As Matthias Ott explains very well, design tools come and go. Affinity tools have been fucking awesome for me for years. And they will continue to work fine for a while. I will set my sights on other tools soon. Stay curious and have a beginners mind.

Ruby Central

2025-10-31T10:00:00-07:00

Ruby community is in a bit of a crisis. RubyCentral has performed a hostile takeover of RubyGems and Bundler. You can read a pretty non-biased accounting of what transpired here. I, however, am full of bias. I just do not trust RubyCentral. I love programming with Ruby. It’s a joy. Watching what transpired with RubyCentral, and learning more about some of the public faces of popular Ruby projects, has just turned me off.

The events have also widened my view of the community - hanami looks incredible, i have also been tinkering with roda. And to be real, I can just write ruby without participating in rails, rubycentral, shopify, etc. We don’t need them. I certainly don’t. I am very fortunate in that regard.