I’ve had a record player for at least 20 years. For the last 10 or so it was an Audio Technica LP120, which is on the upper end of ’non-audiophile’ turntables. Swappable cartridges, tons of tracking force adjustments, speed adjustments and strobes to check for accuracy. Direct drive. I ended upgrading the cartridge at some point. I loved that turntable, and it was darn reliable.

I did manage to fry it on 220v here in Singapore, despite the fact that it advertised compatibility with 220v. After it broke, it didn’t take me long to find a successor: an Audio Technica LP70X, which is in many ways the opposite: Fixed cartridge, no tracking force adjustment or speed adjustment. Belt driven.

I love diagram languages like mermaid.js and PlantUML because the text format that backs the diagram can be tweaked, takes up very little space in storage, and can be re-rendered at various resolutions any time you need. They’re great! I hate writing them. Mermaid has a different syntax for every diagram type, and they’re hard to remember. PlantUML is more consistent, though not totally, and in my experience can be quite verbose.

I’ve had this domain, this site for 10 years. Running on Hugo the whole time. There are only a few things here, but it’s no big deal. There are very few things I have on the internet that have been live that whole time and are still a going concern:

• this site
• gmail
• Facebook
• Instagram

Only one of those gives me real control of what I put out here, with no rules but my own and the law. It’s a blessing to still be able to do that in 2025 - give anyone the power to publish anything.

I first met Marc Maron in 2010 at a comedy festival in Southern California. WTF was less than a year old, and most of the guests thus far were “alternative comedians”. All podcasts back then were either tech-focused or comedy-focused, particularly LA alternative comedy. I found the tech ones interminably boring, but alternative comedy was really important to me and I was hooked on WTF.

I was in the back of a van with Maron and Maria Bamford (in hindsight, insane situation) as we drove around Lake Arrowhead for half an hour. Marc bored into me for at least half the time, asking me about what made me move to California, my ethnic background and family history in the US, opinions on late night shows. It was more intense than any first date conversation, and I was flattered by the attention. Still, I doubt it’s an encounter he’d remember. He’d been doing his radio show for years, meeting hundreds of new people a year between that and standup sets. I think he’s just that way - curious about every person and what drives them.

I write and publish this blog with Hugo, a static site builder that uses YAML for its posts. It’s also what we use to build the Grafana docs site, so I use it often. For the past few years I’ve been using vim to write posts. The final site content is copied onto a server after it’s built.

I have an SSH client on my phone, so I can theoretically write posts from anywhere. However, using a text editor over SSH on a phone leaves a lot to be desired. There are also iOS git clients like Working Copy, but they can’t run a script to verify my builds. Before publishing, I need a separate step, and it’s not part of my writing workflow.

I’ve been using Git for 9 years now, and today was the first time I knowingly encountered a file named .gitkeep in a diff. “What’s the point of this empty file?”, I thought. Quickly realizing that the idea is to track an empty directory, I started to wonder “Why would you want to make sure a directory exists when there’s nothing to put there?” and I started seeing blog posts about preparing for future changes that will add files to the directory or making sure your team has a consistent directory structure.

I’ve been at a few software organizations navigating the transition from small company to established businesses with big customers. At that point, duplication starts to become a cost, and consistency and stability in the product becomes more important than earlier in the business cycle. This is when everything starts getting “platformized” and standardized: application platforms, app development frameworks, managed job queues, data pipelines. These all have the chance to be transformative for your company from a dev experience and cost control perspective. They also routinely get mired in endless migration timelines, and never being “ready enough” for big systems to transition to the platforms.

By 2030, real encryption may be illegal in the European Union. Heck, Spain wants to ban end-to-end encryption entirely It’s already under attack in the UK. Be sure that the USA and China will be nipping at their heels.

Because mathematics are mathematics, there’s not actual safe way to provide lawful government access to encrypted communications. If the government has a key, at some point the key will leak. The shared keys for DVD CSS and AACS leaked. Any shared keys for decrypting content eventually leak, and there’s no sound way to update content to disable those private keys.

I love fashion as a means of self-expression. Getting creative with pieces found in thrift stores and flea markets was a big part of my 20s. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about fashion in a school context and its effects on children.

My daughters are in their early years of school. Even in preschool here in Singapore, kids wear a school uniform. It’s usually simple - a polo shirt and shorts, with embroidered school logos. Everybody buys them from the same uniform supplier, and you buy a PE uniform too. State schools, international schools, religious schools. They all have uniforms. My daughters have very different tastes in their own wardrobes, but at school they’re essentially equal.

I bought two of the original Loog guitars, little 3-string acoustic guitars intended for new learners and especially children. There’s a lot to like about them: they’re inexpensive, cute, and have surprisingly good sound and volume. The larger one gives a tenor guitar sort of sound that’s pleasant, and the smaller one is ukulele-ish. The kids are getting old enough to be into them, and I love having them around.