Posts on The Chronicle

They Took Our Jobs!

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:18:00 -0400

I just listened to a Search Engine episode about Waymo and driverless cars (The Trial of the Driverless Car), and it made me so angry. Not at Waymo, though. There has always been tension between people who do a job and the companies trying to mechanize or automate the job, but all of these people have been arguing about the wrong thing… And they’ve been doing it for 200 years.

Reverse Centaur Salads

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:54:39 -0500

Perhaps you are aware of the popular fast-casual salad shop called Sweetgreen. They’re a semi-iconic brand here in Boston, and I’ve eaten a metric shit ton of their salads. They’re delicious!

Yesterday, I walked into a Sweetgreen here in my town in the Boston suburbs—a location I’d never been in and quite honestly didn’t know was there—and I was shocked by what I saw. Instead of a counter with several friendly employees behind it making salads to order, I saw iPad ordering tablets and two guys silently packing bowls. Silently.

Moreover, it seemed like all they were doing was putting dressing on these salads. Where were they coming from? Who was making them? Why weren’t they talking?

Friends, the reverse centaur has come for our salads.

Defying Gravity

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:41:54 -0500

Yes, this is a post about Google Antigravity. It’s not about Wicked. But if you want to listen to that while you read this, that’s fine by me.

Yesterday I tried out this new AI-centric IDE from Google and I have… Thoughts. This will be a mostly unstructured sequence of experiences and opinions, so if you are looking for something well-researched I’m sure there are 1,000 other blogs you could read.

Vibe Coding Is a Lot Like Ruby on Rails

Sat, 31 May 2025 06:14:20 -0400

Our bucket overflows with news about the exploits of “vibe coding,” and journalists are now (apparently) paid by how many times they can fit the word “agentic” into a piece, because no other explanation makes sense to me.

As I’ve written before (somewhere, maybe not here), I use AI and I like AI and I think we’ll come out the other end of this with some really interesting and useful new stuff, but at the moment it feels like the hype machine has shifted into overdrive.

I can’t shake the feeling that in some ways, we’ve seen this before… With Ruby on Rails.

Tech Enshittification Reaches a Fever Pitch

Fri, 02 May 2025 15:19:12 -0400

The enshittification of the tech industry is reaching a fever pitch, and it’s all thanks to AI. Not what AI can do, but what people seem to think it can do.

It’s really hard to get a job in tech right now. Surely our industry has gone through its ups and downs and hiring waxes and wanes alongside interest rates and how sweaty the many perpetually damp men in the Silicon Valley VC scene are on a given day. But things are getting rough out there, friends.

AI Isn't Coming for Your Job (Your Boss Is)

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 06:40:21 -0500

AI is not going to replace the majority of programming jobs, full stop. I roundly reject any argument that presents AI as a solution to converting a set of business requirements into functioning software.

But, if you don’t learn how to use AI, and stay abreast of what it can do, it may very well replace YOU. Let me put that differently: it will be the reason your boss replaces you.

How I Social Post With Hugo

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 06:20:09 -0400

I have a few blogs, including this one, and over the years I’ve used a few different platforms. My first ever blog was on WordPress, but now all of my blogs use Hugo, a static site generator written in Go.

The one “downside” to using a static site generator is that you can’t easily do some of the things that a server-based system can do, like cross-posting to other places. This is a post about why I chose to use Hugo and how I post to Mastodon and Bluesky (mostly) automatically.

Switching with the Shelly 1

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:56:32 -0400

I’m a bit of a home automation hobbyist. I bought my first few Philips Hue lights before anyone knew what Hue was, and I wrote one of the first couple hundred Amazon Alexa integrations (they even gave me a t-shirt for it!)

My house isn’t as jammed with sensors and self-made IoT devices as some of the folks I’ve seen on YouTube, but I do run Home Assistant and appreciate the occasional well-designed automation. Almost all of the wall switches in my house are “smart” and “does it connect to Home Assistant” is now a question I ask about every new connected device I consider buying.

Recently I had a couple “problems” (we home automation nerds tend to see “minor inconveniences” as “major solvable problems”) and decided to solve them with Shelly relays. This is that story.

Go-ing Local With Enphase

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:52:45 -0400

We have solar panels on the house, and their energy production is managed by an Enphase Envoy microinverter system. I love data, so I wanted to build my own dashboard of energy consumption and production, which took me down a rabbit hole of dealing with Enphase’s shitty API.

Since then, I discovered that the Envoy system does, in fact, serve its energy data locally, so this is my brief explanation of how I moved over to that approach instead.

Own Your Everything

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 06:01:45 -0500

As astute readers are aware, I’ve been on a host my own stuff kick for some time now. I brought my music local with Navidrome, I moved my remaining websites off of that-shape-named-service into static sites that I host myself, and I just moved from Samsung SmartThings to Home Assistant for all my home automation stuff.

A recent household budget discussion wandered into the territory of replacing our Spotify family plan, and my wife’s position on it revealed what I think is one of the crucial points about hosting your own systems: owning your stuff.