Notes from September 2026

If you follow my monthly roundups, (1) who are you?? please say hi (2) you’ll notice a smaller post this time. September was a busy month for me.

Lots of feedback on a small post

I published “Anecdotally, programmers dislike ‘reduce’”. I finally wrote up a phenomenon I’ve observed for years. It’s a short post that didn’t take long to write.

I got a tremendous volume of feedback—more than anything I’ve ever written. Dozens of messages, hundreds of comments, shoutouts in popular newsletters…I’m even meeting up with old friends because of it!

This industry, for better and worse, is moving away from the details. I like the details! I was heartened to see the number of people who care about the minutia of programming—enough to email some random guy on the internet.

Cool links from online

• “What is the programmer interface for garbage collection? There isn’t one. Can’t get simpler than that.” From “Simplicity is Complicated”.
• Won’t attend, but the Small File Media Festival looks neat.
• “A lot of the time, the Linux problems are ‘designed by committee’ problems.” Loved this opinion from the Kate and Veronica podcast.
• “If there’s one thing the current wave of far-right autocrats has managed to do incredibly well, it’s to constantly keep themselves the centre of attention: constantly the thing that is debated, constantly positioned at the centre of the court as the obvious one to make decisions. This is why: patriarchal racist capital needs these ideas and people so it can continue to be the centre of attention. This is the logic of the big-tech-AI-sun-empire: keep everything oriented towards power, at all costs.” From part 1 of “Towards a Lunarpunk Practice”.

Hope you had a good September.