Preston Thorpe: I’m very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to work on databases and solve unique challenges with such a talented team would be a dream job, but it is that much more special to me because of my unusual and unlikely circumstances. As difficult as it might be to believe, I am currently incarcerated and I landed this job from my cell in state prison. If you don’t know me, let me tell you more about how I got here. ...

In 2001, The Cure released Greatest Hits, the compilation with which they ended their contract with Fiction Records. The first edition of the anthology was accompanied by Acoustic Hits, an acoustic reinterpretation of the band’s hits, including Boys Don’t Cry, Friday I’m in Love, A Forest, Just Like Heaven, Lullaby, and Lovesong, one of the simplest and greatest love songs of all time (just listen to the bass line). The bonus disc was not reissued until 2017 and has only recently landed on streaming platforms. ...

I deleted my Bluesky account. I didn’t follow anyone anyway, and I only used it to repost content from my website. Being almost mainstream now, I found Bluesky to have the same dynamics as other mass-adopted social networks: controversies, lots of ego-hunting, vanity fairs, sterile debates, witticisms, and everything else that doesn’t interest me. Having left Twitter a while ago and Facebook a long time before that, I’m left with Mastodon precisely because there are fewer people there, and they are more in my niche; it feels like the pre-mass social media world, like the first Twitter years. Not coincidentally, I’m also receiving more feedback on my content than anywhere else. ...

I’ve been doing “agentic coding” for some time, and well, it’s weird. On stable, mature technology (in my case, the C#/.NET stack), it is beneficial, as it significantly boosts productivity. But, there’s a bit, and that’s that I’m not programming anymore, or very little now, and I love coding. I love entering “the zone” and solving complex problems, one at a time. It’s always been my superpower. Will I still have fun in the future now that I can delegate most tasks to Claude Code? ...

The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (via)

Quoting Dries Buytaert: A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. […] The principle is: If a note can be public, it should be. Unconsciously, I am trying to do the same, as you might have noticed by the increased activity on this website. Maintaining consistency can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort.

I’ve been implementing a remote MCP Server. It comes with a hybrid authentication system that supports the OAuth2 flow and, as a fallback, a custom header for those simple clients that cannot handle OAuth. One such client is Claude Desktop, which, at this time, is even worse; it only supports STDIO (local) servers, let alone OAuth2. Today I learned about a nice NPM package called MCP Remote, which bridges the gap by allowing MCP clients that only support local servers to connect to remote MCP Servers, even with authentication support. Thanks to this tool, Claude Desktop is now talking to my remote server1. ...

An impressive list of free online courses from top universities, courtesy of Open Culture. I’m bookmarking them for a friend when he retires.

Today, I learned about Marp, the “Markdown Presentation Ecosystem,” which comes with an enticing promise: to create beautiful slide decks using an intuitive Markdown experience. For my latest presentation, I utilized the Slides Extended Obsidian plugin, which is based on reveal.js—an excellent option for keeping slide decks within one’s Obsidian vault (I keep all notes, work and personal journals, and knowledge in Obsidian.) Marp could be a viable alternative to the plugin, as Obsidian notes are just markdown files. The advantage here is that I can further elaborate or iterate on my slides, for example, from the command line, as Marp comes with a dedicated CLI tool that lets you export to PDF, HTML, and more. Additionally, Marp is not based on reveal.js, a tool that has given me headaches in the past. ...