iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 10/07/2026

I switched my default search engine to @duckduckgo.com and it is soooo much better than Google. Most of the searches I do on the web are software dev related, it DuckDuckGo is so much better at this.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 07/07/2026

How often have you stepped away from the keyboard, only to have the solution come to you later while you were doing something unrelated (a walk, shower, commuting)? There is a pile of scientific evidence showing that our brains continue working on hard problems in the background.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 29/06/2026

We've spent way too many brain cycles on creating low friction ways to sling slop. Time for a change.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 29/06/2026

Vercel is a plague on the web.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 29/06/2026

A world with fewer things (less software, fewer products, less production), but things which are designed well, work exceedingly well, and bring joy to their users, is a better world. There is another world, flourishing in slop now. But, we don't have to be a part of that world. It's a choice.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 25/06/2026

I'm torn on the local-first software pardigm. While having control and offline access to your data is a huge benefit, I also despise the single page JavaScript architecture and explosion of complexity when synchronizing databases. rxdb.info/articles/loc...

rxdb.info

Why Local-First Software Is the Future and its Limitations | RxDB - JavaScript Database

Discover how local-first transforms web apps, boosts offline resilience, and why instant user feedback is becoming the new normal.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 17/06/2026

The home cooked independent web is thriving!

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 17/06/2026

I think this means JavaScript 5 is gone. The announcement made me feel nostalgic. Remember when Array map, filter, and reduce were introduced? And "use strict"; Object.create , Object.defineProperties? We didn't have const and let yet, but we knew it was coming! babeljs.io/blog/2026/06...

babeljs.io

Releasing Babel 8 today: ESM-only, drop ES5 default, and a smooth migration path · Babel

Today we are releasing Babel 8. It's been 8 years since we released Babel 7. And that's not without reason.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 16/06/2026

This phase shift in engineering cultures (it's not just Meta) is going to present some exciting new opportunities. - People leave to start their own ventures - More people leave to join them - We get a sub-culture of innovation with momentum - Break the current technology consolidation phase

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 15/06/2026

The usefulness of LLMs for software can't be denied any longer. But, I really don't like the closed and proprietary nature of the whole thing. It feels contrary to the spirit of programming. I'm also 100% confident we're going to find a way to open source all of this ...

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 15/06/2026

Absolutely, 100%, true. I've been working in the streaming industry for 10 years, and every year end up in contract negotiations or app rejections with Roku over the collection of data.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 13/06/2026

The AI bubble is different than the dot com bubble. I don't remember corporations shoving new technology down our throats in 1999. It felt like we were the rebel rousers back then. HT @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/t...

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: The AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble (26 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 12/06/2026

Among the over-hyped agentic coding workflows this thoughtful post by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant, Terraform, and Ghostty terminal, among others) is one of the best illustrations of how we got here, one possible way to work, and how he gets quality results: mitchellh.com/writing/my-a...

mitchellh.com

My AI Adoption Journey

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 12/06/2026

Spend more time living in the now.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 11/06/2026

I vibe coded a habit tracker ;-)

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 11/06/2026

Novel idea: Build websites with HTML, first. Hypermedia as the engine of application state. Thanks to @moh-kohn.eurosky.social for writing the post mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html... Which got a good discussion on HN news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847...

mohkohn.co.uk

How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem...

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 10/06/2026

There are a *lot* of software organizations laying people off and the remainders are choosing to leave and do something else. Don't take a job just because it was offered. I've made this mistake too many times in my career. Times will change, and you'll have opportunities you won't want to miss.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 10/06/2026

It has now been 3 months since I've had to attend a meeting. I went from 100 to zero, almost overnight. I get to live in the now, this moment, each day, every day.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 09/06/2026

Portability is absolutely critical for a truly open framework. While it is true that Cloudflare and AWS Lambda are proprietary platforms, it's hard to image how else the edge compute and tiny isolated container concepts could exist.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 09/06/2026

The Small Web is Beautiful: A Study of Web Development as if People Mattered. Ben Hoyt wrote this in 2021 and I can't get it out of my mind these days. It's a take on E. F. Schumacher’s "Small is Beautiful" economics treatise benhoyt.com/writings/the...

benhoyt.com

The small web is beautiful

A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 08/06/2026

Code is cheaper now. "Everyone wants to be the sorcerer and not the apprentice. But a sorcerer must understand the code." Great, thought provoking post (as usual) by Carson Gross htmx.org/essays/code-...

htmx.org

</> htmx ~ Code is Cheap(er)

In this essay, Carson Gross argues that as AI makes code cheap to produce, understanding code becomes the expensive and scarce resource. He warns of the complexity that LLM code can generate and propo...

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 07/06/2026

Compelling idea: Create a small language model, trained on a single software development framework. Keep it extremely domain specific. This is in contrast to the scorched earth approach taken by frontier models. Cool project by @theletterf.bsky.social got me thinking passo.uno/fine-tuning-...

passo.uno

Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995

In my predictions for 2030 I wrote that tech writers would be using specialized LLMs, running locally on powerful hardware. I see hints of this move to “local first” among engineering pundits, but we’...

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 06/06/2026

We need to live "in the now", more often "In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor turned the commoditisation of the minute into a science when he published The Principles of Scientific Management - which he had assembled by standing over the shoulder of various factory workers, wielding a stopwatch"

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 05/06/2026

80% of good software is deleting the thing you were proud your agents wrote yesterday.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 04/06/2026

Common folks. We can do better. I know we can. Also, everyone wants to blame this on AI slop, but the enshittification has been happening for a while.

A webform displays a very unhelpful error code instead of a useful error message

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 03/06/2026

The software eng team at LinkedIn is shipping some real garbage lately. Terrible page load times - I mean the real page load time, not the time it takes to print a <body> tag. Failed DB transactions without rollback. Race conditions while I'm using the same browser tab

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 02/06/2026

I'm making my SVG favicon by hand today. Because there is nobody to tell me not to ;-) That's what I love about the solo builder thing. I can prioritize crazy stuff just because I think it's important.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 01/06/2026

"I can't possibly fathom how these same idiots, the morons who continued overhiring LONG into the era of low rates, who then laid off into the same "unsuspected unchanging" rates, and are now "streamlining" for the era of AI when they, at this point, clearly have ...

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 01/06/2026

Working too much leads to busy work, which then occupies all the headspace that could be used for creative thinking. Everything I've ever done which was actually valuable, came from a long walk, a vacation, a trail run, and car ride. It *never* came from a prioritized checklist.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 01/06/2026

Be accessible We all started our software journey somewhere, and now we have a responsibility to pass our craft along to new practitioners. Our community must be welcoming and the tools we build must be friendly for new developers.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 01/06/2026

Forgot about this little gem of a CLI tool: brew install aspell aspell -c path/to/file.md A command line spell checker!

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 01/06/2026

Keep things minimal Single developers and small teams have the most to gain from minimal, high quality tools. Large teams, architecture astronauts, and big enterprises move slowly and use bloated tools. In contrast, developers without that mass can move faster and build higher quality software.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 31/05/2026

Was introduced to the german Brauhaus movement by @mb21.bsky.social blog post on web quality, and I think it captures my sentiment on the software development landscape perfect right now. Craftsmanship and quality matters. But so does efficiency and production. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus

en.wikipedia.org

Bauhaus - Wikipedia

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 30/05/2026

Opus 4.8 seems to be writing *a lot* more code documentation for my projects. I like it.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 30/05/2026

The jq command line tool for working with JSON is one of those simple little software tools that bring so much delight into my day :-) jqlang.org

jqlang.org

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 26/05/2026

Why are modern web apps sending a code to my email instead of a magic link? Is there some sort of security thing I'm not aware of, or is this lazy product development?

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 14/05/2026

There is nothing good about this

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 11/05/2026

This is one of the primary reasons I left Disney. There is so much senseless anxiety about things that really don't matter to customers, the product, or to shareholders. All of that anxiety is pushed onto managers, who can't possibly keep it all from leaking into their teams.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 30/04/2026

The latest models seem to be converging on overfitting to software developers and programming workflows. Maybe loosen the reins on them a bit in the next post training round?

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 28/04/2026

Painkiller products are hard to explain to your parents. Vitamin products are easy to explain to your parents. I identify with this. And it shows the paradox of the Mom Test

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 28/04/2026

I like the idea of the "zebra" company: In contrast to unicorns, zebras are black and white: Profitable and have a higher order purpose. - Sustainable growth + long-term stability - Bootstrapped and "calm" - Prioritize quality over growth

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 24/04/2026

In the long run, playing it safe is more dangerous than taking risks. Playing it safe builds in the status quo to the point where it can't be overcome.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 15/04/2026

Get some sleep. It will still be here tomorrow. -- Note to self.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 11/04/2026

The rapid and unquestioned adoption of single page web apps, for every use case on the web, warranted or not, has got to be the biggest mulligan we'd like to take in the history of the web.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 03/04/2026

We need to be rebuilding our software from first principles now. Burn the ships and start fresh. --- Matt Mullenweg has been pretty sensitive to any mention or criticism of WordPress in the tech world, and I guess I can't blame him for being defensive.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 03/04/2026

Matt Mullenweg had some feedback for the Cloudflare WordPress clone: "Some day, there may be a spiritual successor to WordPress that is even more open. Until then, please keep the WordPress name out of your mouth." Ouch.

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Kris Walker @kriswalker.me · 02/04/2026

More access to building software, coding or prompting, is always a good thing. I really *hate* it when people try to gatekeep the newcomers. People did this to me when I got started, and as it turns out I was right about most of the crazy stuff I was trying to do. I should have never listened.

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