Silhouetted by the sun

Okay 2026, let's go!

This photo of a skydiver silhouetted by the sun is truly mind blowing. Fittingly, it won the Astronomy Photographer Of The Year prize.

I'm starting a new job in a few weeks as an Engineering Manager and thought this advice about inverting problems to be really helpful. As Engineers, and probably as humans, we tend to be very optimistic. Instead, invert a project and consider what it would take for it to fail, then avoid those things:

For example, if your goal is to keep your home clean, instead of thinking about what it means for it to be spotless, you can invert the problem by thinking about what it would mean for it to be disgusting, and then make sure you do everything possible to make it not disgusting.

Also relevant to an Engineering Manager role is this piece on cognitive load. As is this piece about preserving focus time. I also really enjoyed jyn's piece on just having fun with engineering.

I've recently migrated a side project to Bun which was astonishingly easy - particularly in these days of LLMs. So it is noteworthy to me that Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. On the one hand, I love it when open source projects get corporate sponsors so they have the necessary resourcing. Other the other hand regular readers will know I have some concerns about Anthropic's business model.

I recently came across Evan Hahn's list of shell scripts that he uses all the time. There's plenty of inspiration there and links to the source code.

Proof that an more gentle world wide web still exists abounds and makes me so happy. Would you like a guide to folding fitted sheets? Here's a site to help you identify birds of prey. And here's a guide to the relative sizes of animals. Thankfully the Internet Archive is busily archiving all these pages as well and has now archived one trillion pages - donate to them right away.

Barry Jones is one of the old Labor guard that I've always greatly admired and am saddened by the news that he is now in palliative care. I had the good fortune to meet him a couple of decades ago while working at ourcommunity.com.au. His piece on faith and death is well worth a read, even for a committed atheist like myself.

It turns out the idea of traditional Italian cuisine is a myth. As Alberto Grandi points out, the "Darwinian logic is embarrassingly simple: the cuisines that change are the ones that survive. Yet sovereigntist rhetoric insists on freezing everything in place, as if the national menu were a snow globe." It's a sentiment that always rings true to me.

It's slightly old news now, but the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has developed a secret register of companies that underperform as technology providers for the Australian Government. I assume this is now the list of providers they then select from for their next project.

ZDNet has another report on the growing trend of European companies trying to move away from US tech giants - this article focuses on the shift to OpenSource providers. Indeed, the International Criminal Court is migrating away from Microsoft to Open Desk. On a related note, the Python Software Foundation has withdrawn a $1.5 mil grant proposal to the US Government as it would be required to stop the operation of any programs that advance diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet another reason to love Python.