Clean — Perfect by Construction

Anatomy of a Lean Proof for Software Engineers

Intro I recently worked through a problem from a theory of computation textbook that asked me to prove a property of a language using finite automata. The informal proof is a simple constructive proof where you build an automaton and show that it recognizes the language. This is kind of similar to program verification, so I thought it’d be interesting to see what it takes to formalize the proof. Lean is a good choice for this, because its Mathlib has all the theorems for the problem.

The Paradox of Perfection: When ‘Good Enough’ is Actually Better

Exploring the tension between engineering perfectionism and pragmatic delivery. Discover why striving for the perfect solution often prevents us from shipping valuable improvements and how to find the balance.

Vibe Maintainer

Some attendees at an AI Tinkerers meetup in early Feb were asking me what it’s like to be the maintainer of a big OSS project where the…

ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlyin…

Atomic Design by Brad Frost

Learn how to create and maintain digital design systems, allowing your team to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before.

“Policy Without Tools Is Just Poetry” - AT Protocol

Juliet Shen from ROOST joins the show to talk through the Coop 1.0 release, what open-source trust and safety unlocks for new builders, and where AI actually belongs in moderation

A new era for software testing - <antirez>

Notes on software quality

“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.

How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks …

Improving My Hardware Workflow With CI and Nix

One thing you might notice if you read my blog is that I do a lot of hardware projects. Generally, these include a board, some software, and possibly some extraneous components (like CAD design, such as a case). Software tooling is quite mature, but I find that hardware had traditionally lagged quite a bit behind. For a while, I just lived with this, but over the last few months I've put in a bunch of effort to improve my workflow.

How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite is Going

For the past year and a half, the team building Roc's compiler has been rewriting our 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig, for reasons I'll recap below. We recently passed an exciting milestone: feature parity with the original compiler!

Impeccable: Design skills for AI harnesses

1 skill, 23 commands, and curated anti-patterns for impeccable frontend design. Works with Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI.

Impeccable: Design skills for AI harnesses

1 skill, 23 commands, and curated anti-patterns for impeccable frontend design. Works with Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI.

Lean Data Automation: A Principal Components Approach

Plus: A nimble, composable example with Github Actions, Hamilton, and Runhouse

Impeccable: Design skills for AI harnesses

1 skill, 23 commands, and curated anti-patterns for impeccable frontend design. Works with Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI.