Nat Bennett's personal newsletter. Programming, reading, writing, running businesses, and making things with high quality.| Simpler Machines
There's a kind of guy who loves Marcus Aurelius's meditations. I know two things about this guy: Things are going wrong in his life, and he is handling those things very badly. You'd think I'd love stoicism. I have anxiety, and I've done the therapy for it. I meditate. I| Simpler Machines
I got Claude to write tests by telling it that if it doesn't write tests it will be attacked by bats.| Simpler Machines
I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being, a monthly(ish) newsletter about staring at code that you wrote last month while microscopic Von Neumann machines tried to melt my lungs.| Simpler Machines
Still pretty heads down here on StoryTime. I'd like to be writing more but it's tough to mix that and "spending as much time as I can coding" together – they draw on a lot of the same mental stores. One of the things| Simpler Machines
Hello again – from San Francisco. Not much writing lately. You can read more about why in yet another newsletter – dev notes from StoryTime. Here: the personal relationship to software, cameras, and humongous men. --- Writing a significant software application (mostly) solo is strange. A lot of ego. Normally I&| Simpler Machines
Howdy! Been a minute. Between an intense contract and the election, my writing fell off a cliff this year – all of it. Newsletter, journalling, fiction, email – all of it. I owe several of you messages, which I expect to get to over the next few days. This has| Simpler Machines
Hello! Hello! Things have been crazy around here, in the way that contracting occasionally gets — for a hot minute I had effectively three jobs, but things are wrapping up and settling in and generally feeling a lot more manageable. Still don’t have news I can share on| Simpler Machines
“I knew you’d love this.” Is there anything more delicious? One of my favorite sensations of this meme age — a friend was scrolling, saw something, and thought of you.| Simpler Machines
I’m going to try to convince you to start a company — especially if you’re a Pivot.| Simpler Machines
Why Pivotal engineers changed teams so often, and how those changes happened| Simpler Machines
My favorite thing about this test is that it's not a test for whether these operations are happening inside of a transition. It might actually be better to do this with the first request as a subquery inside the insert, and this test will happily accept that solution.| Simpler Machines
I miss being able to do that raw volume of work. I miss the feeling of being on a team that pairs. The level of collaboration skill. The pace.| Simpler Machines
There are people trying to get us back to that disaster vibe – but – I dunno – society-as-a-whole has escaped TheGlobalChatroomSlashAnxietyReflectionMatrix and I think everyone's chilled out a lot.| Simpler Machines
let’s just get tactical write away, and talk about note-taking for dependency mapping| Simpler Machines
ChatGPT by default writes verbose and somewhat naive Bash, but you can improve it a lot with a few directives.| Simpler Machines
It's almost May, and boy is it – the weather's getting so nice that I get annoyed when I go outside without a jacket and it's cold. When I first moved here from New York City I could be outside in shirtsleeves no problem – 60 degrees was a warm spring day.| Simpler Machines
There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done."| Simpler Machines
If your model is "it's okay to lie if I've been lied to" then we're all knee deep in bullshit forever and can never escape Transaction Cost Hell.| Simpler Machines