Ryan Marken

open.substack.comRDEL #150: How is AI adoption affecting team motivation?41% of engineering leaders say their teams are less motivated than a year ago, often because creative work is being displaced by the review of AI-generated code.

4 July

open.substack.com/pub/rdel/p/r... What I read today

1 July

It seems that nobody has or operates on principles anymore. Maybe I'm just getting old.

open.substack.comHow to Want Something Without Needing ItWhy the Stoics were not cold, and how to lose what you love without being destroyed by it

23 June

What I read today open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

open.substack.comHow to Use Anger as FuelThe energy behind your anger is neutral. What it builds or breaks comes down to where you aim it.

22 June

What I read today. open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

youtu.beZig 2026: No-AI Policy, $670K Foundation, Left GitHub & Why Zig Isn’t 1.0 - Andrew Kelley ExplainsYouTube video by JetBrains

30 May

In an age where everything is A.I. Where products are built solely to see how much attention and subscriptions can be squeezed out of user bases, this interview was such a breath of fresh air. Someone committed to building something because it's what they're passionate about youtu.be/iqddnwKF8HQ?...

30 May

This has re-lit the spark I lost to everything now being built with agents. To feeling like: if you're not on that hype train, you're afraid of being a dinosaur. This has given me a perspective I once had, but lost. Programming because you want to build, not because you're beholden to the industry.

open.substack.comAI productivity debateResearchers and practitioners weigh in on AI’s current and future impact.

23 May

what I read today. open.substack.com/pub/abinoda/...

5 May

A thought that just crossed my mind... With AI delivering more code, there's going to be a whole swath of people coming into the profession who will never feel the joy of coding a solution that solves a complex issue they you know will be running in production for a long time.

open.substack.comYou Are What You Attend ToOn how attention builds identity, and why the deepest obstacle to it isn't your phone

23 Apr

What I read this morning open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

open.substack.comThe Trends #10: Amazon now requires senior approval for AI-assisted code from junior and mid-level engineersThe Trends filter tracks tech trends: what moved, why it matters, and what to watch next.

16 Apr

What I read this morning open.substack.com/pub/techworl...

open.substack.comThe 5 Most Important Skills to Learn in 2026What it actually takes to stay sharp, stay free, and stop being moved by forces you didn't choose.

15 Apr

What I read this morning. open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis... One of the best posts I've read in a long time.

open.substack.comYou Decide Who You Want To BeOn the terrifying freedom of self-creation and why most people never use it

31 Mar

What I read today open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

open.substack.comThe Point Where Everyone QuitsOn what separates those who continue from those who stop

28 Mar

What I read today open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

27 Mar

This 3d print took 56 hours. Pretty stoked about it.

open.substack.comClaude Code + NotebookLM + Obsidian: The Research Stack Nobody's Using20 YouTube videos become cited notes, audio, and a knowledge graph in Obsidian

21 Mar

What I read this morning open.substack.com/pub/artemxte... Going to try and implement this now. Seems like something I've been wanting without actually knowing it 😂

open.substack.comYou're Not Paid to Write CodeOne thing I noticed in my engineering organizations is that when people get the problem to work on, the first step is to open the editor, create a new branch, and start coding.

19 Mar

What I read today. open.substack.com/pub/techworl... We were taught this reasoning in school 12 years ago way before the AI hype. It was true then and even more applicable with AI. I've long forgotten a lot of these principles but this doesn't just apply to AI to being a good engineer.

open.substack.comConviction Over WillpowerOn the difference between forcing yourself and believing what you're doing matters

17 Mar

Finally got back to waking up early after adjusting to the time change allowing me to read in the morning. What I read this morning. open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

8 Mar

Excited for this smoke tomorrow #grill #smoke

open.substack.comDoing Everything Right and Still FailingOn operating in a world that doesn't reward virtue as consistently as you were promised

5 Mar

What I read this morning. open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

4 Mar

Calling Lua programmers. When you have a module you want to import like lua-requests, should you install it locally for each project or globally? What's best practice here? #lua

4 Mar

Is there a dependency management file similar to nodes package.json or golangs mod files?

open.substack.com4 Disciplines That Separate Effective Engineers From Busy OnesLearn about the daily habits that help engineers be more effective. (7 min)

3 Mar

Also read open.substack.com/pub/petariva...

scienceofpeople.com22 Tips to Be More Articulate and Speak More ClearlyBoost your communication skills with these 22 practical tips. Learn to speak clearly, articulate your thoughts effectively, and command any conversation.

3 Mar

What I read this morning www.scienceofpeople.com/how-to-be-mo...

youtu.beHighly Suspect - Yellow Roses [Official Audio]YouTube video by Highly Suspect

2 Mar

What I'm listening to today youtu.be/qlEFaEh_47Y?...

youtu.beMac Miller - All I Want Is YouYouTube video by MacMillerMusicVideos

27 Feb

What I'm listening to this morning youtu.be/8ZbD-rqHOr0?...

open.substack.comYou Never Complain About BreathingOn why we complain about what we've declared we cannot change

27 Feb

This morning I read: open.substack.com/pub/stoicwis...

open.substack.comDatabase Design Doesn't Start With Table. It Starts With ConsequencesHere's what most backend engineers get wrong about schema design and how to fix it before you hit production. (6 min)

26 Feb

This morning I read: open.substack.com/pub/petariva...

24 Feb

Do I start reading "A knight of the seven kingdoms"? Or, do start on the second book of the "Red Rising" series?

Golden Son it is.

@malware.delivery I'm sending emails using sendgrid and am trying to propegate custom key value pairs to our webhook callbacks. Nothing is sticking. Was this you?? 🧐😅

23 Feb

More snow...

Ryan Marken reposted

rob pike

@robpike.io

23 Feb

STOP LAUNCHING CRAP WE DON'T NEED OR WANT It's staggeringly depressing how blithely they plan to ruin everything. Everything. I went to a dark site last week so I could say goodbye to the sky. Took a little hand-held photo and guess what? A satellite trail appeared. Just stop!

rowan kaiser@rowan.monster

genuinely in awe of how audaciously stupid this plan is

theatlantic.comThe Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War PlansU.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

22 Feb

Wanted to learn a new language. Started playing with Lua. It's to early to say if I like it, yet but it's a nice change of pace from ts/js or python.

U.S.A.!

Going to build a #mtg card database site that lets you filter and sort.

Ryan Marken reposted

Shane Harris

@shaneharris.bsky.social

24 Mar 2025

In 25 years of covering national security, I’ve never seen a story like this: Senior Trump officials discussed planning for the U.S. attack on Yemen in a Signal group--and inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Side projects, for me, aren't usually only about making the thing you want to build, but is also usually about learning how to do something new or better.

I got a lot of, if not all, of my architecture set up to be run in a makefile but it's a pain running everything locally when I need to switch between my laptop and desktop... I think I'll take some time to set up a server sitting on my local network to handle my db, kafka broker, and OTel collector

My server is an old dell Inspiron laptop from like 2014 that has debian as the host and running vms of alpine for my different dev "environments". Which I find awesome finding usage for old computers.

github.comGitHub - oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen: Generate Go client and server boilerplate from OpenAPI 3 specificationsGenerate Go client and server boilerplate from OpenAPI 3 specifications - oapi-codegen/oapi-codegen

Side projects, for me, aren't usually only about making the thing you want to build, but is also usually about learning how to do something new or better.

So far I've managed to get my postgrea instance up with my initial ddl migrations, a start on an open API spec written with my server def generated with github.com/oapi-codegen..., and a partial implementation with it.

Additionally, I've gotten a jeagar collector running and an OTel package for tracing to provide observability into my code which is cool. And yesterday and today, I worked on getting a sarama consumer/producer stood up so I can start sending messages.

Side projects, for me, aren't usually only about making the thing you want to build, but is also usually about learning how to do something new or better.

In scraping these sites, the end game is to be able to have a digestible way to compare products easily to find the lowest premium or deals.

But mostly I wanted to build something that was waaaay over engineered to get better with some tech I've used but am not good with yet. Namely, kafka and OTel.

Side projects, for me, aren't usually only about making the thing you want to build, but is also usually about learning how to do something new or better.

I'm building an application that will scrape gold product prices (current interest of mine) from different online gold brokers.

25 Nov 2024

Can't do anything the easy way 😔 Decided to break my go project into separate modules so they can be imported where needed. My repo for this project is private. Running mod tidy is getting a 404 when go tries finding my tagged release. Anyone else experience this? #golang

25 Nov 2024

I've seen a suggestion that says to turn off the sum integrity check. That seems...not right.

23 Nov 2024

Nice afternoon hike

22 Nov 2024

If you use naked returns, know that I'm cursing you.

21 Nov 2024

Anyone write their own reverse proxy? Is that advised against? Looking for resources to help me along with putting some webservers I have locally behind a proxy but don't want to leave my local network vulnerable.