Carlos Vargas

In the last month, I’ve been trying to start a Link Blog inspired by @simonwillison.net. I’ve been doing it consistently for the past month and I really enjoy it. It helps me consume information differently and think about it, instead of just mindless scrolling. vargascarlos.com/2025/02/01/q...

Don't be a meat proxy. What a great term. Time to figure out how to use it in my day to day now. gruhn.me/blog/2026-08...

I wonder if we can tell when Claude got an influx of users 🤔

It seems we’re all finding how exhausting this new LLM world can be. From Martin Fowler, Salvatore Sanfilippo, Simon Willison, Steve Yegge and many more. vargascarlos.com/2026/02/18/L...

Really like the term “Cognitive debt” from Margaret Storey. vargascarlos.com/2026/02/14/Q...

I like to tell people: “we’re all just winging it”

I think "context engineering" is going to stick - unlike "prompt engineering" it has an inferred definition that's much closer to the intended meaning, which is to carefully and skillfully construct the right context to get great results from LLMs simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/...

When someone tries to vibe code in our legacy code base.

Quoting Birgitta Bockeler, about the evolution of the AI ecosystem in software. vargascarlos.com/2025/06/24/Q...

This is genius

Could this be the future of publishing? vargascarlos.com/2025/06/14/W...

Watching this #UCLFinal and the last 2 minutes of the Barca-Inter come to mind. This would have been a much more entertaining final with some Barca Flickball (biased take).

I love getting a peak at how movies and tv shows are made. Great list of videos that Anil has found about Andor.

It takes you about the same amount of time to read this post as the amount of downtime you’d be allowed per week with 99.999% availability

Apparently before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened when they wanted to get large ships into the Great Lakes they just brought them up the Mississippi and shoved them through the Chicago River

I work on the subscription team at Scribd and I constantly work with Apple AppStore subscriptions. Today’s news are very eventful. I wrote some thoughts about that here. vargascarlos.com/2025/05/01/A...

I’ve been touching grass the last week and it’s been refreshing unplugging from all the chaos. Recommend.

Had a ~6 yr wireless plan that had a data cap (7Gbs each). With today’s apps and web, we were constantly running into it. Finally had to upgrade to an unlimited plan (🤞it stays that way), because we grew tired of having to constantly monitor our usage and phone is unusually useless without it 😞

The stock market in the last few days.

Fully recommend DAN DAN DAN. I’ve heard good things about it, but approached it with no expectations (I didn’t know what it was about) and was blown away by it.

Please let this turn into an actual product. www.apple.com/mac/lumon-te...

Some more Google Docs debugging stories. vargascarlos.com/2025/03/29/Q...

@viticci.macstories.net on this week’s Connected, you mentioned that talking out loud helps you figure things out. In programming, we call this “rubber duck debugging” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_...

TIL about the contenteditable HTML attribute, how powerful it is, and how it was used to build Google Docs. Mind blown. vargascarlos.com/2025/03/21/c...

I’ve been trying to read Armin’s post about Ugly Code the last few weeks, and I’ve finally managed to get around to it. I’ve wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion. vargascarlos.com/2025/03/15/T...

With all the drama about the TypeScript compiler getting ported over into Go, I’m glad I stumbled upon Anders comments as to why it made the most sense. We need more engineering thoughtfulness like this. vargascarlos.com/2025/03/11/Q...

Some thoughts about where I fit within Ben's spectrum and why. vargascarlos.com/2025/02/28/T...

Simon Jansen is a madlad. Insane effort and what a result 👏

I love stumbling upon articles like this every couple of months. Every time I realize something new. I’ve been working across teams unofficially and I think it’s time to solidify that I’m a part of both. It will remove a lot of friction/frustration, while causing side effects somewhere else.

‘Tis I

Someone just asked me “has October 2025 passed?” While looking at the date in their phone 🤔 Not gonna lie, they made me doubt myself.

TIL about String Interning > a method of storing only one copy of each distinct String value, which must be immutable. Interning strings makes some string processing tasks more time-efficient or space-efficient at the cost of requiring more time when the string is created or interned.

“I didn’t fuck around. Why do I have to be part of the finding out?” - me, every day this month

I’ve been upgrading my side project to the latest React for the past few nights. It’s amazing how smooth it has been. The challenge has been due to other packages interface updates, forcing me to rewrite certain features and reconsider my past choices.

Amazing how more productive I can be (or at least feel like it) when I don’t have a day full of meetings.

Could have used with another (or two 😉) weeks of break, but after an insane and full fill year, I was able to completely unplug from coding. I feel pretty energized for 2025, now let’s see how many meetings I can cancel this week heh

Such a great dive into the parasocial relationships social media and subscriptions have created. The post starts off with OnlyFans and it expands into the rest of the internet. nickfthilton.medium.com/onlyfans-sop...

27th-31st might be my favorite days of the year. I would hate to constantly live that “what day is it today” feeling, but on these days, it feels so out of the normal routine, it feels amazing.

See an old cartoon, quote it with another.

One of my favorite blogs this year. I tried blogging a few years ago, but found it too tedious since I wanted “everything to be perfect, knowledgeable, etc” which meant that I took forever to post something. But this idea of just micro-thoughts...it’s appealing.

Every time I go back to pictures I edited in Lightroom, I hate them and have to re-edit them. Then I end up re-editing the re-edits. Rinse and repeat every time I open Lightroom 😫

Trying to decide how much rest my brain needs before I can work on side projects…see you in 2030!