| Site | https://alchemists.io |
| Profile | https://alchemists.io/team/brooke_kuhlmann |
| Community | https://alchemists.io/community |
A letter to John Ternus: https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus
Well written and a powerful reminder that high quality software and hardware can be an amazing way in which to delight, bring joy, and enrich people's lives.
Class variables are such a bane in Ruby. Doesn't help that Rails keeps promoting this practice: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21942
The unnecessary mutation is why I call this out as an antipattern and always leads to unwanted surprises: https://alchemists.io/articles/ruby_antipatterns#_class_variables
Holy hell, Republicans want to cut health care to continue to fund a senseless war:
"House Republicans are considering cutting health care spending to help pay for a reconciliation bill that could provide as much as $200 billion for the Iran war and immigration enforcement."
Source: https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2026/03/30/day-1896/
Trump said his “preference” would be to “take the oil in Iran” and floated seizing Kharg Island; hackers linked to Iran accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account; House Republicans are considering cutting health care spending to help pay for a reconciliation bill that could provide as much as $200 billion for the Iran war and immigration enforcement; the Department of Homeland Security remained shut down after 44 days, setting a record for the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history; the Trump administration’s Supreme Court case against birthright citizenship relies in part on legal arguments advanced by white supremacist and anti-Chinese activists in the late 1800s; Trump’s White House ballroom project includes a “massive” military complex under the site of the demolished East Wing; and 33% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, the lowest rating of his second term in office.
Such joy: https://lara-aigmueller.at/thoughts/leaving-the-ai-party. To quote directly, we should:
"[V]alue craftsmanship, individuality and honest, high-quality work."
Granted, I see value in LLMs as augmentation for the mundane and menial tasks but swapping out human creativity/ingenuity for pure unthinking regurgitation isn't the answer.
I've started adding folks, like this, to my second brain (i.e. Obsidian) for future collaboration/hiring. ⭐
I want to help build a community that cares (and sweats the details). 🚀
Good turnout in Boulder. Glad we got to march through downtown. Lots of amazing signs. The papier-mâché puppets were a nice touch.
🎗️ Today's the day for the next No Kings protest: https://www.nokings.org
Let's get out and make our voices heard. Hope to see you all there wherever you are!
The ability to read and quickly understand code (i.e. cognitive load) has always been more of a time sink than writing code.
This is especially true when poorly designed/written code is part of the hot path in the application because each team member has to constantly re-read and decipher each time. This is a major, reoccurring, company expense:
<engineers> * <time to understand> * <each revisit of same code path> = <reoccurring cost>
Related: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/25/thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/
