As a programmer, I wish I could help people understand that the fastest part of any project is writing the code...

Non-programmers always want to throw more code writers at a project to speed things up. The "Mythical Man Month" problem aside,

the bottlenecks are all the legwork involved in defining the problem, the scope of this particular task, and fully testing it.

Even before AI, writing code was fast and we already have a lot of tools to crank it out...if we're clear on *what* to crank out.

This is prolly true in all fields, this difference in understanding between the people who actually work in a field, and the people who are adjacent to that field.

Some news, I’ll be departing the PSF as a staff member at the end of this week.

You can read a more formal announcement over at https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2026/01/ee-departing-the-psf-staff.html, but I wanted to share on socials as well.

It has been an incredible… nearly 8 years serving as the Director of Infrastructure for the Python Software Foundation, but it is time for me to do something new.

Humbled to be named Reuse & Repair Champion at the Full Circle Awards 2025 by Circular IE! 🛠️♻️

The judges called me “the driving force behind Repair Cafés in Ireland” — but really, this is about the amazing fixers & community at @tog and beyond.

Repair is never just about the fix, it’s about sharing skills, stories & keeping things in use.

Next up:
🔧 Repair Café Tullamore – Oct 11
🔧 Repair Café @Tog Hackerspace – Oct 17

👉 https://circular.ie/articles/reuse-and-repair-champion-jeffrey-roe

#FullCircleAwards #RepairCafe #CircularEconomy

This morning, during some chaos, this zipped by on one of my feeds. Maybe it was here? Maybe it was BlueSky? Hard to overstate how much this made my day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver-engineered_dam_in_the_Czech_Republic

Ireland just released a report showing the huge success of the unconditional basic income it provided to artists. Each $1 spent led to society gaining $1.39. Artists' earned incomes went up more than their side job incomes fell. And they were happier and used less welfare

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/press-releases/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-produced-over-100-million-in-social-and-economic-benefits/

August 1st - Googler asks the community if XSLT should be removed from the HTML living standard.
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523

Respondents overwhelmingly reject the suggestion.

August 6th - Google starts work on removing XSLT from Chrome.
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/435623334#comment4

August 14th - Googler sends PR to remove XSLT from the standard.
https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11563

Like, I don't have a particular view of whether this is a good idea or not. But these sham community engagement exercises piss me off.