jefflinwood

That part of Austin (I lived in North Shoal Creek for about fifteen years) is pretty slow to change. Most obvious change on Anderson would be part of Northcross Mall becoming the Walmart.

I built a Tcl/TK GUI in 1997 and I thought that it (specifically Tcl) was dated then. If you're used to anything beyond shell scripting, Tcl feels very un-programming. It does look they added objects in 2012, I can't speak to that.

Notwithstanding anything about LLM tools being able to do GUIs any way you want in 2026, I'd really consider just about anything else at this point. JavaFX, React Native, Electron, Flutter, etc.

I actually built this, and shipped it, in 1996, with no knowledge of page rank, citation analysis, or bibliometrics, for an internal/external search engine for the Envirolink web site. Envirolink was a directory of environmental web sites, so they already had a list of URLs to crawl. The reason it was feasible to build was that it was a fairly constrained list of URLs, it wasn't the entire web.

I didn't really know what I was doing (I was 17), but it was an awesome unpaid summer internship. There were two parts of the search engine - a crawler and the search engine. Both were written in Perl.

I just finished reading this book, which came out this year.

Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age by James M. Tabor (Author)

About this telegraph cable, and all of the different attempts to lay it on the sea floor.

I also recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (1998) if you want to learn more about telegraphs.

Code review - it's now baked in to Claude Code and Codex CLI.

If you look closely at the author list, you can see that some of the same names still hang out here, which is pretty cool.

It's also fun just to look at the article titles to see what the zeitgeist of the era was for a given time period.

Interestingly enough, Envirolink's web search engine had bibliometric search ranking in 1996. It only searched a small subset of the web - mostly around environment advocacy.

I built in 1996 as an internship, it all ran as some perl scripts, and I had no idea what I was doing, of course, I was 17. I just thought it was clever to use the links between pages as a signal to the search engine. I'd never heard of citation analysis.

I tried the onboarding, but I think it timed out on the Analyzing screen because it couldn't find any issues in my Sentry environment. So I couldn't get too much further.

EDIT: It did let me in, but I don't know why it took so long.

I've worked on teams where there's been one person on rotation every sprint to catch and field issues like these, so taking that job and giving it to an AI agent seems like a reasonable approach.

I think I'd be most concerned about having a separate development process outside of the main issue queue, where agents aren't necessarily integrated into the main workstream.

It's still around!

SOAP was actually pretty easy to use, once it settled out.

For the most part, everyone used some kind of SDK that translated WSDL (Web Services Description Language) specifications to their chosen language.

So you could define almost any function - like PostBlog(Blog blog), and then publish it as a WSDL interface to be consumed by a client. We could have a Java server, with a C# client, and it more or less just worked.

We used it with things like signatures, so the data in the message wasn't tampered with.

Why did it stop getting popular? It probably really started to fall out of favor when Java/C# stopped being some of the more popular programming languages for web development, and PHP and Ruby got a lot more momentum.

The idea was that REST/JSON interfaces would be easier to understand, as we would have a hypermedia interface. There was sort of an attempt to make a RESTy interface work with XML, called WebDAV, that Microsoft Office supported for a while, but it was pretty hard to work with.

I've got some old SOAP code from 2001 here at the bottom of this article:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2160672/build-portals-with...

I'm building this over at https://zapcircle.com/ - it's still a work in progress, but it's all open source.

The idea behind it was that Behavior-Driven Development might be a great idea, but Gherkin was a pain to work with. LLMs bridge that gap now:

https://www.jefflinwood.com/2025/zapcircle-bdd-2025/

This was a great article!

I saw "To Fly!" for the first time at the Smithsonian Air and Space Dulles location (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) on their IMAX screen two years ago. Definitely a film of its moment, and I can see how that influenced future science film documentaries.

My dad worked for Spitz doing Omnimax installations and planetariums, but I don't know any of the details. I would assume this was probably the late 70s or early 80s.

I'm having the LLM work with human-readable behaviors for each component. You can have the LLM take those behaviors and create a Mermaid diagram, for instance.

It seems a little counterintuitive, but you can ask an LLM to improve a prompt. They are quite good at it.

San Francisco is both a city and a county, unlike San Jose. In addition, you can't directly compare municipal budgets without taking into account enterprise departments that are meant to be revenue neutral, such as airports - in this case, both have an airport.

That's kind of what they were trying to do with the 320 and 540.

I worked on their e-commerce store, you could configure and buy and ship one from the web site in 1999-2000.

The prices were still really high.

I worked out of the SGI campus before it got sold to Google, and I remember the on-site cafe there was amazing. I don't know how much Google changed about it, I've never been.

As a vendor, I (well, my company) had to pay for meals at SGI, I have no idea if the employees got free meals.

Austin was supposed to be the next big tech hub since at least the late 90's and the dot-com boom/bust.

I don't think the Oracle headquarters change makes a huge difference, but I did figure Twitter would move to Austin, and that hasn't happened yet.

I worked on the SGI campus as a consultant/vendor to them in 1999/2000 during the dot.com boom. I really wanted one of those 1600SW flat screens (everything was CRT back then), but they weren't really in use at the time.

One of the neatest things is that they let us (Trilogy/pcOrder) put together a sand volleyball team to compete in their company intramurals.

Their cafeteria was also top notch.

I met Paul in 1999 after a show they did in Austin with Crystal Method and Lo Fidelity All-Stars. I was a nerdy 20 year old who had no business hanging out with a bunch of EDM superstars, but someone had some kind of hookup and we got to hang out together.

From an email I sent my brother at the time:

"This show was so cool. It was a rave. We went to this music hall. I danced throughout the whole show. I met the singer from Lo Fidelity All Stars and got his autograph during the show, and we hung out with Ken from Crystal method and Paul from Orbital after the show. The guy from Orbital was impressed by the fact that we worked for a .com. I went with two other guys from Trilogy. Orbital was just amazing. It was just like their live album - Halcyon with the "Shot through the heart", the "SATAN SATAN SATAN" song, some stuff I didn't know. Crystal Method played keep hope alive and get busy child and some new stuff. I got so dehydrated though."

Something like the GitHub certification?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/collections/o1njfe825p602p

You could checkout Nixpacks - https://nixpacks.com/docs/getting-started - if you want a solution to build images as part of a CI/CD pipeline.

If you dig into those numbers, they lost 3.8 million subscribers in India due to losing streaming rights for cricket matches.

I don't think that's a reasonable lens to be looking at how Disney's cartoon movies are doing.

I do think it might be worthwhile if you wanted to decide if Disney should have decided to keep the streaming rights, and whether the economics of that decision make sense.

I'm probably the target market for this, and I think it's going to have a hard time selling.

I currently pay for XBox Game Pass Ultimate at $15/month. That comes with 400 games, although I tend to play the more indie games. They do rotate off, so I bought Subnautica, for instance, on Steam. I notice that a few of yours have been on Game Pass.

Right now, Epic is shoving free games like crazy through their Game Store. I have a huge backlog of games on Epic that I'll probably never work through. Some indie games, some former AAA games. Same with Amazon - they give away free games every month for some reason.

I don't know if this glut of games is going to end well or poorly, but I would suggest you don't compete with XBox, and instead do a Mac-first indie game subscription service. Apple Arcade is pretty poorly marketed, and there might be more opportunity there.

You could try FreeCodeCamp - it's a different style of learning, but it might be useful for you. There are some sections on HTML and CSS, or you can jump straight into Bootstrap:

https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/front-end-development-lib...

Houston Public Library membership is open to all Texas residents. Their web site is currently not working for me, but I would assume it will be back up and running shortly.

I think the biggest problem you might face for getting money out of it by self publishing is that it doesn't have a clear audience - at least from the way you describe it.

It sounds as if you have this book sitting inside you, and it's part of your creative process to write it down and release it to the world, so I'd really focus on the act of publishing, and releasing, more than the actual monetary value.

Nemo stage show at Animal Kingdom, maybe?

In this particular case, the problem is that the plugins require Dart glue code, and a native implementation on both iOS and Android. So if you run into a problem with a component, it's much more complicated to fix it.

In general, using third party components with native mobile apps is pretty straightforward.

Which reservoir sites could be built that aren't?

Most of the good sites for building reservoirs in California are already taken. You could dam the Smith River, but that isn't going to be popular.

Same thing goes for the Los Angeles River - replacing the channelized aqueduct with a meandering set of flood plains that recharges an aquifer would require removing large chunks of residential, commercial, or industrial land.