In Three Rewrites there was a sentence I glossed over: Hooks before and after every action — logging, dry-run, error context, all without touching the core. Half a sentence. But that’s exactly where the third attempt ended up. Today I want to unpack that one line. It’s going to be longer. What a hook is A hook is a function I slip in before or after an action. ensure, delete, start, stop — every action incus-compose runs on a resource can be intercepted. Before and after. ...
I hate spaghetti code. Warzone 2100, among other things, showed me why back in 2011. C code, globals everywhere. You change one variable and three things break that seem to have nothing to do with it. You read the code and can’t tell where a decision begins and where it ends. For three years — from 2022 to 2025 — I worked on go-orb. Alone. A framework for distributed systems, meant as the successor to go-micro. Config from anywhere, service discovery, RPC, streaming, pub/sub, kvstore, metrics. Every new idea became a feature, every feature a plugin. ...
Sometimes you walk through the world and it gets out of your way. People turn curt before a word has been spoken, some irritable. They sense something about you. And you understand them, because what radiates from you keeps them at a distance. At other times, doors open. People laugh with you, seek your closeness. You are simply there, light and open, and the world answers warmly. For a long time you took the one for luck and the other for misfortune. Then you realize: it is an echo. As you call into the forest, so it comes back. When it is dark inside you, you see differently, you enter the encounter differently, and the encounter answers you differently. The outside carries what lives on the inside. ...
I pray the same thing every day. Please show me my mistakes. I am sorry for them. Thank you for your blessing, Lord. May your will be mine. Your law, mine. And I want to help you put it into practice. This is a habit that becomes alignment. Renewed every morning. Someone asked me: If his will stands above yours — do you doubt? No. I hope it overwrites mine. Completely. Piece by piece. ...
Once there was a man who was good. Blameless and upright, one who shunned evil. He was good the way a stone is still — from birth, without ever having chosen it. Then the dark forces came. They took from him first what was outside: his possessions and the people he loved. Then they reached inward, toward his body and his sleep. They wanted to know whether goodness would hold when the ground was pulled from under it. ...
I think of a fictional person. He is a pacifist — not because he read about it, but because he has experienced violence and rejects it. He comes from a country where men must be strong and are not permitted to show shame. He flees. He arrives here. He carries something with him. The conviction that peace is possible if someone starts it. He wanted to contribute here. Not as a gesture — because he knows what happens when no one does. He has seen where hate leads. He wanted to live the opposite. ...
Once upon a time there was a black sheep. It lived in a village full of sheep and carried a bucket with it. A bucket of filth. Everything it had not allowed itself to be, everything the village had not wanted to see, lay in it. It could not put the bucket down. For a time the sheep thought about tipping the bucket out. Over the others. They should turn black too, it thought, then it would no longer be alone. It imagined nights in which it moved through the village spraying colour. The thought warmed and poisoned at the same time. ...
There is a form of self-destruction that feels like protection. It is called: I am the victim, everyone else is to blame. I know this attitude from the inside. For years I was the poor one. When something did not work, it was down to the circumstances or the people around me. Above all to my parents. They were the address for my blame for years, for much that I should have stood up for myself. ...
The fool is one of the oldest figures in human history. He goes by many names — shaman, dervish, mystic, court jester. What connects them: an inner freedom that outlasts outer circumstances. He sees differently and speaks what others leave unsaid. He cannot be bought. The fool knows the word no — toward himself and toward others. His confusion is his raw material. His clarity, the result. They are called fools. ...
Yesterday I helped a family bury their dog. We accompanied him to his last breath. A dear, dear fighter — for those he loved. I read Psalm 23 to the family — so they could see: even this dark valley passes. In the evening I thought: now I will do something good for myself. I went out to celebrate. Into bed at six in the morning, fell straight asleep. Up again at two in the afternoon. The day was depressive. ...