Watching as condensation drips from the window panes – the inside being so warm, and the outdoors being almost freezing – I notice the pink sky which signals that, soon, the sun will set. My first instinct when seeing the pink sky – the colour of the sky only intensifying as the minutes pass – was how much the colours of the sky means to me, not just this year but in general. At sun rise and sunset, the boundaries are gradients: the sky changes between many colours. There are magical mom...

A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden. More specifically, that we should emulate Sweden’s large-scale adoption of prefabricated construction. Something like 85% of Swedish single family homes , along with 30-40% of multifamily buildings , are factory-built, produced in large, impressive-looking factories like Lindbäcks . Per this line of thinking, the main problem with US housing construction is that it’s stil...

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection. Work I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefull...

Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and any Wasm-targeting programming language can extend a Wasm-hosting application. It has more friction than supplying a script in a text file, but extension authors can write in their language of choice, and use more polished development tools — debugging, test...

I'm glad to see the back of 2025, so let's focus on 2026. As I write this, it’s 18:49 on New Year’s Eve. I’m sat in the lounge, with the fire going, annoyed that our NYE plans have been ruined by me having the flu. I feels like an appropriately shitty end to a very shitty year. In 2025, I: Worked way too much Spent too much time away from home travelling for work Neglected those I love Helped my Mum, where possible, through recovering from a heart attack L...

I am in the process of updating my résumé. Not because I’m looking for a job [1] , but because I like to feature my résumé on my website and the current published copy doesn’t reflect my pivot from engineering management to an individual contributor role two years ago . I feel a little bit weird about the misrepresentation, and would rather update the document than take it down. While working on some edits, I was reflecting on how things have been going, and decided to write this “wha...

GDB is great for stepping through machine code to figure out what is going on. It uses debug information under the hood to present you with a tidy backtrace and also determine how much machine code to print when you type disassemble . This debug information comes from your compiler. Clang, GCC, rustc, etc all produce debug data in a format called DWARF and then embed that debug information inside the binary (ELF, Mach-O, …) when you do -ggdb or equivalent. Unfortunately, this means ...

In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up to 100 times faster, a big boost for spreadsheets and other number-crunching applications. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to compute trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in microcode. I'm part of a group that is reverse-enginee...

We are experiencing one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the last few decades. Call it what you will: AI, generative AI, large language models… But where does it come from? Academics will tell you that it stems from decades of mathematical efforts on campus. But think about it: if this were the best model to explain what happened, where would the current breakthroughs have occurred? They would have happened on campus first, then propagated to industry. That’s the line...

Forgive the Betteridge headline, but it’s because this is a personal thought process I’m still going through myself. As opposed to a personal thought process I’m going through for someone else!? That doesn’t make sense. Welcome to 2026! The shop next door is playing a Carpenters album, which is awesome. Rest in peace Karen, you were a legend. Spreadsheets Last year was a bit of a wash for me when it came to personal productivity, but I flipped the narrative hard in December. Mayb...

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 . It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. The year of "reasoning" The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the command-line The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance The year of $200/...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html

Dear Team, As we near the end of the calendar year, I want to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together. 2025 was an extraordinary year for Shield AI, marked by record-breaking achievements with the Coast Guard, the launch of a new autonomous aircraft, and countless milestones in between. At every step, each of you played an essential role in making 2025 the year it was. I came into Shield AI in May with a background in building business in tech, not defense. Despi...

I work at HPE on the Chapel Programming Language . Recently, another HPE person asked me: So, you work on the programming language. What’s next for you? This caught me off-guard because I hadn’t even conceived of moving on. I don’t want to move on, because I love the field of programming languages . In addition, I have come to think there is something in PL for everyone, from theorists to developers to laypeople. So, in that spirit, I am writing this list as a non-exhaust...

Some insights on who visited my blog in the last 12 months Some insights on who visited my blog in the last 12 months

This is the last NULL BITMAP of the year. If you read these with any regularity, sincerely, thanks for spending time with me every week. Reflecting on the year, I have been a bit down about the future of programming culturally, with the advent of LLMs it feels like people are telling me that being interested in how things work and how best to think about things is a waste of time. That "no, no, we're automating the boring parts" refrain fills me with dread about which those people thought were...

Testing the Mono Gateway, a custom-built 10 Gbps Router Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ. In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf: Jeff Geerling January 2, 2026 Testing ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Olu Niyi-Awosusi and the other 130 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?...

I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head. There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet! facet facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity. ...

There are numbers every Python programmer should know . For example, how fast or slow is it to add an item to a list in Python? What about opening a file? Is that less than a millisecond? Is there something that makes that slower than you might have guessed? If you have a performance sensitive algorithm, which data structure should you use? How much memory does a floating point number use? What about a single character or the empty string? How fast is FastAPI compared to Django? I wanted to ta...

"The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model onto a set of data; the model has thousands of parameters, but you only have dozens or a couple of hundred of data points. This is what political sciense is like; there's a huge number of parameters and variables, far more than actual...

This year I ran three book club readings over email with 1,230 unique attendees. I ran 12 coffee club meetups in midtown Manhattan with 170 unique attendees. Angelo and I ran 6 NYC Systems meetups with 12 different speakers and 281 unique attendees. I took 3 visiting PhD students out for Banh Mi . I raised $6,915 for educational non-profits, offering chats in return. I got coffee, lunch, or took 30 minute calls with 55 people I'd never spoken to before in person or on video. (Most, bu...

0.0 Context Setting It’s been a minute. This is probably the third draft of an episode that I’ve tried to finish so maybe this one will stick. It has been hard to write, lately! It’s December 29 in Portland, Oregon and it is getting cold. Also many things have happened in the world and it feels like things that suck have outweighed the things that don’t suck. 0.1 Some Personal News Hey, did you know I do workshops and coaching now? I could explain what they do, but I’ll le...