In 2005 I spent six months in a math department writing C++. Twelve lines of undergraduate computer science got the paper published — and hid a bug for 18 years.
My son was learning place value, so we built it: ten snap-fit cubes, each worth 1,000, stacked into a 1-meter Tower of 10,000. OpenSCAD, tolerances, and all.
A reflection on adding illustrations to History Snacks — and how restraint, intent, and quiet design choices shaped the experience more than the images themselves.
Developers have grown used to sluggish tools, but do our IDEs need to be this heavy? A simple experiment comparing IntelliJ, VS Code, and Zed shows how performance can be more than optimization — it can be a design philosophy.