Hardware · Video ReviewPublished 1 Sept 2026▶ Video · ~10 min · YouTubeLogitech MX Master 3S: still the default mouse for people who ship software
Terafied's review calls the 3S a quiet upgrade that may not justify leaving the MX Master 3. We agree — and still recommend the 3S as the first mouse most developers should buy if they own neither.
“Technology moves fast. Good judgment takes its time—and that’s what we’re here to document.”
— TARIQUE ANOWAR, FOUNDER & EDITOR
CULTURE
APPLE
TALKSPractical notes for the stack underneath everything: focused single guides when you need an answer, and multi-part series when the whole system matters.
01 / Guide series
03 SERIES IN THE LIBRARY →
KITEPDF: ARCHITECTURE & DEPLOYMENT.
Multi-part tour of the KitePDF processing stack—how requests become jobs, where data lives, and how to run it from laptop to AWS.
▸ NEXT: PART 04 — NOT PUBLISHED YET
One problem. Fully unpacked.
EKS vs. GKE vs. AKS: We Deployed the Same App on All ThreeThree managed clusters, one identical stateless app plus Postgres, $412 of billing over 30 days.02
The Seven AWS Line Items That Surprise EveryoneThe invoice items that show up after the honeymoon.03
Why Boring WinsDashboards are not a platform. Manifests are.04The Hardware You Already OwnA cluster from a closet, not a cloud invoice.Long-form arguments about the industry, the culture, and the things we've quietly stopped accepting. Signed by name, defended with receipts.
The John Ternus Era Begins at Apple
Tim Cook leaves Apple stronger, richer, and more strategically exposed than the company was fifteen years ago. John Ternus now has to decide what comes next.
01Skills for Real Engineers: How to Keep Claude Code and AI Tools From Ruining Your Architecture
AI coding tools can produce a lot of code very quickly. The engineer’s job is still to decide what deserves to exist, where it belongs, and when to stop.
By Tarique Anowar — 10 min read
02Your Homelab Is a Résumé
Half the sysadmins we interviewed got hired because of a rack in their spare room.
By Tarique Anowar — 6 min.jpeg)
03Right to Repair Is Losing, Quietly
The headlines celebrate every new law. The parts catalogs tell a different story — serialized, throttled, and paired.
By Tarique Anowar — 8 minIs 32 GB the new minimum for a gaming PC in 2025?
1,285 votes · Closes Friday · one vote per readerFilmed on the bench, written for your wallet. Every device earns its score through days of real use — the YouTube video shows you the testing, the written insight proves the verdict.
The RTX 5070 Super: The Card Everyone Should Actually Buy
14:06
~12 min~10 min
09:31We install it, break it, and live with it for at least three weeks before a single word is written. Then we tell you whether it deserves your disk space — with the version number, the price, and the caveats.
Obsidian v1.9.4
"Notes that will outlive the app — the closest thing to future-proof your thoughts can get."
Bitwarden 2026.8
Open-source password management that still beats the paid giants on value — even after the 2026 Premium price hike.
DaVinci Resolve 20.2
A Hollywood-grade editor for zero dollars — Studio's $295 is the rare perpetual upgrade that still makes sense in 2026.
Zed 1.17.2
The editor your GPU-accelerated dreams promised — fast enough to replace VS Code for many workflows, not yet for every extension.
Tailscale 1.86
Your homelab, everywhere, without a single port forward — networking like it should have been.
Raycast 1.94
Spotlight, replaced. The AI features are optional — thankfully — and the speed is absurd.
Docker Desktop 4.43
Indispensable for many teams, heavy for daily RAM, and increasingly priced — the alternatives have never looked better.
Krita 5.3.2
Free, open, and genuinely beloved by working illustrators — the brush engine is the story.
k9s 0.51.0
The terminal UI that makes kubectl feel like a video game — once you live here, you don't go back.
Terraform 1.11
Still the lingua franca of infrastructure as code — even as the license fight keeps boiling.
Portainer 2.27
A GUI for Docker that homelabbers actually keep installed — Business Edition is optional until SSO isn't.
Grafana 12.1
Dashboards that still look a bit 2018 — and still the first thing you install on a new cluster.
A practical watchlist for the tools and platforms underneath your stack. Know what is approaching end of life before it becomes an incident.
EOL Radar
Great speeches from the people who built the industry — keynotes, commencement addresses, conference talks. Hand-picked, time-stamped, and annotated with our own viewing notes so you can jump straight to the good parts.
AWS re:Invent 2025 Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels
Vogels’ final re:Invent developer keynote: how AI is reshaping tools, architecture, and what it means to be a Renaissance developer building on AWS.
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Best Practices for Serverless Developers (CNS403)
Julian Wood walks through production serverless patterns: right-sizing Lambda, going async with EventBridge and queues, cutting unnecessary compute, and treating cost as an architecture decision.
Infrastructure As Code
Fowler’s compact case for treating servers like code: phoenix servers, immutable rebuilds, and why cloud without infrastructure as code leaves most of the upside on the table.
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
Majors argues that DevOps didn’t die — ops matured into platform engineering: internal platforms that let software engineers own production without drowning in tickets and YAML.
"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" — Stanford 2005
Three stories, one line. The template every commencement speech since has tried — and failed — to beat.
Simple Made Easy
The talk that permanently rewires how you think about software architecture. Required viewing; we timestamped it.
Everything we publish, in plain chronological order. Filter by desk, scroll back through the week, or grab the RSS feed and never depend on this page at all.
Deploying on real AWS
Why KitePDF runs on one EC2 host with Compose, how Terraform, SSM, Neon, and GitHub Actions fit together, and what breaks in production.
KitePDF system architecture
Design choices behind KitePDF: trust boundaries, Better Auth with JWT and JWKS, authorization, and the async processing plane.
About this series
Who this multi-part guide is for, what you need before you start, and the roadmap from architecture to AWS.
Skills for Real Engineers: How to Keep Claude Code and AI Tools From Ruining Your Architecture
AI coding tools can produce a lot of code very quickly. The engineer’s job is still to decide what deserves to exist, where it belongs, and when to stop.
The John Ternus Era Begins at Apple
Tim Cook leaves Apple stronger, richer, and more strategically exposed than the company was fifteen years ago. John Ternus now has to decide what comes next.
.jpg)
Deep Dive on AWS Lambda Durable Functions (CNS380)
Eric Johnson and Michael Gasch deep-dive Lambda durable functions: checkpoint/replay, waits up to a year, and writing reliable long-running workflows in familiar TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python.
Best Practices for Serverless Developers (CNS403)
Julian Wood walks through production serverless patterns: right-sizing Lambda, going async with EventBridge and queues, cutting unnecessary compute, and treating cost as an architecture decision.
AWS re:Invent 2025 Keynote with Dr. Werner Vogels
Vogels’ final re:Invent developer keynote: how AI is reshaping tools, architecture, and what it means to be a Renaissance developer building on AWS.
Kubernetes — KubeCon Keynote
Hightower’s KubeCon keynote strips Kubernetes down to its contracts — objects, APIs, and the platform patterns that matter once the hype slides away.
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
Majors argues that DevOps didn’t die — ops matured into platform engineering: internal platforms that let software engineers own production without drowning in tickets and YAML.