Ian Lewis Ian Lewis

Ian Lewis

Engineer in Tokyo

© 2026 Ian Lewis

TIL: Apr 13, 2025 - Weekly Reading

These are some of the things I was reading this last week or so.

Code

  • sbp

    A nice little bash prompt library. I decided to use this in my dotfiles and wrote a Tokyo Night theme for it.

  • Stylelint

    A linter for CSS that can be extended to cover SASS. I added this to my website to improve its stylesheets.

Tech

  • Things You Never Wanted To Know About Go Interfaces - mcyoung

    This a somewhat hard to follow, but very useful post about the implementation of types, interfaces, and functions in Go. It’s useful to understand how languages implement certain features so you can reason about what is and isn’t efficient code in that language.

  • Waterfall in 15 Minutes or Your Money Back - Harper Reed

    Harper Reed writes about AI and it’s impact on the craft of programming. He seems to come down on the side of viewing the future of programming as juggling different tasks around the edges of an AI doing the core programming work. He mentions that the “flow state” might be overrated and that constantly context-switching between tasks will be more prevalent.

    I tend to think that many tasks will be automated away, but that the most valuable engineers will be the ones that know deeply about how the system is actually working. Abstractions like an OS or API allow us to have a shallow understanding of their inner workings because they generally have a consistent, documented behavior that AI doesn’t really have by design.

  • I’m Leaving Sentry - Armin Ronacher

    Armin was and is a big name in the Python community who has also become a well known member of the Rust community. I used Sentry before it was a product and I fondly remember hosting Armin as keynote speaker for PyCon JP 2012. Dave Cramer was there as well and we had many great conversations during the conference. While it was a few months after Armin’s first commit to Sentry that he mentions in his post, I’d like to think I contributed to his success at Sentry in my own small way. Good luck to him in the future!

Personal growth

  • What High Performers Know About Doing Hard Things - The Caring Techie Newsletter

    The thesis is that doing hard things is the most impactful and that we should train ourselves to do hard things. I wouldn’t describe much of the impactful things that I worked on as “hard” though. Looking back they were some of the most fun work I did and it I was easily motivated to do it.

    The things I thought were hard were often unrewarding and were hard because they were unimpactful.

Politics / Economics

Games

  • V Rising - Invaders of Oakveil

    I’ve been playing V Rising since its initial release and Stunlock has been doing a great job with the expansions. This one also looks like it will not disappoint. Very much looking forward to giving it a go at the end of the month.