Hacking the Hackathon
At their best, internal hackathons provide a necessary patch to systemic problems. But their usual structure limits their potential.What hackathons do best and whyThe most valuable output of a hackathon is often a self-contained tool, the solution to a long-lived bug, the testing of a new system, etc. What they have in common is that they areuseful things…that developers knew are useful…but couldn’t be fit in “non-hackathon time…”because they weren’t deemed urgent or valuable enough by managers....
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January 30, 2026
I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code
I used to pay $120/year for a SaaS that hasn’t added new features in four years, and didn’t fix its broken billing system for three years. Using an LLM, I managed to rewrite all the functionality I used to pay for in 20 minutes. Is this bad news for “write once, don’t update later” SaaS?...
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January 29, 2026
xbar-my-prs Info about your GitHub PRs in the macOS menu bar
xbar-my-prs is a plugin I wrote for something called xbar which is a macOS app that let's you write scripts that then show up in the macOS menu bar. Mine is about fetching information about my recent GitHub pull requests.
A picture of it in action:
Every minute, it does this GitHub search: is:pr author:@me sort:updated
Then it parses the results and attempts to display a neat summary.
And each time it runs, it stores a copy of the result in the /tmp directory so that it can compare what the res...
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January 29, 2026
How can I retain access to the data in a SAFEARRAY after my method returns?
Find a way to take ownership.
The post How can I retain access to the data in a SAFEARRAY after my method returns? appeared first on The Old New Thing....
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January 29, 2026
The cults of TDD and GenAI
I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards
test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And,
I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with
the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work.
The basic premise of TDD, for those unaware, is that one first writes a unit
test that verifies the expected behavior for some function they want to write,
observes the new test fail, and then on...
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January 29, 2026
Hacking An AI Children’s Toy: Remote Access to Every Conversation
My neighbor texted me the other day and said she’d pre-ordered two AI toys for her kids that supposedly used an LLM to dynamically generate content for talking to the child. This was super fascinating to me. I’ve always thought something like that seemed awesome as kids can ask questions about anything, and get contextual answers back....
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January 29, 2026