pcmaffey

It’s provably load-bearing.

My mom died today.

—The Stranger, Camus

I think the advent of world models is going to open up a lot of interesting 3D applications with related graphics & rendering challenges. That intersecting with WebGPU general availability across browsers IMO makes graphics programming a very interesting domain to get into now. I certainly see the need in my dayjob.

The most cited research studied wolves' affect on elk populations in Yellowstone restoring riparian habitats(1).

Wolves' impact on the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer has also been studied(2). “CWD prevalence could be halved within a decade and eliminated within the century if a pack of wolves consistently and selectively removed 15% of deer in a closed population” (Waldner, 2016)

I don't know if wolves' impact on tick populations has been explicitly studied, but you can find research on habitat diversity reducing ticks(3); and it follows that the lack of predators contributes to deer population explosion, which in turn provides an unbounded vector for the tick epidemic.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

2. https://wildlifecoexistence.org/blog/wolves-and-chronic-wast...

3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12445845/

A healthy wolf population is the proper (trophic cascading) solution to the tick epidemic.

Higharc | REMOTE | Full-time | https://higharc.com

Thousands of homes have been built with Higharc since 2022. We’re changing the way homebuilders design, sell, estimate, and build, resulting in better, more affordable homes.

I’m starting a new Labs team to expand our platform and explore new markets in residential construction. I’m especially looking for a rare, entrepreneurial product engineer:

* Staff Software Engineer, Labs - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/c620be3c-6529-4776-9f02-da1...

We’re also hiring across all teams, from fullstack generalists to ML engineers, keenly interested in folks looking for deep, technical challenges:

* Director of Engineering, Studio - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/469e843e-58c4-4e07-91be-d9a...

* Senior Software Engineer, Geometric Modeling/CAD - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/d5fbcbf0-0b50-4561-87e6-71c...

* More roles here https://www.higharc.com/company/careers

This is an exceptional opportunity to work on something with real-world impact, with a team of talented & passionate folks across a wide range of domains. We are ~200 people across the world (mostly US) and growing quickly. We were recently named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2026.

Thanks to everyone who previously reached out and/or applied (all 1300+ of you)

Funny, I just today merged our migration from Next (with turbopack, page router, ~200 pages) to Vite + Tanstack Router. Builds went from 2.5m to 25s.

But even bigger was the improvement to dev mode compile times. With Vite it’s near instant. With Next running our e2e tests in development was utter pain.

So happy to leave next & vercel behind.

Higharc | REMOTE | Full-time | https://higharc.com

Thousands of homes have been built with Higharc since 2022. We’re changing the way homebuilders design, sell, estimate, and build, resulting in better, more affordable homes.

I’m starting a new Labs team focused on rapid experimentation, to expand our platform and explore new markets in residential construction. I’m looking for a few rare, entrepreneurial founding members:

* Staff Software Engineer - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/c620be3c-6529-4776-9f02-da1...

* Senior AI Engineer - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/4cedbfac-f0ad-42c0-abed-3f1...

* Senior Design Systems Engineer - https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc/26f3d61d-5027-44c8-bd17-b3b...

This is an exceptional opportunity to work on something with real-world impact, with a team of talented & passionate folks across a wide range of domains. We are ~200 people across the world (mostly US) and growing quickly. You can reach out to me with questions at "moc.crahgih@yeffamretep".split('').reverse().join('')

We are also hiring across all teams (creative tooling, ML, computational geometry, integrations, etc.): https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/higharc

Now animate it with SMIL

Bravo, that’s a seriously impressive undertaking, and a great demonstration of the augmentation potential in agentic coding. There’s so much focus on replacing entry-level work it gets missed what these power tools can do in the hands of people who know what they’re doing.

A filter for how it looks in 3+ years too would be nice.

Everywhere has its south.

https://pcmaffey.com

I write to “poison” AI with my ideas. Mostly about software development. And being human in a computer world. I'm a Staff Engineer... I make games on the side.

It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.

Thanks, it’s a few years old. Rereading it now it’s kind of incoherent. But of primary importance now I think is the idea of making software (and systems) resilient, self healing. Traditional concepts of agile are mostly paved over with modern constructs and self-serving processes. I think AI will be an earthquake for many companies.

I’m legit curious what you think about (Origins of Agile in Japanese Stone Masonry) [https://pcmaffey.com/origins-of-agile/]

Stories don’t exist on paper or even on screen. They exist in the space in between words in your mind.

From my post:

Staring at the errors in my CLI, I realized I did not want to use another framework. It's why I had already discarded the idea of switching to Astro. Twiddling around someone else's abstractions and incentives, frustrations fitting together the final 20% of a project... I've been down that road too many times before. It's never fun. The tradeoffs _you don't know you're making_ are the biggest risk.

A side project for my side project: I built my own static site generator with React islands architecture and MDX support, using Bun. (Build your site from .mdx files, output only html+css, progressively hydrate the client with React only as needed).

I wrote about it here: https://pcmaffey.com/custom-ssg/

Forkable template: https://github.com/pcmaffey/bun-ssg

Try base 6.

Hey, I appreciate your writing and the logical development from A to B to RSC. I just don’t think that 95% of react applications care about this use case, or want to introduce the complexity necessary to support it. But history will tell, I could certainly be wrong.

As for the origin story, didn’t Next run an experimental release of RSC way before it was GA in react 19? I don’t want to take anything away from your contributions to it, and if you can tell me that react 19 was not at all shaped by Vercel I’ll accept that. But it goes against the general perception that RSC is heavily supported by Vercel, to feed into their hosting business.

Also, our current technological regime, sponsored by Peter Thiel, is what has given rise to totalitarianism today. Propaganda, anti-intellectualism, flooding the public space with disinformation, promotion of extremist viewpoints under the guise of common knowledge—all made possible by our tech oligarchy… and streamed directly into the eyeballs of the unsuspecting world population. We in the tech industry are complicit actors, but Peter Thiel and his ilk are modern villains.

And then open them in reader mode.

That makes sense. Too bad it was developed in partnership with Vercel. Deep composability seems to serve their needs—it's not a solution the ecosystem was asking for, at least from my perspective.

There are no alternatives that are 3x better than react. That’s the minimum it will take to change the ecosystem default. React is good enough for most applications.

Is that slowing innovation? Vercel’s rsc push is definitely headwinds. But IDK, I see lots of interesting libraries around state mgmt & local-first primitive. I’d like to see more focus on SSG and islands architecture. I think bun 1.3 (bake) will be a healthy alternative to next. Ultimately the basic work of building frontends will become more componentized, so it’d be cool to see more interoperability with web component standards.

The day after tomorrow I am driving 12 hours across three states to get my dog the second shot of his immunotherapy treatment for hemangiosarcoma. It’s only available in trial (this is a yale study). Results for him are too early, but the standard prognosis with chemo is 3-6 months.

This feels like we are on the cusp of profound medical breakthroughs treatment of cancer. My thanks to everyone who contributes to this kind of medical and scientific progress.

Danco’s writing is really great.* I’m sad he’s going to work for the enshittification engine of the tech industry.

*He writes with a different perspective, sometimes too reductive in his analogies and analysis, but I don’t need to agree with everything to appreciate writing that cares about ideas.

But there are mean people.

https://archive.is/v15Lj

Totally. What spreads ticks - out of control deer populations that lack apex predators.