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Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM — the annual Brussels pilgrimage. If you’ve been, you know the drill: too many talks, too little time, questionable coffee, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you pack thousands of open-source developers into a university campus in the dead of winter. This year was different for me, though. Two talks in two devrooms, three sessions at OTel Unplugged — and this time, I brought the whole family. My wife and our toddler (who has graduated from “can barely walk” to “can absolutely destroy a hotel room in under four minutes”) came along, and we turned it into a proper trip — FOSDEM, then a few days exploring Ghent and Antwerp before heading home. ...

If you work at a company that runs its own Go module proxy and you connect through a VPN, you’ve probably seen this: 1 2 Get "https://binaries.example.com/google.golang.org/grpc/@v/v1.77.0.mod": dial tcp 172.27.5.36:443: i/o timeout The module has nothing to do with your company. It’s a public dependency. Yet Go refuses to fetch it from the public proxy and just dies with a timeout. The frustrating part: you know proxy.golang.org has the module, and your config lists it as a fallback. So why doesn’t it fall through? ...

We all know better. Don’t hardcode secrets. Use a vault. Rotate your keys. We’ve been saying this for years. And then the agentic coding boom happened. Suddenly every tool wants an API key. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Mistral, Replicate—the list grows weekly. And where do those keys end up? Right there in .zshrc, in plain text, because you needed it working right now and you were going to fix it later. ...

TL;DR: Spent a week building cool stuff with Cursor, an AI-powered IDE. Found it surprisingly effective for both coding and managing my second brain. When your requirements are clear, it’s almost magical! ✨ 1 1 “Magic” here = fast iteration because the AI had unambiguous intent + cohesive context windows. ↩ The Setup: R&D Week Vibes You know that feeling when R&D week rolls around, and you’re caught between “I should learn something useful” and “I want to have fun”? Well, this time I decided to combine both by digging into Cursor, an AI-powered code editor that’s been making waves in the developer community. ...

Another Year, Another FOSDEM FOSDEM—the annual pilgrimage to Brussels for a weekend of open-source brilliance, hallway track magic, and the inevitable sleep deprivation. This year’s Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting was, as always, a whirlwind of ideas, people, and tech so sharp it practically needed bandages. But for me? It was all about seeing friends. Catching up, syncing, and squeezing in as many conversations as humanly possible. As we always say—the hallway track is the real conference. I’m beyond grateful for the people I managed to see, and equally bummed about those I missed. But with a toddler waiting at home, even carving out this limited time was a logistical miracle. ...