I’m a pretty humble guy, so most people don’t know this extremely impressive fact about me: Raymond Chen once mentioned me on The Old New Thing, the classic Windows development blog. https://mtlynch.io/my-old-new-thing-cameo/
I interviewed Adam Gordon Bell, blogger and host of the CoRecursive podcast about how he consistently reaches the front page of Hacker News, what blog post topics attract customers, and how Adam improved his writing https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/interview-adam-gordon-bell/
In August, I got useful feedback about my book, spent way too long editing a video, and had way too much fun creating the transcript. I also helped a blogger reach #1 on Hacker News and Lobsters when my goal was just the front page. https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2025/09/
New achievement: I repaired a CPU with bent pins!
I bought a used AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU for my home NAS because my old Athlon 3000G was choking on 4K video. The new CPU arrived with bent pins. Thought about returning it but managed to repair it myself with a utility blade.
I asked customers and potential customers of my upcoming book which chapters they were excited to read. I got 133 responses and found interesting ways to visualize the responses. The feedback helped me restructure the book and adjust focus in certain chapters. https://refactoringenglish.com/blog/chapter-interest-results/
an attempt to express the goodwill that I feel towards everyone, despite being in a position where I have contentious interactions sometimes:
https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-heads.html
My unusual marriage advice is to use a couple's email domain. It eliminates a lot of miscommunication on shared email threads and shared online services. https://mtlynch.io/couples-email-domain/
New blog post 🥳
Secret Management on NixOS with sops-nix
Passwords and secrets like cryptographic key files are everywhere in computing. For example, when I migrated my existing NAS setup to NixOS, I needed to specify the desired Samba passwords in my #NixOS config. For personal computers, this is fine, but if the goal is to share system configurations (for example in a Git repository), we need a different solution: Secret Management.
→ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-08-24-secret-management-with-sops-nix/
It took me several hours to figure out how to flash custom firmware onto my AirGradient ONE air quality monitor, so I wrote up instructions to save others the hassle. https://mtlynch.io/notes/flash-airgradient-cli/
In my July update:
- How do I integrate reader feedback when readers want to wait until my book is done?
- Where is all my time going?
- How I reimplemented a 300-hour app in 10 hours
- I'm making progress with Gleam but might be cheating
https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2025/08/
New blog post! 🥳
Development shells with Nix: four quick examples
I wanted to use GoCV for one of my projects (to find and extract paper documents from within a larger scan), without permanently having OpenCV on my system.
This seemed like a good example use-case to demonstrate a couple of Nix commands I like to use, covering quick interactive one-off dev shells to fully declarative, hermetic, reproducible, shareable dev shells.
→ Read more: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-07-27-dev-shells-with-nix-4-quick-examples/
I successfully migrated from a RAIDZ1 ZFS pool to RAIDZ2 without a spare ZFS server or external storage. It was a bumpy ride and involved some neat hacks, but I moved all 18 TB of my data successfully. https://mtlynch.io/raidz1-to-raidz2/
Julia and I know drowning is the biggest risk to US kids 1-4, and we try to take this seriously. But yesterday our 4yo came very close to drowning in a fountain. (She's fine now.) https://www.jefftk.com/p/shallow-water-is-dangerous-too
Underused Techniques for Effective Emails https://lobste.rs/s/tfauzy #practices
https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/techniques-for-writing-emails/
Writing emails is a bit like driving in that everyone assumes they're above average at it, but nobody thinks critically about how to grow their skills. I wrote about the techniques I wish more developers knew for writing effective emails. https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/techniques-for-writing-emails/
New blog post published 🥳
Migrating my NAS from CoreOS/Flatcar Linux to #NixOS
In this article, I want to show how to migrate an existing Linux server to NixOS — in my case the CoreOS/Flatcar Linux installation on my Network Attached Storage (NAS) PC.
→ Read the blog post at https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-07-13-nixos-nas-network-storage-config/
This is my first weekly update on my simpler weekly update site (looks like I need to improve the social sharing) https://weeks.mtlynch.io/2025-07-11/
I'm shutting down What Got Done, my free weekly status update app. The source remains available, and I've added tools for exporting/migrating your data. Thanks to everyone who tried the app over the years! https://www.whatgotdone.com/shutdown-notice
June was my most productive writing month ever, but now I'm trying to avoid juggling too many tasks at once. https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2025/07/