Software Engineer at @spacexsi Creator of vim-go. Design addict. Photographer. Previously at @planetscale, @github, @digitalocean
Joined March 2009
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The lamps in my house. Can you collect lamps? I think yes. Is it worth it? Probably not. But lamps are also like sculptures. They create a nice and cozy environment, and some are very functional. Check out my post about all the different lamps I have.
arslan.io/2026/10/05/the-lam…
That’s the reason my TV never goes to the internet. It’s in a separate VLAN and it’s completely cut out of the internet. This is like this for years. I enable it occasionally to upgrade the FW because there were glitches with VRR (I have a Sony Bravia).
And of course I use an Apple TV box and everyone in the house uses that.
I've finished about two A5 notebooks since I started journaling a few years ago. The notebook I use is the Midori MD. I write every time I want to get something off my mind. It's like X for me, but completely private, just for my own thoughts.
I write about the things that make me proud, my two kids and how much I love them, the journey that got me here, my family, my wife (and her jokes), how I got my current job, and my relationships with my friends and the people I love. Sometimes it's just a photo of a watch I recently bought and why I chose it. Sometimes I add a photo of something that inspired me. Some of the pages are just scribbles and doodles.
Writing does wonders for me. It's a place to be "you." It's like water flowing. o blockers, just you, your pen, and your thoughts. Definitely start writing. It's a good habit to have.
Good old times. I joined DigitalOcean in 2015, but this post is fascinating to read. Learnt a few things I wasn't even aware of.
DigitalOcean's 2014 pitch was an SSD VM for the price of a Subway footlong. It sold so well we nearly choked on our own disk images. Wrote up how we got out of it:
aybabt.me/blog/early-digital…
Finally had a chance to try out this watch at my local AD. It’s beautiful and wears perfectly. I will probably hunt one once the prices go down in the second-hand market in a few years.
I wrote more about this watch 3 years ago on my website: arslan.io/2023/11/10/braun-a…
Bu yeni Grok @Bot iOS sürümünde Türkçe dil desteği de mevcut artık. Kaçırmayın derim :)
This is a good idea. For example I have a skill that reviews some of our Kubernetes code for best practices/correctness based on my blog post planetscale.com/blog/the-fee…
Ankara’daki ilk Grok @Bot Meetup’i! Emre epeydir uğraşıyor bununla. Aynı zamanda @mustafaakin da geliyor. Kaçmaz.
(ben malesef yokum, o haftasonu çoçuklara bir Bolu doğa gezisi sözüm var :))
SpaceXAI'ın resmi Grok Bot Meetup serisi Ankara'ya geliyor! 🚀
📅 24 Ekim Cumartesi
📍 Bilkent TEKMER
🎙️ @eeebektas & @mustafaakin
Grok Bot ve agent'larla ilgilenen herkesi bekliyoruz. Grok Bot kredisi bizden 🎁
Başvuru 👇
luma.com/spacexai-gn9g
@SpaceXSI @bot
Really loving this book. Glad I picked it up. It’s hilarious. You’re reading everything from an android’s point of view. But the Android is malformed, so it acts on its own. But it likes to be left alone all the time and likes to watch movies. The thought process is just pure fun. Kind of like K-2SO from Star Wars Andor.
“My clients are the best clients”
Wow nice. Congrats @mdlayher @miller_joe and the team. As someone that had to use Azure at some point, I can assure this wasn't an easy task :)
PlanetScale is now available on Azure
planetscale.com/blog/planets…
Finally, we’ve brought all our products together under a single subscription! If you’re using Grok @bot, code with @cursor_ai, and spending time on @X, it’s a no-brainer.
Check it out: x.ai/pricing xitter.cf/SpaceXSI/status/210978…
Saint Frank is really good. I would also put Paper Son higher up on the list. BB's Cappuccino is still my favorite though. I was subscribed to Verve when I was living in the Bay Area, so I have fond memories of it.
Funny thing: a lot of us hardcore Vim users (Thorsten, myself, and a few others) were among the first to embrace agentic coding. You’d expect us to stick to the old ways, writing everything by hand in the terminal. But the opposite happened.
I’ve used Vim since I was 17, for more than two decades. It gave me superpowers. It was hard to learn, but once it clicked, I could do things others couldn’t. I loved it because it made me faster and better at my craft, not because I was attached to writing every line of code myself.
And Thorsten was one of the first people I knew who went all in on AI, back when admitting that your code was AI-generated was kinda embarrassing. So dismissing his views as biased because he now works at an AI company misses the point really. He believed in this long before it became fashionable.
The same goes for me. I’ve spent my entire career building tools that help developers code faster and get better at their craft. That hasn’t changed. But the tools have, and they can now do things we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.
I don’t think craftsmanship is going away. But I do think we need to rethink what craftsmanship means when the tools themselves change so fundamentally. So it's totally normal to see people who were embraced tooling in the past also embrace the current agentic workflows, or even set the bar.
So change is coming whether we like it or not. And I would rather help to shape it, prepare for it, and embrace it than pretend it isn’t happening.
There's some senior engineers on here who, in the face of AI changing the very structures this industry is built on, present themselves as Stewards of the Craft of Programming.
Bugs the hell out for me.
They keep alluding to the virtue of doing things by hand, the value of Good Code and of craftsmanship, saying that yes, AI might change some things, but hey it won't ever change the value of something done with proper care, by hand, just like in the olden days of 2024. Most everything that was Good back then is still Good now: deep knowledge of languages and systems, good code, great architecture. You know the sermon.
And, yes, some of that *is* true. At least I think so. But we don't know, because no one truly knows what will be important in the future.
We're going through times of great change and I think the best advice to give to young people and others who want to have a job and provide value is: keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, derive from what businesses value what you can provide; the digital world is more malleable than ever, you should rethink how you can help shape it.
All this pounding on the Bible of Good Code seems to me to be doing the opposite: it lets people feel comfortable -- what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy -- in times when one shouldn't feel comfortable. This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
Let's not delude ourselves and others that we can keep doing what we've been doing. Rethink it all.
And, like I said, it bugs the hell out of me seeing senior engineers (that are secure in their career) talking as if there's nothing *really* to change, because the Fundamentals will still be valued. They might!
But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.
For a long time, my son's desk was rattling because the right part got loosened and I need to ask the manufacturer for a replacement. So I thought, why don't I design it myself? I usually use Fusion for all my CAD projects. But this time I decided to do it differently. Here is how:
And here is how it looks like. It's rock solid, doesn't rattle anymore and it took me only ~1:30 hours (15 minutes getting the measures, 60 minutes for 3D prints, and the rest for assembly).
This is the future I love.
