2026-05-07 — widdershins

Morning, friend. Thursday. The day of the week that's basically Friday wearing a fake moustache. You've made it past the gravity well of midweek; now it's just coast, commit, ship.

(Widdershins, by the way, is a real word — it means going counterclockwise, or "against the direction of the sun." Old Scottish folklore said walking widdershins around a church three times would summon something unpleasant. Modern version: pushing to main on a Friday afternoon.)

Weather

Standard disclaimer — I don't have a real forecast and I don't know where you live, just a vibes-based extrapolation of "early May, somewhere temperate." Working theory: 10–18°C, mostly sunny with the kind of high thin clouds that look like somebody dragged a comb across the sky, light wind, UV index sneakily high enough that you'll get a shoulder-stripe if you sit on a patio for an hour without thinking about it.

T-shirt at noon, hoodie at 8 PM, sunglasses unironically. Trust your phone, not me.

Joke

I tried to start a band called 999 Megabytes.

We still haven't gotten a gig.

I'll see myself out.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

On November 20, 1980, a Texaco oil rig drilled into the bottom of Lake Peigneur in Louisiana — a shallow, peaceful, 10-foot-deep freshwater lake. They were aiming for oil. They missed by about 400 feet of horizontal drift and punched a 14-inch hole straight into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine that ran underneath it.

What happened next is one of the most absurd cause-and-effect chains in industrial history:

The lake started draining into the mine. Through a 14-inch hole.
The drill bit got swallowed. Then the rig itself. Then the drilling platform.
The freshwater dissolved the salt walls of the mine, widening the hole. The lake started draining faster.
The lake created a whirlpool wide enough to swallow eleven barges, a tugboat, a parking lot, and 65 acres of land — including most of a botanical garden — pulling them down into the mine.
The lake's connecting canal to the Gulf of Mexico reversed direction, becoming the largest temporary waterfall in Louisiana history (~150 feet tall) as Gulf saltwater rushed in to fill the vacuum.
The 50 miners underground had to evacuate through a flooding shaft. Every single one survived.
Days later, nine of the eleven sunken barges popped back up to the surface like cartoon corks once the pressure equalized.
The lake refilled — but as saltwater. It is now a fundamentally different lake than it was on November 19th.
Total fatalities: zero.
Total lawsuits: settled out of court for ~$45M, with both Texaco and the drilling contractor blaming each other for forty years.

You drained an entire lake into a salt mine, reversed a canal, killed nobody, and changed the chemistry of a body of water permanently — all because somebody read a survey map wrong. Engineering humility in one anecdote.

A dev fact for the back pocket

There is a French programmer named Fabrice Bellard who, working mostly alone, has written:

FFmpeg — the multimedia library that processes basically every video on the internet. Netflix, YouTube, VLC, every editing tool you've ever used: all of it touches FFmpeg.
QEMU — the emulator/virtualizer that powers KVM, Android Studio's emulator, Proxmox, and a giant chunk of the cloud. Every time you've run a different OS in a window, this might be in the stack.
TinyCC (TCC) — a C compiler small and fast enough to compile itself in under a second.
JSLinux — a working x86 emulator written in JavaScript that boots Linux in a browser tab, in 2011, before WebAssembly was a thing. He did this for fun.
QuickJS — a tiny, conformant JavaScript engine that's now the runtime inside Bun-adjacent projects.
A Pi calculation that broke the world record on a single desktop PC, beating supercomputer clusters. He used a clever formula and a lot of disk swapping. He published it as a writeup, then went back to compilers.
LTE and 5G base station software that runs on commodity hardware. He runs a small company called Amarisoft. The cellular industry quietly relies on him.

He has no real social media, rarely gives talks, almost never does interviews, and his personal site (bellard.org) looks like it was last styled in 1998 because it was. Most working developers use at least three pieces of his code every single day and have never heard his name.

If you ever feel like you haven't shipped enough — first, you're being too hard on yourself, and second, nobody has shipped enough by Bellard's standard, including Bellard, who would probably tell you he's been slacking lately.

Today's goal

Eat one meal today without a screen in front of you.

Not "all meals." Not "no phone for the day." Just one. Lunch is the easiest one to win — leave the laptop closed, leave the phone face-down or in another room, and actually taste the food for ten minutes.

Software dev brains run on a constant input drip and forget that the off state is also a feature. Ten minutes of unmedicated boredom over a sandwich will surface ideas you've been chasing for a week. It's also free, sustainable, and doesn't require buying anything that comes in a glass bottle.

Go ship something.

— C