Mark Sanborn

Passionate about indie software. Founder of , Working on

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@ayushagarwal027 Go is my go to but I’ve recently built some stuff in Rust. The Rust build times are brutal compared to go. I didn’t think I’d care too much about compile time but it really matters when iterating quickly. Unless I need absolute perf Go is in a pretty good sweet spot.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@AikidoSecurity I’m just going to do dev in a disposable VM from now on.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@davepl1968 There’s a drinking version of that book. I thought it might help me cut back and I quit completely by the end of the book and haven’t drank for 6 years. The book might have saved my life.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@Hamzeml I just set something like this up. I kinda think bash is fine in this AI age. Why complicate it with ansible.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@RyanJamesShaw I always liked the plastic slider ones. Metal ones sometimes bent and got stuck.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@yacineMTB Configuring Linux with AI is awesome. My latest: my monitor on the right needs rotated 90. No do it the other way. Now add waybar on that screen too. I remember the days of spending literally hours trying to get that stuff right in a giant xml xorg.conf file.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@levelsio You need an e-ink display or something for the sun.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@RyanJamesShaw @levelsio Yeah AWS firewall rules, digital ocean, Hetzner, whatever. They all have one and they operate about the same. Firewall rules are fairly standard across interfaces.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

A lot of them use cloudflare, Akamai, or other waf. They have vulnerability management software alerting when new CVEs come out and patch constantly. They have a SIEM and SOC. They also get hacked just like everyone else. Binding to 80/443 with nginx as unprivileged user is fairly secure. It’s just the tunnel setup is a little better.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

For those wondering: the risk is that you have a service running as root that binds to 80/443. That service, maybe nginx or caddy has a vulnerability that lets attacker gain root on your machine. You can improve this by not running those as root. There’s been recent LPE that allow you to get root so even running nginx/caddy non root isn’t enough. Not having the service exposed to public at all is obviously better. If this seems far fetched just look at historical CVEs. This setup seems pretty good.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

For what it’s worth you don’t need hundreds of hours anymore with AI. I had AI setup my hyperland config. Fresh install my secondary monitor is rotated. Before I would spend 10m looking up syntax and correct value and monkey around. Now you just tell the AI what’s wrong and your setup and it fixes it. Long are the days of configuring a giant xorg.conf file. I tried omarchy and liked some of the defaults. I just setup vanilla arch and told the AI what’s wrong parts of omarchy I liked and it just wrote the configs. Super easy. Give vanilla arch a shot

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. One down side to rust is slow compile over Go. You feel this when doing fast AI iteration. I’ve been wondering if it would be better to use a language that makes it easy to inspect and modify the application while it’s running would be good in this post AI world. Thinking of Common Lisp or Erlang.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@nostalgames69 Justin Bailey

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@levelsio @Cloudflare I thought all these premium email providers would have been out of business when SES came out in like 2011 or 2012. I still can’t believe people use them over SES. I didn’t understand it then and they are still here in 2026.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@levelsio @dillon_mulroy @Cloudflare One important key to this is use the VPS firewall instead of OS so if tailscale crashes or isn’t on you can temporarily poke a hole through VPS firewall web UI to let yourself in. Otherwise you’ll lock yourself out someday.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@esrtweet Been using arch derivatives for years and it’s as stable as non rolling distros from what I can tell. Occasionally I’ll have to run some commands to repair. Usually it’s a kernel/nvidia driver update mismatch thing. I’ve done vanilla Arch, manjaro, and omarchy. All good.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@thdxr I just have LLMs run on a cron doing small refactors, unit tests, etc all the time.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

@ThePrimeagen You have to just embrace the slop. You can prompt a refactor, cleanup, unit tests, benchmarks just as easily as you can prompt features. Let go of the code.

[Mark Sanborn @marksanborn]

It gets worse. Once you finally figure out how to sign and your signing for a few months you will find a random build stuck signing with no error. All builds will fail for days. You’ll see that the forums are full for people with your same problem. You learn that you have to reach out to support because something in your build triggered human review but it never gets unstuck until you send like 10 support requests and wait a few weeks for some human somewhere to click an approve button.