Remember How Fun Computers Used to Be?
A love letter to Linux, wobbly windows, and the desktop cube.
~/writing
Musings, mostly
written at night.
Ryan Rusnak on software, logistics, and whatever else comes to mind.
2026
15 posts
The age of Linux is upon us
Windows and macOS improve at the speed of a payroll. Linux improves at the speed of everyone — and now that anyone can write code, that gap is about to get embarrassing.
My 15 minutes of Fame
I built a beer-firing robot to survive a job I hated. It ended up in Popular Science, on a British reality show, and twenty feet tall in front of a James Bond movie.
Memento Mori
An Easter egg calendar in Omarchy got me thinking about the three ways I measure a life: the memento mori grid, what quarter of the game my parents are in, and what time it is on my own clock.
Bugs and Asshole Programmers
Vibe coding and coding with AI are not the same thing. The best part is not the speed — it is never having to route around the one engineer nobody wants to talk to.
Adulting
College tells you that you are an adult now, but nobody depends on you yet. Being an adult is being strong enough to take care of others — and actually doing it.
LLMs and How You Spend Your Time
A 20-minute 'yes and' phone call replaced hours of writing a vision document — and was actually fun. LLMs are worth a few days of thinking about how you spend your time."
7CTOs - Combining Software Engineering and Data Science
A talk I gave before LLMs, COVID, and my second kid — back when recurrent neural nets were the exciting thing.
There should be a moral linter
What if there were a linter for life — something that scored a post across moral dimensions and said, maybe walk that back, buddy?
“AI slop”
Hating on AI-generated work rhymes with every past generation that resented the next abstraction — from assembly to C to object orientation.
Life Starts at 40
Why I wouldn't trade the view from 40 for any younger version of myself — and what the midlife crisis is really about.
The Sound of Root Two
The math behind why some notes sound good together and others don't — clean integer ratios versus the irrational number our ears hate most.
You need three things to start a company
Everyone in the bar had the best idea. Ideas are the easy part — you also need expertise and data.
Why Airspace
In 2015 I wanted two things from my work: something meaningful and something super hard. Then I met Nick.
The Southwest Airlines Story
From a TI-82 in middle school to the day our ops team turned a plane around to save a kid in Baltimore.