Musings & Links for January 17, 2026

Music, more tech, and an announcement.

Hi friends,

This week’s entry of Robbie Rambles features some more notes technology, thoughts about music, and a personal/professional update.

• DHH (founder of 37Signals and creator of Ruby on Rails) is on the same wavelength as me (and a number of technologists) when it comes to the use of AI agents in daily software development. I’m increasingly convinced that there hasn’t been a more exciting time (if ever) to be building software, especially if you’ve never done it before.

• Take, for example, my coworker Thomas Anckorn’s experience with self-hosting his personal site on a Raspberry Pi in his own house, or Brayden Wilmoth recreating the Instant Messenger experience you fondly remember. It’s the year of personal software. I cannot think of a time when I’ve seen tech be this playful, and I’m here for it.

• At Law & Liberty, David D. Corey (a Baylor prof and Waco local!) and Dominic M.M. Saunders defend pop music as music. I resonated with this, especially because the contrast they cite as prototypical of what people point out as the difference between pop and classical is the inverse of my listening habits; I’ve actively listened to Thrice’s Horizons/West multiple times, while Vikingur Olafsson’s (admittedly excellent) performances of Bach are what I put on when I need to focus on something else.

• Speaking of music, my friend Tommy recently turned me on to Charmer, a fine example of midwest emo that’s been around for a decade and surprisingly escaped my notice this whole time.

• I wrote about embracing and mastering technology on my blog the other week. Most of this has borne out, though I wound up keeping Spotify since Jenoa maintains a Duo account, and she’s not about to make the leap to the Jellyfin server any time soon.

  

• Finally, I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Mockingbird Ministries as fractional CTO. I’ll still be working at Cloudflare, but I’m honored to give some of my time to accelerate delivering the message of God’s grace for you. Exciting things are to come, starting with a refreshed Mockingapp. Stay tuned for more.

Thanks for reading. And if you’re building something good, true, and beautiful and could use someone to steward the technology side of things, feel free to respond to this email or drop a line at Kalos.

Cheers,

Robbie