
Cool Links Vol. 12: June, 2025
3 min read
Links to the best stuff I've read or watched during the month of June, 2025
A chronological view of *everything* I've posted here, since the beginning of time (or the blog's inception, whichever comes first).

Cool Links Vol. 12: June, 2025
3 min read
Links to the best stuff I've read or watched during the month of June, 2025
Came across this website on Mastodon and oh wow, it’s so nice! I’ve seen a bunch of websites trying to mimic the old Windows vibes, but this one did it in a way that makes sense. Content is well laid-out and it doesn’t go too far into the “mimicking Windows” aspect.
The Internet Used to Be a Place
Amazing video about the internet we’ve lost (or rather, was taken from us), and how we can rebuild it.
Absolute fan of Sarah’s storytelling here, the way she weaves through the topics and links (hah!) them to that Hypnospace game is amazing!
The New Separation of Concerns
I learned about separation of concerns over a decade ago, when I was still learning how to code. On the web side, it would very often be related to what language you were using; HTML is for markup, CSS for styles, JS for interactivity, whatever-backend-language-you-use for business logic. That made sense back then but now the lines have become much blurrier.
Brad Frost goes a bit into what a more modern version of that separation of concerns might look like. I haven’t tried out his course, so I can’t comment on how good it is. But I’m a big fan of his atomic design principles so I’d say it might be a good one!
I’ve been subscribed to this newsletter for over a year and it never occurred to me to recommend it here. Stefan Judis does a weekly roundup of web dev-related things and puts them out in a nice, easy-to-read, lighthearted newsletter. It’s been one of my favorites for a while and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ll enjoy his content too!
Jojo Rabbit
Reviewed on Jun 29, 2025
A beautiful movie about innocence during a time that wanted nothing but to prey on it. I’d love to say it’s all in the past.

Fantinel.dev v5 is here!
10 min read
Out with the green waves, in with the rainbow of pastel colors!
The Last of Us (Season 2)
Reviewed on Jun 26, 2025
Breaks my heart because I love the game, but this adaptation just didn’t do it for me. Season 1 was pretty good, but I feel like none of the changes on Season 2 worked. Ellie is just a completely different character, and I feel like none of her actions are justified in the show. I gotta say some of the heaviest moments hit really hard on the show too. Episodes 2 and 6 were standouts though. Really enjoyed those.
The Taking of Deborah Logan
Reviewed on Jun 15, 2025
Holy crap, now this is a good horror movie. A slow burn that really pays off. Its found footage structure makes perfect sense in the story and also reflects a lot on what you think and feel during the entire movie. It finds the perfect balance of explaining things enough to be satisfying but not enough to break the horror aspect (something that most movies just suck at).
Spirited Away
Reviewed on Jun 14, 2025
Okay, first of all I think this is an amazing movie, it looks and sounds amazing, all the characters are extremely creative, it’s a beautiful coming-of-age story and it’s a major pop culture icon. But watching it felt like a bit of a chore, I can’t really explain why. Good thing the ratings here are about my enjoyment of the movies, not their “objective” quality 😅

Cool Links Vol. 11: May, 2025
6 min read
Links to the best stuff I've read or watched during the month of May, 2025
As a bilingual person that’s soon moving to another country I really struggle with websites and apps that keep trying to serve you content in a specific language instead of the one you choose. Google is one of the worst in this regard.
Even worse is when the content is translated automatically. It sucks! Google again sucks at this. It keeps reverting things to Portuguese and even re-enabling automatic dubbing (gross, I know) on videos, even though I explicitly have my device, browser, and Google account set to English.
Sharing links to albums or songs in streaming apps sucks because not everyone uses the same one. This neat website takes in a link (although named after Spotify, it works with others as well) and spits out the link for the same music on whatever other platform you want.
Great for when you share a link with others too!
Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year now, and I just found out about their public stats page. Pretty cool they have this info open out there!
The most interesting part is the Domain Insights, that ranks the domains that get most blocked/prioritized on Kagi (Kagi allows you to prioritize results from specific domains, or simply block some altogether). It seems people really hate getting Pinterest results 😅
Moving from Notion to Obsidian
I love Obsidian, and have been using it for over a year for taking notes about everything. The thing about his kind of app though is that you’re always looking for ways to tweak and improve your system. This article is great at explaining how Dave uses Obsidian for himself and as usual has a list of neat plugins.
One day, maybe, I’ll write my own post about how I use it. I’m just not confident enough on my system yet, probably…
Programming is a feeling, and AI is changing it
Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.
The Everything App is a symptom of Nothing Management
This is a spot on overview of how pretty much every tech company now has no clear direction besides making more money. No vision, no goals, no passion, except for making the number go up.
Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.
The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.
The Internet Archive opt out itch
In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive’s opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?
He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?
If you don’t care, it’s miraculous.
I’ve had this talk with my wife a few times already. Around us, it just feels that nobody cares about anything. Everything is hastily produced so it can be ignored by other people. It’s just disheartening to be the only ones noticing AI slop everywhere and see people not only believing it’s real, but also not really caring if it’s real or not.
This article also reminded of this one that I posted back in December: Care Doesn’t Scale.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
Fantastic piece that highlights how much of a distraction AI has become to creating value, simply because everyone is too focused on the tools and not on the work.
But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.