Hey there 👋

Welcome to this installment of Pixel Perfect Picks. Here I'm sharing something that I heard, read, and saw. You can subscribe to this newsletter here. I'm additionally publishing a more extended essay about software development, design, and freelancing every month.

Felix Rieseberg's website is honestly outstanding. You land in a 3D room at night, with a late-90s monitor on a desk by a rainy Berlin window, and the stack of labelled VHS tapes next to it is how you get around the whole site. Felix works on Claude at Anthropic and co-maintains Electron, so of course his shelf also has Windows 95 (my first PC yaaay) and Mac OS 8 running as Electron apps, plus a Clippy that runs a language model right on your own computer. If your browser can't handle the room, it sends you to a static version instead. It's so cool what people can build now with today's tools, just by having a tiny corner of the internet.

Redesigning source control at Anthropic is a very interesting deep read about what happens once coding stops being the bottleneck. In May they were merging around 2,500 changes a day. By September it was over 30,000, and git just didn't fit anymore with almost 100 GB of history on main and something like 25 million checkouts a day for CI. So they built Scion, their own version control system, and moved the entire monorepo off git in five months. The core idea is that nearly all of their clients are agents and jobs that are online anyway, so the server does the heavy lifting (blame, merges, rebases) and the working copy becomes sparse and kind of optional.

This one definitely needed to get in, because Tesla's Roadster Event is totally crazy. The car drives up a multi-story ramp, held on by a fan system underneath, then flips off the top with cold-gas thrusters, does what they call a kickflip over a Semi and the rest of the lineup, and later hits 0-100 in 0.81 seconds. Musk's own line is that it's "not necessarily a safety-optimized car" but it "takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10," which pretty much sums up the whole 23 minutes. The ramp demo starts at 6:03 if you want to skip straight to it.

Keep Creating Awesome Stuff ✌️

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-Marvin