Sam Rose

@samwho.dev

10120 Followers 941 Following

That guy who makes visual essays about software at https://samwho.dev. Developer Educator @ ngrok.com He/him.

A photograph of a 3D printed lamp, modelled after the Pixar lamp. It’s black and is sat on the printing plate.
A photograph of me holding a blue, 3D printed octopus in my left hand.
The meme from The Office where it says in the top panel “corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture” and the pictures are pieces of paper that say “compression” and “LLMs.” The bottom panel is Pam saying “they’re the same picture.”
A video showing off the webernetes cluster debugger. It's tricky to describe in words, but each cluster has a widget on screen and when you hover over that widget, a little bug icon becomes visible. Clicking that opens up a full page modal that re-redners the cluster within it, but also renders lots of extra UI. There's a button to pause the cluster, a button to apply new manifests, there's tables for each resource (pods, services, etc.).
A photograph of a very wispy cloud, alone in a bright blue sky, with a straight rainbow line through the middle of it.
He finished in 11th place with 24,260 votes - notably, ahead of Britain First, despite the election's change to a First Past the Post voting system. Incumbent mayor and election winner Sadiq Khan in a victory speech remarked about celebrating "becoming the first person in British political history to win successive victories over Count Binface". He added that Binface finishing ahead of the far-right Britain First candidate was "another reason to love London"
A screen recording from the blog post quoted by the original post. It shows a visualisation of a 3 node Kubernetes cluster with a configurable number of pods running within it. The number of pods is controlled by a slider, which is slid between 2 and 18 in the video. Pods send little circles between each other to represent HTTP requests.
My results for the https://bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/ quiz. I am a “true believer” apparently.
A screenshot from the Jiffy page on Wikipedia. It reads: Uses Electronics In electronics, a jiffy is the period of an alternating current power cycle, 1/60 or 1/50 of a second in most mains power supplies. Computing In computing, a jiffy was originally the time between two ticks of the system timer interrupt. It is not an absolute time interval unit, since its duration depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the particular hardware platform.
A screenshot of my iMessage chat with my wife. It’s just alternating animal emojis as far as the eye can see.
A screenshot showing 3 pull requests, 20 forks, 317 stars.
A screenshot from https://github.com/ngrok/webernetes showing the repo has 138 stars, 6 forks, and 1 watcher.
A screenshot of an iMessage conversation. The other person sent me a link to a Google Gemini chat saying “this explains everything.” I replied saying “AI is highly unreliable, remember (this is my day job, I wouldn’t trust what it says. If I did I wouldn’t have called you.)” to which he replied with the all time banger “the thing is this is correct”
A screen recording of what the post describes. 3 nodes can be seen with 12 pods distributed equally between them. Each node has a “kubelet” attached to it, the kubelet sends health requests to all of the pods periodically. Pods send requests between each other represented by travelling dots. Failed requests are red. Below the nodes is a tabbed table listing out each resource type: pods, nodes, namespaces, services, deployments, replica sets, and events.
4 × 3 85 points • 1 mistake 🌟🟪🟪 🌟🟨🟦 🌟🟦🟦 🌟🟨🟨 🟩🌟🟩
A screen recording showing a Kubernetes cluster: 3 nodes, a pod per mode, a namespace selector, a table of resource types. Then at the bottom is a “send request” button that, when clicks, emits a request from the button toward one of the pods and back again.
A photograph of the underside of the outdoor plug socket box showing that the seals aren’t closed.
A stock photo of a punch label printer. It’s a circular dial that contains all of the letters and number. You rotate it to select a number, then pull a trigger on the handle it is connected to. This then imprints the letter onto a tape, which you then cut and remove the back to reveal adhesive, then stick the label to whatever you want. It was dope as fuck.
A photograph of my left hand holding up the Stardew Valley vinyl box set with my record player in the background.
A photograph of a chair next to a bookshelf. The chair is a comfortable recliner, and the bookshelf has on it: books, a record player, a vinyl collection, speakers, and a variety of other nick-nacks.
A screenshot from https://mystery-mutual.fly.dev/play showing that I got it in one guess.
The “they’re the same picture” meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/theyre-the-same-picture) where one of the pictures says “DNS propagation” and the other says “caching.”
A photograph of the “pun dog”: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pun-dog
A screenshot from the NYT games app showing that I got a 2:47 solve for their “The Midi” crossword (this is very fast for me) and 2:41 for their “The Mini” crossword (this is very slow for me).
A screenshot of the game showing I exactly located 77 on a line of 800 on a mobile touch screen.
A banana that has been bruised very specifically to show an image of an astronaut on the moon looking back at planet Earth.
A photograph of me holding the book “What is Intelligence?” by Blaise Agũera y Arcas. Zach recommended this book a few days ago on Bluesky.
A screenshot from Google Trends showing the search term “what is an encyclical” and 90 days of search interest for that term worldwide. It’s flat up until the start of May, where there’s a short spike. Then toward the end of May there’s a much larger spike. This is in reference to the Pope’s recent encyclical on AI.
A screenshot of the right half of the OG post screenshot. It shows what appears to be an ad in a card-like container. The ad text is “how Google started? Today no one is unaware of Google (G-O-O-G-L-E) and we always search our each query…” (pure nonsense) then there are three (3) hamburgers menus scattered at random on and around the card.
A comparison of core web vitals for astro.build (98.0), vuejs.org (95.7), svelte.dev (95.5), react.dev (93.9), and samwho.dev (90.5)
A photograph of the internal glass column of the Google KGX office. On the windows can be seen pixel art of Megaman made using post-it notes. Also there are Pacman ghosts as well as Jake the Dog from Adventure Time.
A samwho.dev/ping notification that reads: “Hello from Kuwait!”
A samwho.dev/ping notification that reads: “never thought creator of js date quiz was this much creative & interesting, loved your reading list :salute:”
A photograph of a Kindle on my lap showing an excerpt from “Reaper Man” by Terry Pratchett. It reads: “The pendulum is a blade that would have made Edgar Allan Poe give it all up and start again as a stand-up comedian on the scampi-in-a-casket circuit. It swings with a faint whum-whum noise, gently slicing thin rashers of interval from the bacon of eternity.”
A screen recording showing that the CSS has been modified to allow the smaller version of the chart to shrink down instead of blowing up on smaller screen sizes.
A screen recording showing the graph question changing from nice and compact for larger screens, to very spaced out for smaller screens as a browser window is resized.
A short video screen recording showing a bar chart with bars going horizontally. The chart spans about 1.5 screens vertically. Lots of space everywhere for no clear reason.
A screenshot from the state of AI website on iOS Safari. A data visualisation can be seen where each coding agent (claude code, codex, etc) has a bar below it. The bar is split first into 3 horizontal segments, and then each segment is optionally split into 2 vertical segments. Segments are labelled with percentages according to their size. I really legitimately don’t know what it’s meant to mean.
A screenshot from a Slack channel. At the top, someone unnamed said “this is really unhinged.” Below that I have replied: “it is deeply unhealthy that this exists. I am giddy.”
A photograph of me holding an xteink4 in my hand. It is very small, smaller than my hand. My bookshelf is in the background. The first page of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" is visible on the device's screen.
A photograph of me helping up a black mug that says “pragmatic AI” and a card that says “thank you from Matt and the tighten team”
A screenshot showing the command `cat proto/swizecs-nospace.json | ./protobuf_wire_colors.py --proto-root ./proto ./proto/swizec.proto Swizecs` returning output that shows a protobuf schema: message Swizecs { repeated Swizec swizecs = 1; } message Swizec { int32 field_1 = 1; int32 field_2 = 2; } And data encoded first as JSON: { "swizecs": [ { "field_1": 123, "field_2": 123 }, { "field_1": 223, "field_2": 223 }, { "field_1": 323, "field_2": 323 } ] } And then as a protobuf, output as binary bytes: 0a 04 08 7b 10 7b 0a 06 08 df 01 10 df 01 0a 06 08 c3 02 10 c3 02
The output of a python script called `protobuf_wire_colors.py` that shows a protobuf schema: message Messages { repeated Message messages = 1; } message Message { int32 id = 1; string name = 2; bool active = 3; } With each field given a unique colour. Then the same data is shown both JSON and protobuf encoded, with data colour coded to its field.
A screenshot of the output of a Python script called `compress_report.py`, comparing compressed sizes for `payload.bin` and `payload.json`. Results shown: brotli q11: binary 4279 bytes, json 4237 bytes, json smallest by 42 bytes. zstd lvl22: binary 4702 bytes, json 4484 bytes, json smallest by 218 bytes. gzip lvl9: binary 4949 bytes, json 4766 bytes, json smallest by 183 bytes. lzma preset9e: binary 4484 bytes, json 4500 bytes, binary smallest by 16 bytes. bzip2 lvl9: binary 5302 bytes, json 5208 bytes, json smallest by 94 bytes. lz4 lvl16: binary 5832 bytes, json 6245 bytes, binary smallest by 413 bytes. Horizontal red and blue bars visualize the binary and JSON sizes for each compression algorithm.
A screenshot from irc.samwho.dev showing several people logged in using their atproto handles.
A screen recording of a site I’ve made called “sudokube.” It’s a Rubik’s cube where on each square is a number. Each face is a 3x3 sudoku grid that needs solving by getting all unique digits 1-9 on it.
0 recv= 50ms tick= 49ms 1 recv= 112ms + 61ms tick= 99ms + 49ms 2 recv= 173ms + 61ms tick= 149ms + 50ms 3 recv= 233ms + 60ms tick= 199ms + 49ms 4 recv= 294ms + 61ms tick= 249ms + 50ms 5 recv= 356ms + 61ms tick= 299ms + 50ms 6 recv= 417ms + 61ms tick= 399ms + 99ms 7 recv= 478ms + 61ms tick= 449ms + 50ms
A Golang code block that reads: import ( "fmt" "time" ) func main() { ticker := time.NewTicker(50 * time.Millisecond) defer ticker.Stop() start := time.Now() var prevRecv time.Time var prevTick time.Time for i := 0; i < 8; i++ { tick := <-ticker.C recv := time.Now() if i == 0 { fmt.Printf("%d recv=%4dms tick=%4dms\n", i, recv.Sub(start).Milliseconds(), tick.Sub(start).Milliseconds()) } else { fmt.Printf("%d recv=%4dms +%3dms tick=%4dms +%3dms\n", i, recv.Sub(start).Milliseconds(), recv.Sub(prevRecv).Milliseconds(), tick.Sub(start).Milliseconds(), tick.Sub(prevTick).Milliseconds()) } prevRecv = recv prevTick = tick time.Sleep(60 * time.Millisecond) } }
A screen recording from my phone showing the Pushover app streaming in dozens of samwho.dev/ping notifications every few seconds.
A screenshot from the Zed 1.0 release notes that reads: "Added GIF animation support for Markdown Preview. (#53459; thanks davidalecrim1)"
The Simpson’s “that’s a paddlin’” meme.
A screen recording of a component showing browser compositing drawing successive layers.
A photo of the giant building that looks like a butt.
A selfie of me and Oliver outside of Kintan in Oxford Circus.
A screenshot of a $50 donation to the Oasis Center.
A Grafana bar graph showing bandwidth used every 2 hours for the last 24 hours. The last 4 bars on the right are around 20% as tall as the rest on the left.
A screenshot of https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html with the browser dev tools open to the console top. In the console is: Upgrading to IPv6... ████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 50% Halfway there, as of 2026/04/28