Sammy's Blog is a personal developer blog spanning roughly 2019 to 2025, covering an eclectic range from Clojure library announcements to cancer treatment explainers to political hot takes on Citizens United and Modern Monetary Theory. The connective tissue is a single developer thinking out loud, with varying degrees of rigor, about whatever occupies their attention at a given moment. The standout piece is the bot traffic post. After launching sprinklz.io — a customizable feed reader that lets users deprioritize topics — on Hacker News, the author discovered nearly half their traffic came from a single AI scraper service that hammered the site multiple times per minute to generate AI newsletter slop. The forensics are specific and useful: top-level endpoint logging revealed most requests never executed JavaScript, NGINX logs identified the abuser, and the fix cascade (robots.txt, rate limiting, vulnerability path auditing via Claude) reads like a practical incident response playbook. The Emacs web browser piece is cleverer than it sounds. The mechanism: use an LLM to generate reusable JavaScript transforms that simplify modern web pages into 1990s-style HTML, then pipe the result to eww (Emacs Web Wowser). The LLM call only happens once per site pattern, so day-to-day browsing runs fast. It's a genuinely inventive use of LLMs as code-generation middlemen rather than content generators — using AI to undo the damage AI-era web design has done to readable content. The 'why did everything get worse' essay is the blog's philosophical anchor and its weakest piece simultaneously. The observation — that recommendation algorithms turned the internet adversarial starting around 2018 — is correct but well-trodden. The prescriptions (touch grass, protest, stop pulling the slot machine lever) are earnest but generic. The author is more interesting when building tools than when editorializing. The Clojure content (Deft library, chess in 350 lines) is solidly niche. Deft addresses a real pain point in Clojure's type system — the tension between everything-is-a-map flexibility and the need for interface contracts. The chess implementation is a craft exercise. These posts serve the Clojure community specifically and don't pretend otherwise. The cancer treatment series and political posts (impeachment, Democratic primary math, Citizens United) are the most uneven territory. The chemo series appears personal and specific; the political posts read like a smart person's first drafts rather than developed arguments. The blog doesn't distinguish between these registers, which is both its charm and its limitation. What holds this together is voice — informal, technically literate, willing to ship half-formed thoughts alongside polished tools. The blog is a workshop with the door open, not a publication. That's a specific thing, and for the right reader, it's exactly what they want.
