Jacob Emcken

Stumble upon in January 2026

AI tries to make everything easy… convenient, but life without discomfort is not something to desire. The label ‘PC compatible’ is a reminder of how complex (inconvenient) things can be.

2025 was the year I...

… did quite a lot, actually. Apparently, when you sit down and think about it, happenings start to surface.

Rant: Updating Samsung NVMe firmware uncessarily complicated

The other day, I was taken back to the “good old days”, and not in a good way. I had assumed that a major hardware provider like Samsung nowadays would ensure a decent user experience during firmware updates, regardless of the operating system. But I was in for a disappointment.

My home server running Linux has been crashing occasionally for a while. But since a reboot would temporarily “fix” it, sometimes for weeks, I never prioritized finding the underlying problem… until now. It feels like a recent kernel update now triggers the crash more often, but I have no data to back this statement up.

Using idempotency for application interfaces like REST APIs

Applying retry strategies on API calls to make them more robust often brings its own set of problems. Occasionally, rather than losing an entity-creating call, you end up with multiple, and trust me — duplicates are a pain to clean up.

However, idempotency can neutralise the inconveniences from retries, making the pair a powerful combo. 💪

Exception handling differences between Clojure map & pmap

With this post, I am in deeper waters than usual. What might sound like a recommendation in the following could be a potential disaster in disguise. Be warned.

Personally, I prefer not to know about implementation details about the function I’m calling. Although that was the situation I suddenly found myself in, when a function I call replaced map with pmap.

Here is how I approached the weirdness with exceptions tangled with pmap.