Henry Catalini Smith

Immigrants in Tech Oppose Tighter Citizenship Rules

Got hold of a link to this open letter just now. It’s titled Immigrants in Tech Oppose Tighter Citizenship Rules and it’s worth a look. If you moved to Sweden for a tech job you might want to think about signing it. I sure have.

The Week 12 Boycott

There’s a nationwide boycott of big supermarket chains this week in Sweden and it’s been great fun. Probably the only downside has been all the tedious opinion pieces criticising it.

Survival Mode

Stopped using Copilot outside of work a few weeks ago. Coding’s begun to feel fun again since making that change. I hadn’t even noticed the disappearance of that joy until it started coming back either.

Onshoring My DNS

I was arsehole deep in American domain name services, I recently noticed. Between Verisign, Tucows and Cloudflare I had rigged my digital identity to blow in the event of any number of increasingly plausible crisis scenarios. I chose to own this mistake and begin the work of fixing it.

Codeberg Is The Future

GitHub’s been my most-used digital service for years. Even interviewed (unsuccessfully) there once. To some extent it had become an online “home” for me. You know that feeling when you’ve lived in the same place long enough that you can walk into the bathroom in the dead of night and hit the light switch on your first try with one effortless flick of your arm? That’s been my relationship with GitHub.

Shutting down 666a

Since October 31st 2023 I’ve been providing a work environment email service called 666a. On March 31st 2025 it’s shutting down. Today I’m beginning the process of winding it down gently, and I wanted to post something explaining that process and why it’s happening.

Accidentally Sending Too Many HTTP Requests

This was originally posted at https://666a.se/news/accidentally-sending-too-many-http-requests and has been migrated here since for long-term hosting.

Using AI to help humans translate Swedish labour laws

Over on 666a I provide English translations of Swedish labour laws. For the most part these are based on some translated PDFs that the Swedish government sometimes publish. The government update the laws more frequently than they update the translations though. Providing an up to date resource here meant updating the translations myself, which is a challenging problem.

“All we know about is computers”

Kubernetes homelab on an old MacBook Air