Stephen Meriwether’s Blog

John Gruber, at Daring Fireball, is my favorite iPhone reviewer. His reviews are honest but ever so slightly skewed in Apple’s favor. As an Apple fan that’s what I want to read. I don’t want to read how an iPhone compares against a random Android phone because I would never buy that random Android phone and I’d never recommend anyone who asks me to buy it either. When I read an iPhone review I want to read about the iPhone and that’s what John does. So what’s his thoughts on the iPhone 16e, this sums it up best:

The iPhone 16e is an iPhone for people who don’t want to think much about their phone. But they do want an iPhone, not just any “whatever” phone. A just plain iPhone, with a good screen, good enough (and simple) camera, and great battery life. I think Apple nailed that with the iPhone 16e.

Another reason why I enjoy reading his reviews are these little tidbits:

(Also take note of a clever touch: Apple’s default wallpapers for each phone subtly suggest how many camera lenses they have.)

His reviews often have a least a couple and each of them make me smile.

One of the best things I’ve read in 2025: My Father Was a Conservative Evangelical Paster Than I Came Out published in the New York Times Opinion about a father’s journey of reconciling his beliefs against his reality, through his private journal entries.

What I found in my dad’s journals gave me a deep appreciation for what it takes for people to really change their minds — what it means to confront the limits of their faith, to risk their career, their standing in the community, even to question the foundations of all that they believed to be true.

Two things that stood out to me: the unfettered honesty of the journal entries and his process of deeply confronting his beliefs.

While building Conductor we’ve often struggled to make sure we haven’t introduced regressions when changing system prompts, etc. Manually testing sort of works but we often don’t have the time to test the entire feature set. We have integration tests but they also don’t cover the entire feature set.

I think DeepEval is the solution. We’ve only recently started to implement DeepEval but the vision of the future is clear. DeepEval lets you “unit test” features of LLM-enabled software. It’s open-source and comes with a lot of useful tools built-in. It’s a little finicky to get started but the learning curve is not that steep.