I finally opened one of the tabs I’d left sitting since I started studying for the AWS recert, a trigger.dev post on Claude Code tips I’d flagged months ago as worth coming back to. Of the ten tips, two were things I didn’t already do, and a couple of the others described features that had changed or gone entirely since it was written. The post wasn’t wrong when it was published, it had just aged, and I’d saved it at the point where saving it felt close enough to reading it.
There are over a hundred of these open in Firefox, plus a pile of LinkedIn posts I’d bookmarked and a run of GitHub repos I meant to actually look at. The plan is to get through what I can on the Mac first, then the Google Keep notes, then the Firefox tabs, mostly to give my phone a break from holding them all. What the trigger.dev one made obvious is that this isn’t really a reading list, it’s a set of small bets I placed while my attention was on the exam, each one assuming the thing would still be useful by the time I got back to it, and a lot of it goes stale faster than the months I left it sitting.
A saved tab is a small bet that the thing will still matter when you finally come back to it.
The same pattern hit the tips post: something gets written up carefully because it’s a workaround, and then the platform absorbs it into a feature and the writeup is describing a problem that no longer exists. The stronger the tip, the more this happens, because the fiddly manual thing everyone works around is usually the thing a vendor ends up building in. I opened one tab, that led to two more, and half of what I found once I was in there was already answered by something shipped after the tab was saved.
The AWS console does this now for signing into more than one account. I used to run a Firefox multi-account container plugin for that, because the console only held one identity at a time and switching between a management account and the accounts under it meant logging out and back in or keeping separate browser profiles. That was my setup for years, but AWS added multi-session to the console back at the start of 2025, so you can now be signed into up to five identities at once, each in its own tab, once you turn it on from the account menu.
The recert showed me the same thing from the other side. A lot of the design patterns I’d had to learn cold the last time I sat it were complicated because the services didn’t join up, and you had to know the manual way to stitch them together. This time round a chunk of that was gone, either folded into the services directly or replaced by new services that did the joining for you. It was odd to notice mid-exam that stuff I’d spent weeks learning was now just built in, and that the work still counted for less than it had.
The backlog stops being a list and starts becoming a surface you have to excavate.
There’s no quick way to tell which tabs are still of any use without opening each one and reading it, so time to get started.