Having spent the last 6 months working on an Electron app full-time, my Stockholm Syndrome has kicked in and I’ve come around to it. It’s easy to disparagingly refer to an Electron app as bloated, or a crappy wrapper around a web app. This is lazy, reductive thinking that travels well in short-form media like TikTok...

A short set of anecdotes, apropos of nothing. The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession When I was younger, I really liked programming! I loved the sense of accomplishment, I loved the problem solving, I loved sharing what I made with the people around me to both amuse and assist. One particularly wise adult...

Introduction I’ve been enjoying standalong MP3 players! The Innioasis Y1 kept coming across my radar, I like the the form factor, it was $50. What the heck, why not. And Then The community for this thing is insane, it’s just as active as the people doing weird things with my RG35XX. It’s really cool seeing so many...

Introduction My Shanling Q1 died after a couple of years of heavy use and I think it was probably fixable with some soldering but I don’t have time for that. In a rush, I bought an M0s not reading the page and thinking it was the higher-end M0 Pro, but ultimately this was not a big deal! Usage This still works like...

Similar to The Wrong Conclusion is another cognitive anti-pattern: in the pursuit of identity we see ourselves as being something as an inherent quality of ourselves versus doing something as a role, a quality being temporarily practiced. This can lead to bad behavior on our part and it limits our ability to grow...

I have my seed Starship config up as a Gist. Starship is a tool that frustrates me because it seems so bikesheddy and unneeded: a custom prompt manager. We already had shell prompt customization! I blindly install oh-my-* on new machines for prompt customization! And Starship is written in Rust. People just use Rust...

I’ve been using the Tailwind CSS Framework for about two and a half years (as of July 2025) for my personal projects, and I used it professionally in my time at unstructured as well. In all, I think it’s a good thing. However, I don’t find myself thinking I’d use it for new projects at this point: I believe I have...

For the 500 lines of boilerplate, what are the five truly interesting lines that solve the problem? In the course of my problem solving, especially when I am solving a problem I think shouldn’t be hard, I think back to the essential core of the problem Typically a fix is a couple of API calls or a single clever data...

As you are working your way to the goal, you should be able to be clearminded about how you aim on getting there and when you are slowed down for silly reasons do not accept them as excuses. Say to yourself, “I know what I need to do, it shouldn’t be this hard.” Overall, you should be working toward writing...

Top Matter: Codeberg for the library, doc for the library. It’s been six months since I’ve done this, but I’m finally writing about it! Go recently added proper iterator support to the language, which is something of an improvement over the prior pattern of spinning up a goroutine and communicating via a channel in...

You should be familiar enough with your tools to be able list critical things about them, even though they’re what you still choose to use every day. The title Hate What You Know is admittedly vague, I know! There are a handful of directions I’ll go with it, bear with me. And at least to some extent I don’t mean...

I’m trying out the Harper tool in VS Code. I’ve been aware of its existence for about 6 months and didn’t think much of it, just another rehash of existing tools. But I’ve come around to the idea that rewriting old tools isn’t a horrible notion: the people who crafted them were no smarter or dumber than ourselves,...