Julia Evans
Julia Evans
I’m a software developer. I live in Montreal. I sometimes give talks. Most of my income comes from my programming zines business Wizard Zines. I have one main opinion about programming, which is that deeply understanding the underlying systems you use (the browser, the kernel, the operating system, the network layers, your database, HTTP, whatever you’re running on top of) is essential if you want to do technically innovative work and be able to solve hard problems.
September 2026
Top Words
- terminal
- notes
- pages
- django
- rules
- programs
- learning
All posts (27)
I have never been a C programmer but every so often I need to compile a C/C++ program from source. This has been kind of a struggle for me: for a long time, my approach was basically “install the dependencies, run make, if it doesn’t work, either try to find a binary someone has compiled or give up”. “Hope someone...
Hello! Today I want to talk about ANSI escape codes. For a long time I was vaguely aware of ANSI escape codes (“that’s how you make text red in the terminal and stuff”) but I had no real understanding of where they were supposed to be defined or whether or not there were standards for them. I just had a kind of...
I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot of them just said...
A few weeks ago I ran a terminal survey (you can read the results here) and at the end I asked: What’s the most frustrating thing about using the terminal for you? 1600 people answered, and I decided to spend a few days categorizing all the responses. Along the way I learned that classifying qualitative data is not...
Hello! Recently I ran a terminal survey and I asked people what frustrated them. One person commented: There are so many pieces to having a modern terminal experience. I wish it all came out of the box. My immediate reaction was “oh, getting a modern terminal experience isn’t that hard, you just need to….”, but the...
Recently I’ve been thinking about how everything that happens in the terminal is some combination of: Your operating system’s job Your shell’s job Your terminal emulator’s job The job of whatever program you happen to be running (like top or vim or cat) The first three (your operating system, shell, and terminal...
Here’s a niche terminal problem that has bothered me for years but that I never really understood until a few weeks ago. Let’s say you’re running this command to watch for some specific output in a log file: tail -f /some/log/file | grep thing1 | grep thing2 If log lines are being added to the file relatively...
I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup instructions assume that...
I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the fact that cross compiling in Go Just...
Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII control characters Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine (on Mac OS), more...
I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few minutes while it restarts, and it only happens once a day at most, so I’ve just been ignoring. But last week it...
Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time to time? So yesterday I decided to try to upgrade Hugo. There’s no real...
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