here's me being grateful for “old school” forums and the slower communities
after years of lurking on the kakoune user forums, i posted there for the first time.
benjamin wil
Software developer, technical writer
Latest posts
Adding a live word count to the Kakoune modeline
I wanted to conditionally add the current buffer’s word count to Kakoune’s modeline.
Unicode Variation Selector-15 and some of my tears
From my phone, I noticed that my website was displaying footnote backlink glyphs as emoji in my RSS reader.
feed backfilling
so my website has two main feed sources: the main weblog, and this antisocial feed that came into existence via rss club....
Markdown is for humans
Developers and nerds have seemed satisfied with Markdown as a plain text format for a long time.
I like JSON Feed
Recently, I implemented JSON Feed support for my static site generator, Lifer.
taking the summer off work
after deliberating for a while and doing some budget-math, i decided to take the summer off of work and attempt to recove...
SSH agent–managed SSH keys
You probably already know: there’s no excuse to not be using a password manager in 2026.
admitting defeat (re: android development environments on guix)
for over a month i’ve spent a weird amount of my free time trying to set up an android development environment (via react...
new light colourscheme
it’s a bit weird: yellows and blues and reds. what do you think?
my notetaking system, early 2026
the process is still evolving, but i’m going to describe my notetaking system as of right now.
you're allowed to be uninsightful
i’ve published two (small) non-antisocial blog posts this month, which is about one more than usual:
Portable feature flags in ten-ish lines of Ruby
It may make sense to use a mature feature flag library or pay for feature flags as a service in your complex application....
oscar predictions 2026
these are not the things that i necessarily would want to win, but what i think will happen.
Semantic style Ruby blocks
Here’s another blog post vouching for writing Ruby blocks using the semantic rule.
your mime type is showing
hi.
Victoria Film Festival 2026
This month was the 32nd occurrence of the Victoria Film Festival here in Victoria, British Columbia.
New website
Today I’m launching my website redesign. I hope that you like it.
The best films I saw: 2025 edition
As always, in an unranked order, here are the thirty best movies I was able to watch in 2025.
Porto, Portugal
After EuRuKo in Viana do Castelo, I spent some time in Porto.
Viana do Castelo, Portugal
I was at EuRuKo last month, held in a small city in the Norte Region of Portugal called Viana do Castelo.
Catch-all routes and routing constraints in Rails applications
I’ve worked with more than one Ruby on Rails application that has a catch-all GET route at the end of its config/routes.r...
See you at EuRuKo 2025
I’ll be at EuRuKo, the European Ruby conference, in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, this month.
Typesetting artist name–album title separation
Recently I’ve had two occasions to think about how to typeset musical artist names when next to their album release names...
GitHub Discussions is modelled poorly for open-ended conversations
Note that this article criticizes GitHub’s Discussions feature (originally launched in 2017) as it exists now, in July 20...
Prefer text over screenshots
If you want me to read some text, use your computer’s text-copy commands to provide me with the data rather than taking a...
The Shrouds (2024)
In one of the first scenes, Karsh explains to a date that the GraveTech cemetery he built, where Becca, his Jewish wife, ...
Atom vs. RSS
While working on my static site generator, Lifer, I was occasionally annoyed by how my test feeds were being read by RSS ...
This website has been ported to Lifer 0.9
Since releasing Lifer 0.3 in January I’ve released six more minor versions to get the project stable enough to start usin...
From developer to Rails developer
In 2023, I wrote this guide to getting familiar with Ruby and Rails for my employer, Super Good Software.
Lifer 0.3
I recently released 0.3.0 of my static site generator project Lifer, which I intend to use to build this website in the (...
The best films I saw: 2024 edition
In no particular order, here’s my annual list of the movies I loved that I saw for the first time in 2024.
The best films I saw: 2023 edition
As usual: here’s my annual list of the thirty best movies I watched for the first time this year.
The best films I saw: 2022 edition
In 2022 I watched some movies for the first time, as I do every year.
Providence, RI
I was in Providence, Rhode Island, for RubyConf Mini and had the opportunity to eat and drink at some amazing places.
RubyConf Mini
I attended RubyConf Mini in Providence, Rhode Island. If I met you there: it was a pleasure to have met you.
777
Recently I released an EP 777. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp.
The best films I saw: 2021 edition
As usual: here are thirty films, that I liked or thought were good, that I watched for the first time this year.
Now a Gollum organization member
Earlier this year, I was invited to join the Gollum organization after making some contributions to the main Gollum repos...
No longer there
I released an EP called No longer there. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp.
Treatise on Luck
Mark Francis Johnson’s Treatise on Luck is a book of poems that investigates luck: where it comes from, where it goes, an...
The best films I saw: 2020 edition
A marked improvement in my film consumption since 2019. The following list is thirty films long.
Assimilated
I just released a new LaunchBar 6 theme called Assimilated.
Letter for you
I released some music last week. It’s a short album called Letter for you. You can stream it or purchase it on Bandcamp.
prefers-color-scheme: dark
i decided it was time to make a dark colour scheme for this website.
Film Title Poem (2016)
Please also read Jennifer West’s introduction to the film.
Self-hosting a tiny git remote
There are plenty of full-featured git forges out there.
The best films I saw: 2019 edition
I watched a lot of mediocre and objectively-pretty-bad movies this year.
assessing my role in software freedom advocacy
over the last year i’ve become increasingly conscious of how my life and work intersects with free and proprietary softwa...
how to move into a new place
i’m moving this month, and so far it’s going smoothly.