a friendly interruption
In my career I’ve used many tools which keep local file caches of one kind or
another: pip, Maven, npm, clj , go , staticcheck, and dozens of others. I’ve
also written a few myself. 
 Besides running them on my local computers, I’ve also maintained automated test
suites and CI systems that use these tools. 
 These experiences have led me to a set of ideas…
I’ve lived in California for more than 11 years—longer than anywhere
else—so it’s as much my home as any place. But in a few weeks I am moving
away. 
 California is a truly special place. As my time here draws to an end, I’ve been
thinking about the many reasons I love this state. 
 
 I came to Silicon Valley to work in software, and there is…
This is handy: 
 $ GOARCH=arm64 go test
PASS
ok github.com/cespare/xxhash/v2 0.201s
 
 My machine has an amd64 CPU. How does this work? 
 For a long time (since Go 1.5), compiling for a different architecture has been
as easy as setting the appropriate GOARCH . go test works in two steps: it
synthesizes and compiles a main package with all the tests and then runs…
People who see code in my text editor often comment about the lack of syntax
highlighting. 
 
 Over the dozen-odd years I’ve been writing code, I have used a few different
colorschemes. I favor dark, medium- to low-contrast themes because I find this
more comfortable on my eyes for extended reading. 
 
 
 
 I always considered my colorscheme to be an…
A few years ago, while aboard a ferry crossing the Cook Strait, my wife and I
were working on some math puzzles and I found myself needing to generate all
permutations of a sequence. 
 Generating permutations is a common task in Project Euler-style puzzles or
interview questions; it’s a finger exercise for writing a recursive function.
This time, though, I decided to…
After something like a 5-year hiatus, ctrl-c.us is back! In that time, I: 
 
 Spent hours staring at Google Fonts 
 Tried out a bunch of different color schemes 
 Used each new popular static site generator 
 Implemented my own static site generator in Ruby 
 Threw out my Ruby static site generator and wrote one in Go 
 Rewrote my Go site generator two or three times…
This post was updated in April 2018. 
 A couple of days ago I was working on some Ruby code when I found myself wishing
I had Python’s yield keyword. (If you’re a user of both languages, you may be
aware that yield is quite different in Ruby and Python, though not unrelated.)
This led me to try to characterize the relationship between the two yield s. 
 In a…