The Grimoire

Setback

Mistakes were made.

Trees

It’s time to tackle logs and tree farming.

Glass

Tar: the renewable energy source of tomorrow.

Research

Welcome to the Mushroom Kingdom.

Metals

“A land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

Stranded

“You have crashed on a planet almost completely covered in water.”

Introduction

Welcome to PyBlock Hard Mode.

Hire Me

I’ve been a professional software developer since the early 2000s and an enthusiastic amateur even longer. I was also, for a while, a manager of developers. I’m deeply interested in organizational dynamics and group consensus: software, like ourselves, lives in a society, and both serves the needs of and serves to help shape that society. 
 I’m always interested in hearing…

Entities as Dependencies

Entity and record types make a handy way to express “this has to exist before I can use it” in data access code.

Sqlite in Sqlx, Automatic File Creation, and Error 14

Sometimes the defaults get in your way.

Some Direnv Patterns

A by-no-means-exhaustive list of direnv configuration techniques I’ve found helpful.

A reference to a Future is a Future (sort of)

If T implements Future , then &mut T also implements Future . You can use this fact to add cancellation safety to a non-cancel-safe future.

Strategic Forgetting

I am, increasingly, of the perspective that when a business pays programmers to automate some part of its business process, they do so because it will be cheaper to do that than to pay someone to remember that process. Sometimes, this process happens by intent, but much more often in my experience, it happens as a confluence of other incentives.

Small Systems Manfiesto

A series of observations on choices that make small systems more successful. Largely a restatement of how complex systems fail , through the lens of success rather than the lens of failure.

Incident Response

Shut down your PagerDuty account, unless someone will die if you don’t answer it.

Primals and Tempering

Cass: “So does Susano temper people?” 
 Me: “Hmm, actually that’s an interesting point. I think it’s just the primals summoned under Ascian auspices that do that.” 
 Cass: “Huh, yeah. Shiva didn’t temper people either.” 
 Spoilers for Endwalker .

Alphinaud Publishes a Paper

I put way too much effort into this dumb joke.

What Did Louisoix Know?

Musings on the differences between what characters “know” and what their authors know, and the gap created by FFXIV’s evolving relationship with its own narrative. 
 Spoilers for Endwalker . 


Papers of Note

Computer science and development-adjacent papers and academic works I encourage people to read.

A More Satisfactory Way of Building

In 2020, Aphyr wrote A Satisfactory Way of Building , exploring the the idea of pattern languages through the forces and consequences imposed by Satisfactory. In the intervening two years, the developers have released two major updates to the game, adding entirely new systems, adding new ways of responding to the forces and tensions in the game, and tweaking (or in some cases, completely…

The `tools` directory

A general and less tooling-intensive approach to automating routine project tasks.

Notes Towards Initial Rules for a Github Nomic

Github Nomic Rules

Configuring Browser Apps

I’ve found myself in the unexpected situation of having to write a lot of
browser apps/single page apps this year. I have some thoughts on configuration.

Writing Good Commit Messages

A style guide.

A Users, Roles & Privileges Scheme Using Graphs

An SQL schema and associated queries for handling permissions when roles can nest arbitrarily.