Hello! I’m on a funny journey right now where I’m trying to learn how to make websites in a sort of 2010 style, where I have an SQL database and render some HTML on the backend. It’s kind of an interesting journey because it doesn’t necessarily feel “easy” to me to make websites in this way: I never learned how to do it in the 2000s or 2010s, and there’s a…
Hello! I’ve been working on a Django site recently, and I decided to use SQLite as the database. When I was getting started with using SQLite as database for a website I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are…
Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind . At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of tiny sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and…
A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette ( here as CSS ). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50 . I’m not very good with colours so it makes a big difference to me to have a reasonable colour palette…
Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it felt slow and unwieldy to be starting these new browser processes all the time, and it…
Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples) the goal: include the most basic examples The goal here…
Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find the man pages hard to navigate to get the information I want. Lately I’ve…
Hello! One of my favourite things is starting to learn an Old Boring Technology that I’ve never tried before but that has been around for 20+ years. It feels really good when every problem I’m ever going to have has been solved already 1000 times and I can just get stuff done easily. I’ve thought it would be cool to learn a popular web framework like Rails or Django or Laravel…
Hello! This past fall, I decided to take some time to work on Git’s documentation. I’ve been thinking about working on open source docs for a long time – usually if I think the documentation for something could be improved, I’ll write a blog post or a zine or something. But this time I wondered: could I instead make a few improvements to the official documentation? So Marie…
Hello! Earlier this summer I was talking to a friend about how much I love using fish , and how I love that I don’t have to configure it. They said that they feel the same way about the helix text editor, and so I decided to give it a try. I’ve been using it for 3 months now and here are a few notes. why helix: language servers I think what motivated me to try Helix is that I’ve…
Hello! After many months of writing deep dive blog posts about the terminal, on Tuesday I released a new zine called “The Secret Rules of the Terminal”! You can get it for $12 here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal , or get an 15-pack of all my zines here . Here’s the cover: the table of contents Here’s the table of contents: why the terminal? I’ve been using…
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 else has compiled it” worked pretty well when I was…
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 vague “there be dragons” feeling around them. While…
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 “add this to ~/.bashrc ”, but what…
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 easy but I gave it my best shot. I ended up building a custom tool to make it…
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 more I thought about it, the longer the “you just…
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 emulator) are all kind of known quantities – if…
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 slowly, the result I’d see is… nothing! It doesn’t…
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 you’re using a build system. Luckily at this point I’ve mostly…
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 Works and it’s amazing, or cryptographic right…