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Table of Contents tl;dr A year of building and keeping habits Tactic 1: Start tiny Tactic 2: Identify my keystone habit Tying it all together What I liked about the year Learning on the side Working on side projects What I want to improve in 2026 Goal 1: Delete bullshit Goal 2: Stop letting fear make my decisions Goal 3: Dial up the quality of my habits Closing thoughts As 2025 comes to a close,…
Hi. It's me, the software you're using. I can't help but notice that you have notifications disabled. Not to worry, though; I can show you the system dialog to grant those permissions. Oh, sorry, is this a bad time? No problem. I'll check back with you in a few days. Now that we're on the subject, I would be remiss if I didn't mention: using our app is so much better when logged in! Let me just…
I've been doing a lot of Markdown-to-Microsoft Word work lately, and while I have used and loved Pandoc for a long time, the biggest issue is usually getting the Pandoc binary installed on whatever target environment in which my code is running. Today I just discovered the incredible pypandoc package, which not only provides a clean and simple wrapper for interacting with Pandoc, but which also…
Today I am releasing binwheels-neovim , an unofficial package that allows you to quickly install Neovim on Windows, Linux, and macOS without admin privileges and without needing to compile anything. View the source at https://github.com/wilkystyle/binwheels-neovim . Usage # uv uv tool install binwheels-neovim # pipx pipx install binwheels-neovim After a successful installation, nvim will be…
Some years back, I uploaded code and example videos for a side project to help me learn Java and physics at the same time. It wasn't long before I got a comment on one of the videos mocking how long it had taken me to get things working. When Dropbox was first announced, a famous (infamous?) comment on Hacker News was quick to point out flaws in the idea. "Criticizing is fast and easy. Creating is…
I recently completed a full migration of my personal site over here to Bear Blog. I've had my eye on Bear for a while, and I absolutely love the mission of a clean, ad-free site with easy publishing. Also, Bear-hosted sites and the Bear control panel UI are lightning fast and responsive. My blog was previously a static Hugo website, hosted with AWS S3 and CloudFront . Because it was a static site…
An analogy came to mind a couple weeks back that has started to reshape the way I think about my calendar: My time slots have potential energy . Imagine a marble perched up on the edge of a wall. If the marble rolls forward over the edge, it falls all the way down to the floor below. On the other side of the wall is a staircase. If the marble rolls backward down the staircase, it impacts each step…
I've been a huge fan of GNU Make for quite some time. I use it as a top-level orchestration and automation tool for managing all my projects, no matter the size. I've written before about how I use Make, but in this post I'll highlight a few key improvements to the workflow that make it much more lightweight and enjoyable to use. Briefly: Why layer another tool on top? Two main benefits: The tool…
Update, August 2025: I've migrated to Bear Blog , so this post is no longer accurate. This blog is a static site, built using Hugo and my own custom theme (I started with an existing minimal theme and modified it). Architecture The site is hosted in AWS as static files in S3 that are served by CloudFront (AWS's managed CDN offering): +---------------------+ | Site Visitors | | (Browsers/Clients) |…
2024 has been quite a year so far. Plenty of ups and downs to go around, but overall finding peace and joy in everything. On Writing More It's been a while since my last update. I'd really like to start writing here more often—mainly for my own benefit, but obviously for the benefit of anyone else who might find it useful. I think the main thing that has prevented me from doing so is fear : I'm…