Recent content in Writing helps me think. on warpedvisions.org
Years ago, something clicked when I read about Anthony Bourdain’s approach to feeding crowds. It was his stunt turkey technique, where he cooks an extra turkey the week before the actual event. It made me think about how we release software. It seemed absurd at first: why would you cook two turkeys for one dinner? Then I realized what he was really doing: load balancing across time.
Remember autoconf ? If you were building software in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you probably have scars. You’d write some configuration rules, run the tool, and out popped a perfectly functional makefile. It felt like magic, until it didn’t. The moment autoconf broke, you were debugging generated shell scripts that stretched for thousands of lines. The abstraction that seemed…
There’s a moment in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker that fundamentally changes how you see the game world. You’ve spent dozens of hours sailing between islands, comfortable with the rhythm of ocean exploration. The world feels complete; a vast blue expanse dotted with discoveries. Then you dive beneath the waves for the first time and find Hyrule Castle, perfectly preserved in an…
I spent three hours last night hand-drawing pixel fonts in Pixen , placing each dot with care. At 8x8 pixels, it was just like the many character sets I designed for my Atari 600XL in the early 1980s. Each pixel mattered then because we only had 128 characters to work with and maybe 16KB of RAM, or up to 64KB if you were lucky enough to have a RAM extension or a more expensive 800XL. Today, each…
I was debugging a power issue with my thermostat last week when it hit me: I had no idea how many batteries were in my house. Not approximately. Not even close. Twenty years ago, I knew exactly where every battery lived; the TV remote, the kitchen clock, maybe a flashlight. Today? They’re everywhere and nowhere. In sensors, in remotes, in devices I’ve forgotten I own. They’ve…
We’ve been watching the AI gold rush unfold for the past two years now, and honestly? It’s giving me serious déjà vu. Remember the early days of mobile apps when everyone and their cousin was building a flashlight app? Or when “on the blockchain” was supposedly going to revolutionize everything from grocery shopping to dental records? We’re in that phase with AI right…
I’ve been thinking about the current AI moment, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re about to hit a wall. Not a failure wall, more like the wall Web 1.0 hit right before everything changed. Remember when every startup was “webr.com” and the height of innovation was animated GIFs? We’re in the AI equivalent of that era right now. Just as Web 2.0 wasn’t…
Evolution has a weird obsession with crabs. At least five times, nature has taken some random crustacean and said, “you know what would work better? A crab.” But it’s not just crabs, evolution continues to reinvent the wheel. Trees evolved independently more than 40 times. Many different types of eyes appeared in dozens of unrelated lineages. Flight emerged in insects,…
There’s a feeling you get when everything clicks into place. Not the eureka moment of solving a problem, but something more fundamental: the deep satisfaction of being exactly where you need to be, with exactly what you need, arranged exactly how it should be. It’s the feeling of home , but applied to the spaces where we create. This isn’t about aesthetics or luxury. It’s…
As a hobby, I’ve been perfecting various burger recipes. It both feeds us and gives me something to incrementally improve. Add fake internet points to the mix, and now I’m motivated to post photographs of my creations. The feedback and reinforcement these fake points provide are enough to keep me consistently taking those photos, and making those burgers. A little push can be good. But…
Your AI coding assistant hasn’t gotten worse; you’ve just hit the ceiling of what your current approach can handle. “My LLM coding tools have been serving me hot garbage lately” is a complaint I see weekly on Reddit. Same tool, same developer, suddenly worse results. These threads are full of developers convinced their AI assistant has degraded overnight. Same prompts that…
After three months of AI-assisted development, I’m more productive than ever. I’m also mentally exhausted in ways I didn’t expect. The productivity gains are real—I can go from sketch to working prototype in hours instead of days. But there’s a hidden cost that we’re not talking about: the tools fundamentally change the cognitive load of programming. Instead of being…
Something weird happened the other day. I found myself sketching more than I had in years. The pages quickly filled with the doodles, wireframes, and half-formed ideas that used to live in my head until they died of neglect. The reason? I can finally get from sketch to fleshed-out concept fast enough that my ideas don’t evaporate. After a few months of serious AI-assisted development,…
After thirty-something years of working in terminals, I’ve developed a pretty strong bias toward doing things from the command line. It can be faster for me to navigate around using scripts and shortcuts than clicking through GUI hierarchies. The muscle memory is there, the automation possibilities are endless, and frankly, it just feels more direct. The problem is that GUI applications…
There’s a familiar anxiety in the air among software architects and engineering leaders. AI coding tools are going to make us lazy programmers. They’ll erode our fundamental skills. We’ll lose the ability to think through problems. Sound familiar? It should. I’ve heard this exact song before, just with different verses. In the ’90s, visual development environments…
When I was 8, a flakey tape drive ate three weeks of BASIC code. One minute I had a working text adventure game where you could explore a haunted mansion. The next I had magnetic spaghetti and a valuable lesson about the nature of software. That tape drive 1 taught me something fundamental: the thinking that goes into your software is the software. The code is just one representation of that…
We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings. Adjust your monitor height. Take breaks every twenty minutes. Use a proper keyboard. The IT department sends out reminders about repetitive strain injuries, and we dutifully nod while hunching over our laptops for another six-hour coding session. But here’s what nobody talks about: your brain is a muscle too, and we’re giving it the…
I sat down a few weeks ago to ask Claude to help me analyze some user feedback data. I spent fifteen minutes crafting what I thought was the perfect prompt: > Please analyze this data, but don't make assumptions about causation, don't over-interpret small sample sizes, don't use corporate jargon, don't suggest solutions we can't implement, and definitely don't... The response was generic and…
This style guide captures patterns from 20+ years of technical writing about software, design, and the human side of technology. It’s designed to help maintain voice consistency when collaborating with editors and AI writing tools. Voice & Tone Conversational yet thoughtful : You write as if speaking to a knowledgeable friend, mixing technical insights with personal reflections Self-aware…
My dad only knew how to cook a few dishes, but he was proud of each one. He loved making boxed mac and cheese. It was usually the blue generic box, and not brand named KD (Kraft Dinner for anyone not from Canada). Dad would start by heating a few tablespoons of margarine in a tiny, janky aluminium pot, stirring in the cheese powder, adding in some fresh milk. He cooked the noodles in a larger…
I remember an old cast aluminium pot, handed down from my grandparents. It was pockmarked, with a patina of polymerized oils in the depressions. It once served as a pressure cooker that exploded in my grandmother’s kitchen, so it no longer had a lid. The handle was loose and the bolt seized, making it a death trap when loaded with a hot sauce. This pot was mostly used for my mom’s frugal spaghetti…
I regularly stay at a corporate apartment with a nice little kitchen that has only stainless steel pots and pans. Normally having real pans is a good thing, but when travelling I don’t usually bring oil or butter with me, and I don’t want to buy more oil than I need as I hate to throw out food (or pack it with me). And while stainless pans are inert and last forever, they’re a bit picky…
This is the 42nd version of my personal website and weblog, once again self-hosted at Dreamhost . I use the site as a forcing function; a way to learn various languages and tools, and a kick to get back into the habit of writing and publishing. This year I ported the content from Write.as to a self-hosted Hugo setup, which took about a day. Everything about Hugo has been better than expected, and…
Pork loin was on sale this week, packaged in half loins (roughly 3.5kg). I picked one up and split it into four roasts. Pork loin is usually cut into chops or brined and smoked (as back bacon, or Canadian bacon). It’s a fairly lean cut, but when cut right will have some marbling and a fat cap. It makes great ground pork, if you include the fat cap. I ground ¼ of the loin, seasoning and…
Hi, I’m Bruce Alderson. I design and craft software for fun and profit. I also write and make artful things using various methods and tools. I enjoy life in all of its oddness and beauty, especially the distinct, the curious, and the wondrous. I believe that simplicity is possible in anything, where simple is defined as when things fit just so . I subscribe to the belief that who we are is…
The site has been many different things over the years, from a tumble of links, rants, essays, and quotes, to a straight up log of essays. These days it sits mostly within craft, makery, and software. There are no comments, nor any contact form. The best filter is public discourse … you taking the time to write a response somewhere, linking back to me. It takes more effort than a comment and…
Today’s dinner was inspired by a social media photo from my morning feed. Today I’m working with ingredients I have on hand, which includes lemongrass, pork sirloin tip, and a boatload of veg. Pork and mushrooms 500-750g of pork sirloin, thinly sliced and halved (3-4mm x 2cm x 2cm or so) 2-3 cups of mushrooms, sliced (shiitakes in this case) 3-4 stalks of lemongrass super finely sliced (on…
I love food. I love the eating of, shopping for, designing menus around, and above all else, preparation of meals, especially for those closest to me. Cookery is a universe of systemizing the making of food, and to me at least it is a lot like software design and development. In the art of making food there are tactical skills that are important and enjoyable to hone. There are strategic planning…
Today we were craving stir fry so I decided to practice the basic method two ways: lemongrass pork and sweet ginger/garlic pork. We had a sirloin tip pork roast on hand, which is best cooked using a fast method as it’s lean and tender. This method doesn’t include deep frying the pork, so is much lighter than standard take out. Lemongrass pork 500g pork, silverskin removed, cubed 5-6 stalks of…
I reworked my flexible Thai curry recipe into something that I can make in less than an hour ( recipe here ). I also made it friendly to vegetarians, as it works so well with tofu and mushrooms. The biggest change is to bring the method closer to authentic, removing some of the French techniques I used in previous versions. I also recommend using a good commercial curry paste to save on time, or…
There are a few ways to make pizza sauce, depending on how lazy you are. Our favourite sauce is cooked down from good tomatoes for a moderate amount of time, and my fastest sauce comes from a tin of crushed tomatoes or sauce (thickened with paste). For pizza sauce, better tomatoes make a difference, as cheaper ones are less sweet and flavourful. This is loosely based on Serious Eat’s New…
Adapted from my traditional and very knead-y pizza dough, which we discovered by accident that one time when we somehow left it in a cupboard for a few days. It turns out we weren’t the first ones to figure this out , and it’s a fantastic way of making doughs in general. Many recipes use weights for ingredients ... this one does not. It is a super lazy dough that can take as little as…
I like to tell people that I’m proactively lazy. I like to cook when I have the energy and not cook when I’m lazy, and have great food either way. I also have limited freezer space, which has led me to prepare condensed versions of foods that can be defrosted and turned into full meals in under 20 minutes. Condensing foods is an old technique that works well for home cooks today.
Today I wanted a relish for a dish so I made some: ½ cup of chopped, sweet pickles ½ cup of chopped, pickled peppers (mild - medium) ½ cup frozen corn, diced, and fried (until edges are brown and crispy) ¼ cup diced onions (purple is what I had on hand) ½ cup of mustard 2 tbsp ketchup 1 tbsp freeze dried dill (if it’s out of seasons) Salt, pepper to taste Combine, adjust seasoning, and rest in the…
There is a point in your career where you start to weigh what you want to say with what you can and should say. If you’re not careful, it can paralyze and stunt your ability to hold opinions with conviction. I suspect that the difference between our inner voice and where it comes from, versus what we know we should sound like, is one of the primary causes of imposter syndrome, and possibly…
This is a hacky fridge-magnet recipe to use up some old herbs and sour cream. We had it this week tossed with a chunky combination of sliced cabbage, cherry tomatoes, and diced broccoli, carrots, and celery. 2 tablespoons Hellmann’s mayonnaise 2 tablespoons sour cream 2 tablespoons (to taste) cider vinegar (Braggs is good) 2 tablespoons white sugar 1-2 tablespoons finely diced fresh thyme leaves 1…
I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing. Sometimes I snooze it, sometimes I check it off. Sometimes I start to draft something and then lose interest. I leave the task on the list as I really should be writing more. There are a bunch of things getting in my way, but honestly I haven’t felt like myself for a few years. Working from home during lockdown was…
I find trends in style guidelines interesting, especially when shared style guides lag language usage in the wild. I have observed a shift in headline style from Title Case to Sentence case in the majority of commercial publications online. I’ve also found a general improvement in clarity from the most reliable publishers, mostly due to well understood in house style guidelines. Common…
This is the 40th evolution of warpedvisions.org . It’s now running on WriteFreely , hosted by Write.as . WriteFreely is a minimalist writing platform built on Go, LESS, and plain old vanilla Javascript. It’s a speedy platform that feels nice to write in. This is also the 40th Warped theme. Not all 40 versions made the light of day, mind you, but I’ve hacked together all of these…
I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas. Pico-8 is a highly constrained virtual machine that behaves a lot like a personal computer from the 1980s. It has a fixed colour palette, limited memory, limited screen size, and a simplified programming model using Lua. The constraints make it a great place to scale down ideas and quickly finish demos and…
I’ve been playing around in PICO-8 , working on some generative art ideas. Lua is a fun little language that feels a lot like something between BASIC and JavaScript. Lua isn’t my favourite language, but it’s fun at the small scale. PICO-8, however, is a fantastic little game engine (or “Fantasy Console”) that has all of the feels of the 80s. First tests I started with…
One of my art projects last year was an attempt at nerdy art in a retro PCB style: The idea was to use traces and board shapes to make something fun. After some hours of sketching and vector work I liked the results, but found that the general look isn’t as interesting as I thought it could be. That’s how art goes sometimes; idea, reasonable execution, and fizzle fizzle. And…
I set up a new dev laptop for myself over the Christmas holidays. I took the opportunity to burn down my old environment and to survey the 2021 tool landscape, which included testing out various terminals and setups, editors, and fonts. This year I discovered Fira Code , a tidy little monospace font that supports ligatures. Ligatures are two or more letters (or graphemes) that can be combined to…
In the last year I read a lot less than normal, while at the same time I watched more streaming shows than I’m used to. I’ve been busier with work, in addition to what’s shaping up to be a crazy year. Stress and burnout kill my ability to focus on long form reading, which is something I’m working hard to counteract. Sometimes just forcing myself to read a book is the best medicine imaginable.
When my sketchbook is stale and I’m not feeling inspired, I look to pop culture for inspiration and ideas. I’m also a fan of other artists, and channeling some of their works through my own hands is immensely satisfying. It’s an exercise that pushes you to analyze and rethink a thing that’s interesting to me, and I always end up learning or discovering something new in the…
I was looking at buying a set of PFEIL carving tools this year, but was holding off as they’re pretty pricy. I expanded my search a bit and found a similar set from a local Canadian company, Lee Valley Tools. They’re hardened steel with a comfortable wooden handle. They sharpen easily (and keep their edge well), and feel like they will last a lifetime. They’re also ⅓ the price of…
One of my favourite reads is Kottke.org , a blog by Jason Kottke. Calling it a blog is a bit of a slight: it’s more of a magazine, like a proto-New Yorker. It’s thoughtful and relevant, weaving current events, artsy things, various interesting edges of tech, and topics about general humanity. Kottke has been killing it since ‘98, about as long as WarpedVisions has been around…
A coworker was asking me what I used for linocut, so I made a chart of the blocks on my desk. There are several types of blocks that I don’t have in my supplies (like mounted block and clear blocks), but the ones I use are a pretty common set of hobbyist materials. I love carving the easy cut black: it’s soft, makes great edges, and it’s cheap in my area (at Opus). But,…
Occasionally I like to sketch and carve things around our lemony brand . It’s fun to think sideways around our polished brand marks, dreaming in colour and texture. These prints don’t represent anything we would ever use, but the exercise was a good stretch for me (and good practice). This is a second print of the plate with an attempt at layering a textural plate over top. I still…
2017 was a good year for JavaScript. The newer language features are now part of our daily routine. Tightly integrated CI and packaging scripts are the norm, and we have a huge sea of libraries and tools available to us. The core JavaScript frameworks have settled down and matured to the point that we can be confident in JS as the base for large-scale commercial projects. Here are a few of the…