Exploring the Writebook Source Code

Earlier this year 37signals released Writebook, a self-hosted book publishing platform. It's offering number two from their ONCE series, pitched as the antithesis of SaaS. Buy it once and own it for l...

HEY to Fastmail and Back Again

I've read a few stories about folks moving their email from HEY to Fastmail, but have not seen any in the reverse direction. After two years of Fastmail, I'm moving back to HEY. Here are my thoughts....

Crafting Interpreters, Ruby Style

I finally have started working through Crafting Interpreters, a wonderful book about compilers by Robert Nystrom. The book steps through two interpreter implementations, one in Java and one in C, that...

New stuff in Emacs 30

Whoa, the Emacs 30 release cycle has officially started (I totally missed when this was announced a month ago). We're still waiting on a pretest build, but that didn't stop me from reading through the...

Recently

Recently I've been deep down a crossword puzzle rabbit hole. I started a new side project that has taken most of my writing energy: them's crossing words, a blog where I post daily crossword puzzle re...

Markdown Rendering with Awk

I can't believe I'm writing another post about Awk but I'm just having too much fun throwing together tiny Awk scripts. This time around that tiny Awk script is a markdown renderer, converting markdow...

DM Tools with Awk

I picked up Awk on a whim and am blown away by how generally useful it is. What I thought was a quick and dirty tool for parsing tabulated files turns out to be a fully-featured scripting language. Be...

A Few Months with Kagi

I've subscribed to Kagi for a few months now and wanted to collect some of my feelings towards it, particularly addressing whether I think it's worth paying $10/mo for a search engine. To summarize: y...

My Year in Reading

I read 24 books in 2023, a total of just over 8,000 pages. It was an uncommonly productive year for me, not driven by any particular goal but rather a general interest in a few choice authors and comp...

How to Install React

Tsoding's recent stream about React is a hilarious reminder of the complications of web development tooling and the lack of support for beginners who want to take a bottom-up approach to learning. Wha...

Hypermedia and Hyperbole

My partner and I are slowly working our way through the Myst series and have finally started Myst 3: Exile. We were both surprised by how much of a departure this entry is to the previous Myst games....

Recently

I'm taking a page from Tom MacWright's blog and am trying out a "Recently" series, where I summarize a few things on my mind since my last post. Recently I've been tinkering with Crafted Emacs, a mo...