Devtools

Posts about the work behind the work

Copy relative path to file in Helix

Zellij Cheatsheet

Glory Days Or Bust

The road back to my coding happy place, i.e. a terminal emulator running Vim.

Democracy Kicks Ass

Contrasting the sense of helplessness about Microsoft's agenda for GitHub with the community-led democracy of Codeberg.

Is metadata streaming really SEO armageddon?

I don't like some of these silly Rube Goldberg additions to Next.js either but I do think this one at least works as described.

Survival Mode

Stopped using Copilot outside of work a few weeks ago. Coding's begun to feel fun again since making that change. I hadn’t even noticed the disappearance of that joy until it started coming back either.

Codeberg Is The Future

GitHub's been my most-used digital service for years. Even interviewed (unsuccessfully) there once. To some extent it had become an online "home" for me. You know that feeling when you've lived in the same place long enough that you can walk into the bathroom in the dead of night and hit the light switch on your first try with one effortless flick of your arm? That's been my relationship with GitHub.

Atuin and chezmoi are the dog's bollocks

Screencasting Secrets

Screencasting is my secret weapon as a remote software engineer. I'm one of those people who just wants to go fast all the time, and you get to move a lot faster once you get good at showing people what you've made and putting them at ease about the idea of shipping it. At any job, one of the most common questions I hear is "How do you do all those GIFs and videos and screenshots and stuff?". Here's how.

Maining VSCode Terminal

My SQLite in production epiphany

My work environment email alerts service – 666a – is a Rails app using SQLite for its production database. I'm super happy with this stack, but it wasn't an obvious choice from the start, and I know a lot of folks still haven't heard the growing hype about using SQLite in production in the Rails community. Here's how I ended up shipping a production app with a SQLite database, and how it helped me rediscover some joy in full-stack work.

itsy studio

Spotify Boilerplate App

Monkeypatches broke my build