Henry Catalini Smith

Eurovision Tourists Go Home

My perspective on Eurovision 2024 as a resident of Malmö

Can't Buy Me Love

It’s tax declaration season in Sweden, and I found out I owe an additional 15000kr of income tax for 2023. Ouch! As far as I can tell, it’s a side effect of how quickly I found work after the redundancy last year. I managed to start a new job while still in the old one’s notice period, which meant I got two salaries for a little while, and I think that screwed up the preliminary tax deductions.

10 Years Of Global Thermonuclear War

It’s coming up on the tenth anniversary of the release of my infamous global thermonuclear war game. It’s been offline for longer than it was ever online now. I want to get the story of this thing and its general context in my life & career written down and posted in time for the ten year milestone, so here it is.

Tailbone: Disk 2

Stabilizing Zetkin's Playwright Tests

Reducing end-to-end test flakiness in a real-world open source app.

Fixing 666a (again)

So apparently 666a is still capable of surprising me. A few months ago I wrote about the work I’d done to address an issue I’ve been calling “document lag”. Since then, I’ve continued to keep a constant eye on the system’s reliability. This week, something new cropped up.

Atuin and chezmoi are the dog's bollocks

My dotfiles repo is the oldest one I still have. Its first commit is from 2012. The message I wrote for that commit tells a familiar story.

This Machine Kills Fascists

Really cool photo from a bit of a depressing Arbetsvärlden interview I did.

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

Once upon a time, the main tools I used for work were Vim and tmux. And until recently, once every few months I’d get this compulsive urge to try to recapture those glory days. If you know, you know.. That urge has stopped lately though. Visual Studio Code has reached a tipping point where the Vim support and terminal emulator are a better package than anything I can hack together with lua plugins and tmux config.