Henry Catalini Smith

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.

Zetkin Quote

Zetkin have been doing little interviews with some of the volunteers lately.

Night Work, Tech, And Swedish Labour Law

This was originally posted at https://666a.se/news/night-work-tech-and-swedish-labour-law and has been migrated here since for long-term hosting.

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.

Operating 666a

In the final quarter of 2023 I launched my little side project 666a, which is a service providing work environment email notifications for union reps and people like that. It took a few months of work to build something shippable, and I’ve been refining it ever since to increase its reliability. I thought it’d be nice to share a glimpse of what that refinement work looks like. This is gonna be a technical one, so apologies to anyone who preferred the union propaganda.

Sam's Boat

It won't grow if you don't delegate

The first time I read It won’t grow if you don’t delegate, I was at Vänsterpartiet Malmö’s studier för förändring course at Kvarnby folkhögskola. It had been translated into Swedish and printed onto paper, and it was all very exciting.

Incident Report

This was originally posted at https://666a.se/news/incident-report and has been migrated here since for long-term hosting.

You Dumb Son Of A Bitch