Recent Posts

• Four ways to approach Hacktoberfest 2020
  October 1, 2020
  I came up with a four different approaches for Hacktoberfest this year: The Dependency Scrub, Polygot Achievement, Unknown Lands, and the Bug Doctor.
• Small tech
  September 25, 2020

  Jamie Brandon has a nice post about "small tech": tech that isn't backed by a big corporation like Microsoft or Apple but still has an out-sized impact. I love the post and I thought I would add a few additional products to the list.

  • curl is open-source and has thousands of contributors but is still primarily designed and managed by @badger (Daniel Stenberg). If you ever do anything with http for any kind of development mastering curl is worth the time investment.

  • git is the premier version control system on the planet. It started out as a side-project to manage Linux kernel development.

  • Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution that is maintained by a small group of folks and yet is the first choice for most folks when creating Docker images.

  • sr.ht does not have the type of scale or impact that the others items on this list have but I think it could some day. sr.ht is version control host, issue tracker, mailing list tool, and CI toolbox. It competes directly with Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket. However, sr.ht is run by one person—Drew DeVault—and is 100% open-source.

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• Indexing My Blog’s Links
  September 25, 2020

  Owning your content means you can do interesting things with that data. Jim Nielsen did just that by tweaking his static site generator to see all the outbound links he's ever posted.

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• Compose key and i3
  September 18, 2020
  Here's how to bind the compose key to caps lock in i3wm.
• cycle v0.3.0 released
  September 11, 2020
  Cycle version v0.3.0 is now available which features syntax highlighting via Chroma.
• Setting a default browser in i3
  September 11, 2020
  Using a desktop manager like GNOME makes setting default applications easy. However when using a tiling window manager like i3 setting a default application is opaque to the newbie such as myself.
• Eight years
  September 4, 2020
  Eight years ago I started working at Sparkbox. Thank you Sparkbox team for giving me an opportunity to work with ya'll and for making me a better developer and person.
• Uses This / Zach Beane
  September 1, 2020

  A great interview with the creator of Quicklisp, Zach Beane. I enjoy two things about this interview:

  1. The inclusion of outdoor/farming tools in the list of tools.
  2. Zach's conservative approach to languages and software tools.

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• Openring
  August 21, 2020
  I've added Drew DeVault's openring project to the blog.
• A public inbox
  August 18, 2020
  I'm going to give the idea of a public inbox as a place to have discussions about things on this website and elsewhere a shot.