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Notes

This is my digital garden. You can read more about this collection of notes. You might be interested in What’s top of mind for me now.

  • About these notes
  • A globally-available filesystem is a security liability
  • A globally-available filesystem prevents access tracing
  • A good hyperlink has enough context to work around broken URLs
  • A good markup language is resilient against failure
  • A microservices architecture is object-orientation with big objects
  • An enum with two choices is different from a boolean
  • Artificial slowdown as a way to guide deprecation
  • A #shipped channel for celebration and release notes
  • Asynchronous working environments make it easier to divide up time
  • A “users” table is a smell
  • Auto-expanding CLI command invocations hinders forward compatibility
  • Avoid naughty words in hex digest strings by changing the set of characters
  • Backwards compatibility (for behavior) is tough to get right
  • Budget for replacing past purchases
  • Build processes should only generate new files
  • Code in a good programming language does not reveal its author
  • Double-entry bookkeeping is accounting’s law of conservation of energy
  • Drive change by writing structured proposal documents
  • Factorio teaches you about tech debt
  • For a good gaming session, set a goal
  • Get people on board with breaking changes by radiating intent
  • Good human-usable tokens are not random strings
  • Grammar must serve communication
  • Have a dot-com domain for your full name
  • Hierarchies are resilient
  • Importing notes from Bear
  • It is hard in Nanoc to use reusable view components
  • Lightweight markup languages are inadequate for technical writing
  • Logging and caching are (usually) acceptable side effects
  • Minimal language with arrays in Ruby
  • “Mirroring” is using hyperlinks for the mind
  • My pronouns
  • Naming principles
  • Nanoc needs file paths to be known before compilation starts
  • Nanoc needs --json so that the CLI can be used programmatically
  • Nanoc sites take too long to load
  • Nanoc’s terminology is inconsistent with the industry
  • Nanoc’s use of Ruby is not an appealing choice these days
  • Notes are not articles
  • Offices and creativity are at odds
  • Organize electronic archive by year
  • Phrase suggestions as open questions
  • Ruby can be slow for short-running apps because it needs to load (require) dependencies
  • Short-form content doesn’t need to be written as a chronological sequence of blog posts
  • Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring
  • Sourdough bread
  • Spreadsheets are fragile because they only deal with cells
  • stderr is for all diagnostic output
  • Taking a break is better than excess context switching
  • The filesystem is global mutable state
  • The format of a note
  • There are many embedded plaintext metadata formats
  • Too easy in Nanoc to get undefined behavior
  • Toolbox
  • URLs and paths require special word-breaking rules
  • Use Docker tags to document the lifecycle of an image
  • Use stdin and stdout, but allow overriding
  • UX matters for developer tools
  • What’s top of mind
  • Why can’t I git-push to a remote filesystem?
  • You are not paid to be busy
  • You might not need React
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made in Berlin