Notes

This is my digital garden. You can read more about this collection of notes. You might be interested in my weeknotes 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 HTTP header to identify calling microservice
• Ambient authority resources
• A microservices architecture is object-orientation with big objects
• An enum with two choices is different from a boolean
• Approaches to naming products
• A programming language with no globals
• A project is not a product
• Are humans risk-averse?
• Artificial slowdown as a way to guide deprecation
• A “shipped” Slack channel for celebration and release notes
• Asynchronous working environments make it easier to divide up time
• Audience of my web site
• 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
• Books I like
• Budget for replacing past purchases
• Budgeting categories
• Bug report format
• Build processes should only generate new files
• Calling by value or reference
• Can functions be too short?
• Checking and deployment does not belong in Nanoc
• Choices for lexing and parsing in Ruby
• Cities: Skylines: What I’d like to have
• Clean home index card goals list
• Code in a good programming language does not reveal its author
• Common abbreviations
• Common command-line options
• Common function names
• Contents of my web site
• Double-entry bookkeeping is accounting’s law of conservation of energy
• Drive change by writing structured proposal documents
• Email organization
• Embedded plaintext metadata formats
• Equality in programming languages
• Expenses for 2021
• Expenses for 2022
• External textual DSLs
• Fast code reviews are crucial for team velocity
• Fonts wishlist
• For a good gaming session, set a goal
• Foreign functions and ambient authority
• Friendship, community, and purpose
• Fun facts about myself
• Fungibility and equality
• Get people on board with (breaking) changes by radiating intent
• Give up and put everything in purgatory
• Glitch-free deployment of static sites
• Global state in programming languages
• Good human-usable tokens are not random strings
• Grammar must serve communication
• Have a dot-com domain for your full name
• Hierarchies are resilient
• How currency conversion affects budgeting
• How I organize my RSS feeds
• How to implement equality in Ruby
• How to memoize
• How to write a good README for a product
• Importing notes from Bear
• Infinity is not a number
• In hindsight, we didn’t need masks
• Instances and equality
• It is hard in Nanoc to use reusable view components
• Lending and borrowing: implementation
• Lightweight markup languages are inadequate for technical writing
• List of external textual DSLs
• Logging and caching are (usually) acceptable side effects
• Logistics games can teach you engineering
• Logistics games teach you about tech debt
• Minimal language with arrays in Ruby
• “Mirroring” is using hyperlinks for the mind
• Misspellings of my name
• Module systems in programming languages
• My 2021 open source burnout
• My plaintext logging approach
• 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’s in-memory approach limits scalability
• 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
• Note taking style: Further reading vs. references
• Nothing is “near infinite”
• Offices and creativity are at odds
• Organize electronic archives by year
• People are bad at identifying invisible threats
• Permissions are not hierarchical
• Perpetual interests
• Phrase suggestions as open questions
• Programming language design
• Project idea: Captain’s log
• Pull request template
• Ruby can be slow for short-running apps because it needs to load (require) dependencies
• Ruby `#hash` implementations
• Ruby service objects call+run
• Ruby/Smalltalk peculiar similarities
• Ruby’s question-mark boolean methods are inconsistent
• Run-in headers
• Searching for a better way to host this site
• Separate code reviews into feedback levels
• Short-form content doesn’t need to be written as a chronological sequence of blog posts
• Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring
• Site improvements
• Sourdough bread
• Speed can mean latency or throughput
• Spreadsheets are fragile
• Spreadsheets are fragile because cells have no names
• Spreadsheets are fragile because they only deal with cells
• Standard exit codes
• stderr is for all diagnostic output
• Syntax styles in programming languages
• Taking a break is better than excess context switching
• Tech in the past wasn’t better
• The blockchain is a terrible idea
• The filesystem is global mutable state
• The format of a note
• The impact of Git, GitHub, etc
• The purpose of code review is not to find defects
• There is no cross-language standard library
• The type of projects I’d like to contribute to
• The web tooling in the Node ecosystem is closed
• Tips to improve my technical writing
• Tokengated/NFT-gated commerce is a dystopia
• Too easy in Nanoc to get undefined behavior
• Toolbox
• Tooling for a good programming language
• URLs and paths require special word-breaking rules
• Use Docker tags to document the lifecycle of an image
• Use long-form options in scripts
• Use stdin and stdout, but allow overriding
• Use structured writing to keep track of things
• UX matters for developer tools
• What is the purpose of the blockchain?
• What would I change about programming language X?
• What would I change about Ruby?
• Why can’t I git-push to a remote filesystem?
• Writing cross-language implementation is difficult
• YNAB split transactions are confusing
• You are not paid to be busy
• You might not need React