Andrew Quinn's TILs

The long death of programming languages

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote my first Clojure program in anger a few months ago. Only, it’s not accurate to say that I wrote it; AI did most of the writing, and I directed it on what my design goals were and why. Architecturally, you could call it was a stateless anti-corruption layer, yapping between some REST endpoints and some ancient proprietary serialization.

I had never written a Clojure program of nontrivial size before. Indeed I had barely touched any Lisp at all since working through SICP during a high school summer vacation, over a decade ago. That didn’t matter. Much more important was emphasizing certain invariants from the start, like the aforementioned statelessness, which made it very easy to unit and integration test, which was the true challenge.

Claude Code and executive function

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a suspicion - and let me be clear, that’s all this is, a suspicion, I am taking my own claims even more lightly than usual here - that Claude Code makes most people’s lives better, but it makes the lives of those who struggle with executive function much better.

When I have a problem to solve nowadays, I type c, then Enter. This alias opens up a fresh tmux window with 4 separate instances of Claude Code. Then I just… pick one and describe the problem I’m thinking about, and hit Enter again. The loop begins, and suddenly I am collaborating alongside the closest thing to an IRL deus ex machina I’ve ever seen, for the cost of a few keystrokes.

Claude Code disproportionately benefits those who touch type

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use Claude Code. I like Claude Code. According to Steve Yegge’s Eight-Circuit Model of Claudesciousness, I’m a pretty solid Stage 6, edging into 7 on heavy days. I think most engineers, most of the time, can get most of their work done faster with one of these tools than not, although the force multiplier of that speedup is probably not as extreme as it is in my case. Why is that?

Lua is a pretty good config language

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lua and Scheme occupy curiously similar places in my noggin, becuase my primary use case for both has been as scripting languages embedded into other, larger projects. Lua of course is basically designed for this job, but it’s a solid intermediate format to target even if you have no immediate intentions to use the programming language parts at all. A TSV file like

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10.0.0.5  192.168.1.1 80  tcp
10.0.0.6  192.168.1l.1  443 tcp

can be given a lot more structure on the cheap by writing a small transpiler of sorts to turn it into

Copy-Item is 27 percent slower than File Explorer drag and drop on Windows

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

File Explorer drag & drop     ########## (112 MBps)
Copy-Item                     #######    (82 MBps)
Built in SFTP client          ######     (70 MBps)
Built in robocopy (/MT:32)    ##         (25 MBps)
WSL 2 rsync                   #          (13 MBps)

In table form:

Tool	Speed (MBps)	Difference
Drag and drop	~112	—
`Copy-Item`	~82	-27%
`sftp`	~70	-37%
`robocopy` (with `/MT:32`)	~25 MBps	-78%
`rsync` (WSL 2)	~13 MBps	-88%

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a teenager first getting into computers in the late 2000s I spent a lot of time reading old revered tomes like ESR’s The Art of Unix Programming and SICP . If present-day me were to isekai back in time and lose all of the technical knowledge I had but retain my current instincts, however, I would have left all of this on the table and just built a terrible new automation tool for the surprisingly scriptable MMORPG I was into in PHP 5, with as much disregard for clean code and security practices that I could muster[^1]. Then I would have put that tool online, continued to add new features to the ball of mud, and kept it running for 5-10 years before my first post-college interview. And then the vibe that would come across is less “He’s an egghead, and we like that, but we really need someone who actually does things” and more “He’s a meathead, but inside of that meathead is an egghead waiting to be revealed. We need this kind of junior dev yesterday.” I would have done this even though an objectively far superior tool had already existed for quite some time, making this project “feel like” dead weight in the wide world of software! But why?

Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I began running Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive almost exactly two years ago, with a simple goal: Create a straightforward way for Finnish language learners to access the simple news broadcast by YYYY-MM-DD. It has basically accomplished that goal, with only a few tweaks here and there to keep everything running.

Earlier in the series: Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive. I stand by those points, and have some more to add here at the 24-month mark.

Four things that help me avoid / manage mild RSI

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Where is the DevOps for Yocto?

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The cozy world of DevOps has spoiled me with tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Packer. In the situations where I have a Linux machine already booted up, and sometimes already connected to the Internet, I can make things really easy on myself by slinging these tools in my usual way for repeatable, reproducible machines that may or may not come with the attendant headaches of immutable infrastructure (sorry, Nix, I’m not in love with you, I’m in love with the idea of you).

LLMs solve the biggest problem with language textbooks

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most languages have at least one high quality textbook written for secondary learners of the language. (This is no guarantee that one will be able to read the language that textbook is written in, but English to X is quite common, and some intrepid textbook writers have solved this problem by writing the textbook in the very language it is being taught in, starting with the simplest possible phrases and moving gradually up in difficulty.)

Code should be clean because business isn't

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am an ardent capitalist. I am also an ardent Unix philosopher. I have long percieved there to be some interesting tensions between these two wolves inside me.

The Unix philosopher in me wants my code to be as simple and flexible as possible, and - not always, but often - to minimize the number of lines of code I need to sling to solve a given problem.¹ The capitalist in me wants to cover as many edge cases as possible, make every transition as smooth as possible, and apply as much napalm to the fire of user acquisition and douse its twin flame user churn in liquid death of another kind. What to do?

tarsnap is cozy

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been aware of tarsnap for a long time, but only recently did I actually get around to using it for anything, as a result of my big personal digital resiliency audit for 2025. For those of you not in the know, tarsnap is “online backups for the truly paranoid”, and tarsnap the command-line program is the client-side tool you invoke to actually zip up and push your archives into the vault. Its creator, Dr. Colin Percival, is a really smart and interesting dude for a whole bunch of reasons. I’m led to believe the whole business is basically a two-man show between him and his brother these days.

It's okay to solve a problem twice

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”:

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there.

Much more at the original post, including preemptive rebuttals to what I’m about to describe. This post is entirely about cataloguing my own error.

I took this maxim, perhaps, a little too close to heart when I was starting out as a software guy, 15-odd years ago. This is my apology to past me. Past me, I apologize.

You don't need CGO to use SQLite in your Go binary

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At least not for most use cases. You can just use modernc.org/sqlite instead as your SQLite driver.

For people who aren’t in the Go know, “pure” Go programs are trivially easy to compile cross-platform to all the major platforms by default. You read that right - you can just go build a single Windows executable, Mac executable, and Linux executable on the same machine and just ship it:

# This can all happen on the same box!
export CGO_ENABLED=0 # no c cross-compilation please

export GOOS=linux
GOARCH=amd64 go build -o hello-linux-amd64 hello.go
GOARCH=arm64 go build -o hello-linux-arm64 hello.go

export GOOS=darwin   # aka mac
GOARCH=amd64 go build -o hello-darwin-amd64 hello.go
GOARCH=arm64 go build -o hello-darwin-arm64 hello.go

export GOOS=windows
GOARCH=amd64 go build -o hello-windows-amd64.exe hello.go
GOARCH=arm64 go build -o hello-windows-arm64.exe hello.go

This was the real reason I chose Go over Python for tsk, my instant-search Finnish to English pocket dictionary. I wanted to be able to give Windows users a single .exe they could just run and have work out of the box.

Incentivize grandchildren by writing them into your will

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems. The other day I happened across an old post by GMU economist Bryan Caplan which I think does this very elegantly, for a problem of some interest to me.

The vast majority of wills evenly divide the residuary estate between children. Mine evenly divides the residuary estate between (children and grandchildren).

I like this a lot. It makes it unambiguously clear where your priorities in the case of your untimely demise lie. It is also self-reinforcing; children of yours who have no children themselves will recieve less, but when it comes time to write their own wills, they won’t have any children or grandchildren to bequeath to anyway. Children of yours who have many children themselves, perhaps inspired by this very policy, might decide in the end they were duped - but it seems far more likely to me they’ll cite it as one of the biggest reasons they ultimately went for 4 instead of 3, or 2 instead of 1, or 1 instead of none. After seeing it work in practice on themselves, they might decide they want to incentivize bringing their own grandchildren into being in kind.

The second wave of spaced repetition apps

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Spaced repetition has been around for a long time. If you’ve never heard the term before, it’s best described as flashcards on timers. an algorithm such as SM-2 or the more recent FSRS keeps track of how you did on the flashcard, makes a guess as to how long it could possibly wait to show you the flashcard again before you below, say, a 90% chance of getting it right the next time, and then schedules the flashcard for a new day.

Experiment registry: Can I simply enjoy everything I do?

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

N.B.: If I link you to this personally, it is to explain why I usually seem to be in a great mood. It’s an experiment. I’m normally in merely a good mood, and I am pushing myself to be great.

This is an unusual entry for a Today I Learned site, even by my standards. But I think it’s something I would prefer to pre-register ahead of time.

I’ve always been predisposed to mirth. I laugh easily; I rarely get depressed; I’m just about always in a content mood these days, in no small part because I have actually succeeded on the meager goals I set for myself as a teenager (soulmate: check, child: check, sujuvuus vieraalla kielellä: yhä työn alla mutta kyllä se siitä, give me maybe five more years). Yet for some reason I have always felt it is, I don’t know, low status to be so effortlessly joyful and opulent. Like people will take you less seriously or something. So I’ve been reluctant to push my naturally good mood into the realm of actively loving life as my default state.

Switching Vim colorschemes based on which keyboard layout I have active

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know Vim has a client-server model baked in? Of course it does. If you run

`1`	`vim --servername LOVE`

, then in another terminal something like

`1`	`vim --servername LOVE --remote-send "<Cmd>colorscheme peachpuff<CR>"`

, you’ll find your Vim terminal switch to the creamy default theme all true gangsters love - without you actually having to do anything.

I frequently flip between a US- and Finnish-based keyboard while doing my language studies. I already had a tiny shell script in place which plays a seventh major chord every time they switch, courtesy of Sway WM:

Using LLMs to generate small semantic perturbations for language learning writing practice

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Still images of this GIF are at the bottom.

Learning to read a language is mostly a game of getting massive quantities of comprehensible input. Learning to write that same language is a whole ’nother ballgame. But, using the 4-quadrant Anki card setup from my earlier post, I think I’m finding more and more ways to make this as amenable to spaced repetition as possible.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with with surprising success is the idea of using LLMs to generate “semantic perturbations” on sentences I already “know” how to write, where “know” = “have in active review in Anki”, for our purposes.

The language learning "Delta" Anki card pattern

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|       L2, fixable        |              L1, intention               |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|        L2, fixed         |   L1, (fixable -> fixed) explanation     |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+

The above 2x2 layout for Anki cards, which I call a “comprehensible delta”, is one of the best things I’ve happened upon in a while for learning another language. Let’s say you are learning Finnish, and you want to say

Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before. In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every ~~Unix~~ EDIT: Linux system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default:

1
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❯ mount | grep '/dev/shm'
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)

Today’s lucky 10,000, indeed. It gets mentioned often in Hacker News comments, but surprisingly I couldn’t find any actual articles talking about it. The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again.

LLM, JavaScript, GitHub Pages, localStorage: A recipe for free apps anyone can use

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today on Hacker News Scrappy made the rounds, with the explicit tagline “make little apps for you and your friends”. I always like to see new projects in this vein.

That’s why I’d like to outline my alternative approach, which

Works cross-platform and on mobile devices by default,
Doesn’t require any app store tomfoolery,
Has great uptime built in,
Gives you just enough data persistence to not get in your way, and
Is owned by you, forever.

This is the stack I used to build my diet checklist, which I keep as a little icon on my phone’s home page. Here it is:

Create multi-stage Anki card answers with HTML's
tag

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This works as of, at least, Anki 24.06.3.

According to the Mozilla Developer Network,

The <details> HTML element creates a disclosure widget in which information is visible only when the widget is toggled into an open state.

In standard web browsers, absent any CSS to the contrary, a <details> tag starts closed until further notice. Since Anki is basically a local web browser on top of a timer, this also works there.

LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets.

	Passive understanding	Active production
The written word	Reading	Writing
The spoken word	Listening	Speaking

You may know from my FOSS software that I have been learning Finnish for the past 4 years or so. For the first few years I pretty much focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as I consider that to be the easiest quadrant to skill up in first. This focus put me in the interesting position for some time of being able to read most YA fiction and tax documents while being unable to order a pizza for myself on the phone.

Consider the cronslave

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a nerdy, working-class kid who grew up in the 1990s, knowing what time it actually was was a luxury I rarely had access to before I was 12 or so and my parents finally got an Internet connection with its attendant link to the Network Time Protocol. If you had told me I could have not just a watch but an entire machine that

Never lost the time,
Did what I wanted, how I wanted it, and
Could be programmed to do what I want, how I want it on a schedule,

I would have had to substantially revise my Christmas wishlist.

LLMs make Perl great again

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation. So I was surprised to find out not only is it installed by default on Debian, it’s installed nearly everywhere by default. It’s even the non-shell scripting language of choice on OpenBSD!

Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Perl’s utter ubiquity is its longevity. The latest major version of Perl was first released in 1994. It came into existence on this planet less than a year after I did. It’s even arguably more portable than the median shell script - different Unices might use Bash, Zsh, Ksh, or even something newfangled like Fish, but for the most part a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program.

Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics.

Insert GIF here.

You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon. It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who could use it.

Vibe coding and complementary goods

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else.

We don’t normally think of, say, Docker and Kubernetes as complementary goods in software engineering, because you can get both for the low price of free. Or can you? You still have to invest time in learning both, and as the famous saying goes…

Say it takes X hours to learn Docker adequately. If Docker suddenly becomes easier to learn, such that it now takes only X / 2 hours, it’s reasonable to assume Kubernetes will become more popular in tandem, because one of its complements now costs less and is hence supplied in greater quantities anyway. You don’t want a peanut butter only sandwich, do you?

Binary search isn't about search III. Loop invariant of rightmost element search

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you followed “Binary search isn’t about search” and “Binary search isn’t about search II” properly, the following statements should suffice as a summary:

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L[0:l] < T < L[r:len(L)]    # ordinary binary search loop invariant
L[0:l] < T <= L[r:len(L)]   # leftwise binary search loop invariant

Let’s complete the triptych. Take a wild guess what invariant we use for rightmost element binary search:

`1`	`L[0:l] <= T < L[r:len(L)] # rightwise binary search loop invariant`

A motivating example

Consider again an array like

Binary search isn't about search II. Loop invariant of leftmost element search

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the first “Binary search isn’t about search” post, we spoke about using assert statements to enforce your loop invariants. Our plain old everyday binary search invariant can be summarized as such:

For all x in L[0:l]¹, x is strictly less than T, the element we are searching for.
For all y in L[r:len(L)]², y is strictly greater than T, the element we are searching for.

Or, if we want to be even terser, we could note this as simply

Binary search isn't about search

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose you’re trying to track down a bug that appeared in a series of Git commits. You’ve been idly keeping track of where this bug appears in your lucky commits by hand, while busy with other things. So far you’ve compiled this table:

0000000    🧼 clean, no bug.
0000001    🧼
0000002    🧼
0000003    🧼
0000004    🧼
0000005    🧼
0000006    🐛 bug first appears here.
0000007    🐛
0000008    🐛
0000009    🤔 bug mysteriously disappears...

Then an EMP explodes in your vicinity and scrambles your memory circuits. The Internet is down, you don’t have the git-bisect man pages downloaded locally, and all you remember is that your first commit was good, your last commit was good but for reasons you don’t understand, and something bad is probably still lurking in there. But where?

Things you should never do: Use Expect to autotype SSH passwords in scripts

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before I moved to Finland, I spent some time in the Hobbesian war of all against all that is Wisconsin¹. Men were men back in that less civilized age, and “cybersecurity” a ninny-word dreamt up by social harmony types who honestly thought they had anything worth stealing in their servers. For those of us doing real work, which I must emphasize you should never do, we had Expect. And to SSH automatically into servers where we didn’t have fancy accoutrements like “keys” or “audit requirements”, we did stuff like

SQLite is learnable

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a response to pid1.call’s “Siren Call of SQlite on the Server”, which itself is a response to articles like Wesley Aptekar-Cassels’s “Consider SQLite” espousing SQLite as a server-side technology. Cards on the table, I both love SQLite and think pid1 has the more correct take here.

When I decided on a dime after college to move countries and be with my wife, part of the package deal was that I had to throw away my dreams of easing into the software industry by resting on the laurels of my strong, but not MIT-level-known-worldwide-strong, alma mater (sorry Wildcats). Electrical engineering was just not going to be feasible for a then-monolingual English speaker in Finland, and besides, I majored in it 90% out of curiosity anyway. I always intended to return to my once and future home, the shell, after my Rumspringa with electrons.

`python -m http.server` as ephemeral Dropbox

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ever need to download a file from a server – or get someone else to download a file from a server, who may not be comfortable with or should have access to scp or sftp?

Turns out, if you have Python installed – and you probably do – it comes with a handy one-liner file server for just such an occasion:

`1`	`python -m http.server 12345 # or whatever port you prefer`

Common-sense security for SSH on a new Debian server

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I went to DigitalOcean and spun up a tiny new, $4/month droplet – on my own dime! It sounds crazy, but I’ve never actually wanted to pay for hosting myself before. But I have a fun little web app cooking up, one that might eventually pay that $4/month back with interests, and I decided, why not, it’s time to finally put some of my own skin in the game with this whole sysadmin thing.

Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic status: Very unclear, also I Am Not A Lawyer This Is Not Legal Advice Get Off My Lawn

(N.B.: I"m using “GPL” with broad strokes here, to point at “open source licenses it’s straightforward to run afoul of”.)

Policing is always hard in a world of limited resources. Especially when one is targeting sophisticated, well-monied criminal organizations, it can take an awful lot of time and effort merely to credibly reveal that wrongdoing has taken place. Would it surprise you if I said the average criminal software organization is probably, on the margin, more sophisticated than the average criminal organization? If so, you should probably expect that the former’s crimes are brought to life even less often than the latter’s.

The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What’s the best way to get a job? Show someone with a job to do that you can do the job within their iron triangle. What’s the best way you can show someone you can handle a complicated k8s deployment, with 7 different CNCF-approved add-ons, zero-downtime rollouts and a whole bunch of YAML files? Probably by competently and publicly running your own complicated k8s infrastructure.

Self-hosters remind me a lot of the sysadmins of yore, who mostly ended up in the profession because they just couldn’t help but mess around with their underlying computing machine until they knew all kinds of weird nooks and crannies within it. I trace my own lineage in software deveopment back to the day my parents finally purchased a Dell laptop and a 300 Kbps Internet connection (residential wiring in Boston left something to be desired), and promptly broke the Windows registry and installed Ubuntu without them ever realizing anything had changed. The next year I got my first internship through a high school program as a Unix admin intern at Akamai, and the rest is history.

PHP, Go, and Braindead Deployment

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been following my posts recently, you might have noticed that I’ve been working more and more with PHP lately. As someone who was curiously allergic to web dev as a teenager, it has been a strangely healing experience for me.

I’d like to say it’s because my experiments with Laravel, the only OSS work of which I can point to is testing the Homestead VM’s compatibility for Shell Bling Ubuntu, convinced me. But no – Laravel is pretty sweet, but so is Django, but Django has the advantage of using an underlying language that

What I would recommend to teens in 2024 who want to get into development

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PHP and Web Dev Phobia

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

PHP is, for better and for worse, the Python of web dev in my eyes. It is exceptionally easy to get started, in a way which I think younger developers may not be fully aware of.

So here I’d like to make them aware of it! That’s right, this is a Slowstart for people who have never touched PHP or web dev before.

Start the way we usually do on this blog, with the “tutorial-in-a-box” by installing Vagrant and Virtualbox so you can create a disposable virtual machine with just a few commands.

How I ask GPT-4 to make tiny Python scripts in practice

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First get a working script. “Hey GPT-4, write me a ChatGPT script that does .”
Manually check over the script and iterate until it’s giving me what I want.
“Now wrap the script into a click command-line interface.” I almost always specify to use an --input flag and an --output flag.
If the data it’s working with is human-readable, “Make it so that if --input is not specified, it reads data from stdin.”
If the data it’s writing is human-readable, “Make it so that if --output is not specified, it emits data to stdout.”
If the script is complicated enough that error logging is warranted: “Add logging and colorlog. Ensure all error messages are written to stderr so that it does not clash with output.”

This advice is optimized for small Python scripts, usually under 200 lines in total, for automating semi-mundane tasks like

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that.

My pet theory of how great software gets started

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Inspired by yungporko’s Ask HN post, which got me thinking.)

Pretty much every community, dojo, workplace, subculture, scene you can imagine in the modern day had a software sub-scene embedded within it. It can be as small as “that guy who does our Excel”, or as large as the scene itself . This is owing to the fantastic generality of software as a way to make almost anything more efficient, but we won’t go on that tangent now.

What scripting languages come out of the box on Debian 12?

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Poking around in a fresh VM in Vagrant, I see

bash
dash, a POSIX compliant shell linked under sh
python3, 3.11.2 at the time of writing
awk, specifically mawk
sed, if you count that (I do)
perl, specifically Perl 5

There may be others I missed.

Why I’m curious: Knowing that a language is installed by default on the most popular Linux distribution can simplify certain concerns considerably, which are of special interest to people who don’t work on Internet-connected boxes. Knowing that Python/Perl is already on there means that, provided your script only relies on the standard library, you should be able to just scp it over in a pinch and have it “just work”.

Valuable software is about letting people do new things

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier. The actual code which generates this archive is about 300 lines of Python . The basic value add for the user:

What you want: Better fluency in Finnish.
What you need: Practice. Lots of it.
What this gives you: GOTO 2.

This is emphatically not the kind of product, or use case, I would stumble upon as a brain-in-the-vat developer. It is a niche offering, one I only found because I actually got out into the world and tried to do something hard. In so doing, I recognized the possibility of building a tool that could help me in this non-programming endeavour. So I built it. And I’m proud of it.

Layers of abstraction for me, not for thee

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue:

I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session.
I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy.)
I can, in the same user session, open 2 separate windows of a terminal emulator.
I can, in the same terminal emulator, open a new tab.
I can, in the same emulated terminal, run tmux and open a new pane.

There are yet more exotic options like Serial over LAN that I’m only theoretically aware of.

Software engineers as mental athletes

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath.

The total cost for a setup here in Finland came out to only about $350, something I can easily afford with a week’s take-home pay. The primary hurdle for me was psychological: How could I justify spending so much money on a more ergonomic setup when I’m not even sure this whole “software engineering” thing will work out for me? Nevermind that I taught myself to program at 14 from a Civ 4 hacking tutorial, nevermind that I’ve been living my life as a budget cyborg for the last 15 years, nevermind that every job I’ve ever had post-college has been at least 60% WFH – how could I be sure this investment in my home office will pay itself back?

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a well-guarded id_ed25519.pub in case you end up in hot water during the (long - very long, stable cash flow for generations long) maintenance contract, and you’re in the ballpark.

Quickstarts and Slowstarts

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I stirred up some controversy on Hacker News by talking about why I liked it when tutorials take you from clean VM to working, installed software.

I’ve since taken to calling this the “tutorial-in-a-box” method. When I write them myself, I usually put them under the header Slowstart, a riff on the proverbial Quickstart. Two examples:

A gentle introduction to reposurgeon.
The Slowstart for selkokortti, some flashcard generating software based around my Finnish language news archive.

The point of a Slowstart is to make it so that even absolute beginners can start to pick up some pointers about how people “in the know” of your chosen software ecosystem actually get things done. Instead of a Dockerfile or a shell script, you take them by the hand, spin up a totally fresh virtual machine from the ground up using something like Vagrant or virt-builder, and walk them through each and every command they need to execute in order to get to a working install.

Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since. A very small website, for a very specific need, just leaves a delightful aftertaste in the mouth.

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling.

Trackballs are great for the mostly-mouseless

Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool. Between dropping out of high school and enrolling in community college, I replaced my laptop with a $80 HP EliteBook I found on eBay; when I discovered its trackpad didn’t work anyway, I went all in on a no-X setup. I eventually concluded that going 90% mouseless got me almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the downsides. It’s almost as if returns are usually diminishing!

tmux is worse is better

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to split your screen up into multiple independent shells without needing a graphical environment at all. If you want to walk the path of true digital minimalism, vanilla Vim and tmux or its spiritual grandfather screen are all you need.

Disable your browser history to write better internal docs

Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task.

A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for. Another human being, who might be searching for help on how to do this for the first time? Not so much.

I'm turning 30 so naturally I'm switching to OpenBSD

Sat, 04 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m kidding, I’m switching to OpenBSD because I like security or code quality or something.

It’s totally not because the inexorable march of aging is starting to show its effects on my ability to down necessary-evil trivia like me and my friends used to down forties in the Ahhhnald after dark, and so I’d like to settle down with a software ecosystem I can study in real depth once without feeling like 20% of what I absorb in year X will be deprecated by year X+10.

PHP is Web Shell

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of the cooler things about working in a firm founded and run by a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Linux hackers like my current place is that there is a lot of Bash lying around, accumulated over a good 25 years or so. For all their faults, pure shell solutions still set the silver standard for programs which appear almost entirely immune to bit rot.

But you know what? So does vanilla PHP. That pink stuff that was made from the ground up to get you from zero to working dynamic web page as fast as possible.

Language learning treated as breadth-first search

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type. I’ve done enough of it over my life to know this. It’s certainly one of the better hobbies out there: You can do it for free (in principle), you can sink as many hours as you care to into it, and if you get good enough at it you get to reap some unique cultural and economic¹ benefits. But there’s a reason I picked up Python when 14 year old me decided he wanted to get ahead in life instead of (say) German.

Most "life lessons" you hear are about scaling back

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I

Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time. (My words, not his. RAW wouldn’t describe himself as anywhere close to a nihilist. I think the glove fits.)

Check my math - NixOS vs the Most Complicated Program on Earth (MCPOE)

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies.

Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly?

Beware those who promise increasing marginal returns

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way.

The 10 sentences heuristic for foreign vocabulary acquisition

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In order to learn a word, we need to come across it several times.
It seems that the minimum amount of times we need to meet a word is
somehwere around 7 or 8 meetings, but it's very hard to put a figure
on it.

-- Paul Nation, [2020 Victorial University of Wellington](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJj8vpJxfE)

He’s right, but that never stopped me. I say 10 sentences in a specific practice: When you come across a word you don’t know enough times for it to bother you,

The unreasonable effectiveness of VMs in hacker pedagogy

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running

mkdir tutorial/
cd tutorial/

vagrant init debian/bookworm64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

. This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac¹, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell.)

fd + xargs + bat = quick document review

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on vacation this week, and part of what I’ve been up to is fixing up the Selkouutiset Archive. Like most of my websites these days, SA is powered by Hugo, which means handling a lot of Markdown documents, which means I opted to use an intermediate Git repo as a submodule to actually store the custom-processed documents.

After a few tweaks here and there, I found myself wanting to quickly flip through all of the Markdown documents I had generated for each news day. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, just that I would know it when I saw it. So:

wall: Broadcast message all Linux users

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

`1`	`wall "Hello, world!"`

will send a message that looks like

1
2
3

Broadcast message from root@localhost (pts/0) (Sat Feb  1 14:50:14 2024):

Hello world!

to every user currently logged in to the system.

When might this be relevant? When you’re working in a small team, by remoting into custom hardware, and constantly reflashing the device, to give everyone a heads up, for instance:

Some New Year experiments

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hyvää uuttaa vuottaa! As stated before, my TIL is up and running once more.

Some things I’m going to be experimenting with this year:

Self-hosted stuff, speficially on the Raspberry Pi.
One of those fancy new split keyboards I keep hearing everyone talk about.
Coding more, and thinking about coding less.

Been quiet - studying Finnish

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hei kaikki. I’m going dark for the rest of the year as I switch my attention to reading a lot of Finnish, since Free Voluntary Reading is the best way to learn a language.

Hyvää joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta!

Speed paint videos for software installations

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Shell Bling Ubuntu and finstem now have what I’m calling “speed paints” of how someone, starting from scratch on a standard Ubuntu VM, might install the programs.

This came out of me realizing ffmpeg makes speeding up a video recording of a VirtualBox session a one-line operation:

`1`	`ffmpeg -i output.webm -filter:v "setpts=0.1*PTS" -an output-fast.webm`

When I watched them back, I realized it gave me a really good sense of what the installation should feel and look like, even if I hadn’t actually tried it yet. That in turn made me think “Oh, installing this thing really isn’t that bad after all.” So I decided it was worth including.

Getting `fzf` to print the preview pane

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

fzf is an incredibly useful bit of software, if someone shows you how to use it. There’s a lot more to it than just fuzzy-switching directories and fuzzy-searching you shell history – it also comes with a preview pane that updates on every keystroke. Try

`1`	`echo '' \| fzf --preview 'echo {q} {q}'`

and typing something to see how it works. ({q} is the query you type in at the bottom of the screen.)

Vagrant lets you wrap VDI images

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At work I’m currently experimenting with using Vagrant to automate getting an entire local network of our tiny embedded Linux systems running all on my local box.

Alas! One of our devices uses a custom Yocto distribution! But wait, we have scripts to run these as VDI images, and apparently that’s enough for Vagrant to get to work!

`1`	`vagrant package --base my-virtual-machine`

Further reading materials for future me: Creating a Base Box, and the Box File Format.

Most 2 digit numbers not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 are prime

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There are only four single-digit primes: 2, 3, 5, and 7. So all two-digit numbers are either prime, or divisible by one of these four numbers.

Of the four, 2, 3 and 5 are all very easy to spot check whether a number is divisible by them or not (for 3, add the digits first, and see if that sum is divisible by 3). If a given 2-digit number doesn’t fall into this category, 7 times out of 8, it’s prime.

Git aliases for fun and profit

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

haskell-kata’s Quickstart now has this neat little ditty at the start:

1
2

git config --local alias.build '!sh -c \'for file in *.hs; do ghc -o "${file%.hs}-bin" "$file"; done\''
git build

Git is the gift that keeps on giving. I was on the hunt for a subdirectory-scoped alias, and I just discovered this incredibly flexible way to create new Git subcommands.

History: 2 years ago I read through the 1200 page behemoth Haskell Programming from First Principles. (Recommended!) I walked out of that with some 1300 Anki flashcards that I have been chewing through ever since.

Haskell has a rustup now?

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently so.. The resemblence is uncanny.

I’ve apparently been out of the FP game too long, I thought Stack was the latest and greatest in abstracting over the toolchain.

Outage postmortem: Why didn't SelkoArchive get today's news?

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason, my daily archive of Finland’s “clear news” broadcast didn’t work today. Why not? TL;DR: Just a Git snafu.

Quick recap of the archive:

There are 3 Git repos:
- selkouutiset-scrape simply scrapes the HTML https://yle.fi/selkouutiset at 6 PM every day via a Github Action.
- selkouutiset-scrape-cleaned pulls in scrape and turns it into a stack of translated, properly-named Markdown files, by the magic of shell scripts, systemd timers, and a tiny VM in a datacenter somewhere.
- selkouutiset-archive wraps scrape-cleaned into a comfy Hugo theme, again with the magic of systemd timers and a tiny VM, and publishes it to Github Pages.

Which part of the chain broke?

Things Word has that SSGs, by and large, don't

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendations appreciated.

Disclaimer: Most of these make little sense in an Internet medium anyway.

An index. An index simply lists the terms and topics discussed in a document, along with the pages they are listed on.
A glossary. Could be as simple as a CSV file of terms and definitions, or as complex as a whole extra glossary/ folder.
Related: A “Acronyms and Abbreviations” section. Even moreso than the last, this could be a simple CSV.
A built-in site-wide search function. Word gets around this by having everything open at once.
A list of tables. Huge if you want your dead-trees books to match your shiny new website.
A list of figures. Ditto.
A list of referenced external documents. CSV! Say it with me!

The reason I compiled this list was because I decided to investigate whether I could use Hugo at work to generate our client-facing documentation. Currently we are using an unholy combination of Word and Confluence, and I figured that the magic of Git might help us keep our docs updated in a more sane way.

traceroute uses UDP by default, not ICMP

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At least on Linux.

Don’t believe me? Run tcpdump -nn -i <interface> 'host example.com' in one shell and traceroute example.com in another. tcpdump will pick up all 3 of {ICMP, UDP, TCP}, and on my machine the pattern is clear:

20:58:47.187086 IP 1.2.3.4.41369 > 93.184.216.34.33434: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187160 IP 1.2.3.4.39830 > 93.184.216.34.33435: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187190 IP 1.2.3.4.43467 > 93.184.216.34.33436: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187221 IP 1.2.3.4.50462 > 93.184.216.34.33437: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187254 IP 1.2.3.4.35842 > 93.184.216.34.33438: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187285 IP 1.2.3.4.44146 > 93.184.216.34.33439: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187318 IP 1.2.3.4.50311 > 93.184.216.34.33440: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187346 IP 1.2.3.4.34388 > 93.184.216.34.33441: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187375 IP 1.2.3.4.43703 > 93.184.216.34.33442: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187405 IP 1.2.3.4.35304 > 93.184.216.34.33443: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187448 IP 1.2.3.4.50157 > 93.184.216.34.33444: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187474 IP 1.2.3.4.58392 > 93.184.216.34.33445: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187503 IP 1.2.3.4.45918 > 93.184.216.34.33446: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187530 IP 1.2.3.4.38313 > 93.184.216.34.33447: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187556 IP 1.2.3.4.41520 > 93.184.216.34.33448: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.187582 IP 1.2.3.4.55240 > 93.184.216.34.33449: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.225929 IP 1.2.3.4.60724 > 93.184.216.34.33450: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.225970 IP 1.2.3.4.43648 > 93.184.216.34.33451: UDP, length 32
20:58:47.226016 IP 1.2.3.4.52561 > 93.184.216.34.33452: UDP, length 32

I have no idea why. Performance? Getting around sysadmins who unwitting block all ICMP packets? It surprised me, at least.

Cloud translation is more expensive than I thought

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Example from yesterday’s news. Count ’em yourself – there’s 76 of them there.

Mass i18n efforts like this are I think an underappreciated benefit of what static site generators like Hugo can give you. Actually, especialy Hugo – it’s multi-language support is very good, like darn near everything about the platform once you get past the initial learning curve.

Another underappreciated benefit: When building HTML pages is fast, you can afford to build a lot of them. A quick hugo && cd public/ && fd html | wc -l tells us that there are about 2700 HTML files on the site, which Hugo builds in under 3000 ms on my machine. The Github Action run which built the site as of today took a glacial 35 seconds by comparison.

Pomodoros and leverage ratios

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I love pomodoros 🍅. But I have to admit, most of the time when I reach for them, it’s because I"m already having trouble staying on task with whatever I’m doing. I generally don’t get a lot of value out of the ’longer break’ option, a steady beat of work and breaks is enough for me.

In those circumstances I often find solace in the idea that a well-constructed pomodoro creates a certain lower bound on my work-to-play leverage ratio. The classic 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off gives you a 5:1 ratio.

One problem with user-scoped `systemd` timers

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve discovered one big downside of [putting systemd times into ~/.config/systemd/user/][1]: They stop running when you log out.

Two ways around this problem:

Bite the bullet, and install the timers into /etc/systemd/. This means giving up chezmoi version control, making the overall system more snowflake-y. I’m not crazy about it.
Remote in with tmux, instead of ever logging out, just use C-b d to detach from the session.

I’m going with #2. The lead developer of ktty is known not to like tmux, so there’s probably a way to detach long-running SSH sections inside of kitty itself – but I haven’t found it yet. Have you?

Promoting Blog Tag Reuse with `fzf`

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some more updates to the main repo of this TIL site today, in particular I have added a new fzf-tags.fish script.

til uses this script to

Scrapes all the YAML tags: frontmatter from all current Markdown posts,
Puts me into a multi-select fzf menu containing them, and
Puts anything I select into the tags: of the new blog post.

Tags form natural breadcrumb trails throughout a blog as it grows organically over time. Many an afternoon have I spent reading one or two particular tags of interest from a prolific blog. But, if you don’t remember to reuse the tags in the first place, you’ll never build the trail in the first place.

The Rule of Four

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A communication heuristic, optimized for asynchronous communication of detailed concepts between human beings.

Not really a TIL, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

Rationale

Existence “proof”

Our short term memory can hold at best about 7 +/- 2 chunks of information at a time.
Start with the lower end of that: 5 chunks.
Assume that whatever someone is “really” trying to do takes up 1 of those 5.
We’re left with 4 chunks.

Conclusion

Organize your work processes as much as possible so that they can be effectively understood using at most 4 chunks of short-term memory. If you feel a process is too complicated to be held like that, find conceptual fault lines to hack against until it’s true.

Hugo's Secret RSS Feeds

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog now has a swanky new RSS feed button right on the front page, courtesy of the well-designed PaperMod theme powering things on the backend.

Hugo newbies often don’t know that Hugo usually generates these RSS feeds automatically for new websites. You usually have to go out of your way to turn them off. Example: https://andrew-quinn.me/index.xml exists, and has existed for quite some time, without me needing to lift a finger (although I might want to put a button on my home site too!).

Hosting on Azure? Don't forget to declare UTF-8

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

For a long time after moving my website from Netlify to Azure, none of my fancy emoji or weird umlaut characters would display properly. Today I fixed that by popping back into the the Hugo theme I built off of minimum-viable-hugo and adding

`1`	`<meta charset="utf-8">`

to themes/minimum-viable-hugo/layouts/index.html and themes/minimum-viable-hugo/layouts/partial/head.html. (There’s probably a way to intimidate Azure Static Web Apps into using UTF-8 by default too, but I didn’t bother to look.)

Git controlled, user-scoped, recoverable-after-install `systemd` services and timers

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

systemd timers are a serious upgrade from cron. Accept no substitutes.
~/.config/systemd/user lets you run user-scoped timers and services,
- in a place where you can version control them with Git easily,
  - and even keep a handy backup with chezmoi!

Story

We had the great honor of having our friend Tri Phung (LinkedIn, GitHub) over for dinner yesterday. As is often the case the conversation turned to work. I’ve been on a kick of using Github Actions remotely and shell scripts + systemd services/timers locally to sketch out some ideas for new websites in Hugo.

That damned Debian 10 one-liner I always need to let me `sudo`

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

1
2

# ⚠️: Reboots your VM.
su -c "$(whereis adduser | awk '{print $2}') $(whoami) sudo && $(whereis reboot | awk '{print $2}')"

In all its glory! For Debian 10 and up, because Debian 10 is where the sysv to systemd conversion became totalizing.

Let’s break down quickly why each part of this is needed:

Since we are trying to add ourselves to the sudo group right now, we obviously can’t use sudo. Enter su -c to switch to root, run a command, and then switch back out.

whereis adduser instead of simply adduser because adduser is no longer in the $PATH by default anymore.

Tempted to try which adduser? No dice – which only gets you things in the $PATH as well:

1
2
3

andrew@debian-10:~$ which adduser    # zip, zilch, nada.
andrew@debian-10:~$ whereis adduser
adduser: /usr/sbin/adduser /etc/adduser.conf /usr/share/adduser /usr/share/man/man8/adduser.8.gz

awk to rip out /usr/sbin/adduser, which - thankfully - at least is still executable.
$(whoami) because your name might not be andrew!
whereis reboot because I don’t want to have to manually remember to logout and login again.

Art of the dotflag -- `.nojekyll`, `.gitkeep` and their ilk

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I’ve been ~~procrastinating~~ playing the long game by getting some nice workflows set up for my TIL content repository and its associated website (cf Context, below). If all goes well, by the time I hit :wq on this TIL, it should invisibly trigger 2 Git commits, a Hugo build, and then appear on the site fully-birthed.

One of the more interesting patterns I noticed was the .nojekyll empty file which I had to build to get GH Pages to stop tussling with my Hugo Action for turf. .nojekyll is technically a dotfile, but it doesn’t actually contain any content - its mere existence is enough to change behavior. And that makes their existence a really interesting design affordance offered to us developers by the filesystems we use every day but rarely think about.

A good place to symlink local builds

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of both spaced repetition in general and the Anki spaced repetition system in particular for a long time now. So today, after a fresh new install and blinging out of Ubuntu 23.10, I decided to take the next step, as I often do with programs I use a lot, and try to build and compile it myself.

This turned out to be pretty easy! The docs warn that ./run is slower than the non-optimized build, but I don’t notice much of a difference on my machine. It did however leave me with the question: Where should I put the anki symlink to ./run?

No such thing as a Post-Push Hook

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight I was hacking away at some more little automations to make this TIL nice and presentable over at https://til.andrew-quinn.me/.

Git has a wonderful system called “hooks” which live under .git/hooks/, come loaded with examples so you can remember how they all work, and – surprisingly – don’t contain a local post-push hook! There’s post-receive, but that expects to be able to run a script on the server side – not helpful when I’m pushing to one of Github’s many, many anonymous boxes.

Multi-line string literals in Fish

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Fish shell has… interesting syntax for multi-line string literals. The only way I can reliably remember is to literally write them as multi-line literals, which does make a certain kind of brutalist sense:

function kiitos
  set thankyou '---
kiitos kaynnista
ja tervetuloa uduelleen
---'
  echo $thankyou
end

kiitos

reliably prints

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Today I Learned (TIL)

I learn a lot of new things every day. At some point I decided I wanted to have a public record of some of them, so I wrote a shell script to let me open a terminal, type til, and immediately jot down whatever little tidbit I just came across. This repo is the result of that.

Quickstart

Trouble with all the programs I run in my various .fish scripts? Try Shell Bling Ubuntu, that should contain most of ’em.

Andrew Quinn's TILs

The long death of programming languages

Claude Code and executive function

Claude Code disproportionately benefits those who touch type

Lua is a pretty good config language

Copy-Item is 27 percent slower than File Explorer drag and drop on Windows

"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors

Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Four things that help me avoid / manage mild RSI

Where is the DevOps for Yocto?

LLMs solve the biggest problem with language textbooks

Code should be clean because business isn't

tarsnap is cozy

It's okay to solve a problem twice

You don't need CGO to use SQLite in your Go binary

Incentivize grandchildren by writing them into your will

The second wave of spaced repetition apps

Experiment registry: Can I simply enjoy everything I do?

Switching Vim colorschemes based on which keyboard layout I have active

Using LLMs to generate small semantic perturbations for language learning writing practice

The language learning "Delta" Anki card pattern

Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

LLM, JavaScript, GitHub Pages, localStorage: A recipe for free apps anyone can use

Create multi-stage Anki card answers with HTML's tag

LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition

Consider the cronslave

LLMs make Perl great again

Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs

Vibe coding and complementary goods

Binary search isn't about search III. Loop invariant of rightmost element search

A motivating example

Binary search isn't about search II. Loop invariant of leftmost element search

Binary search isn't about search

Things you should never do: Use Expect to autotype SSH passwords in scripts

SQLite is learnable

`python -m http.server` as ephemeral Dropbox

Common-sense security for SSH on a new Debian server

Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?

The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline

PHP, Go, and Braindead Deployment

What I would recommend to teens in 2024 who want to get into development

PHP and Web Dev Phobia

How I ask GPT-4 to make tiny Python scripts in practice

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

My pet theory of how great software gets started

What scripting languages come out of the box on Debian 12?

Valuable software is about letting people do new things

Layers of abstraction for me, not for thee

Software engineers as mental athletes

OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon

Quickstarts and Slowstarts

Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Trackballs are great for the mostly-mouseless

tmux is worse is better

Disable your browser history to write better internal docs

I'm turning 30 so naturally I'm switching to OpenBSD

PHP is Web Shell

Language learning treated as breadth-first search

Most "life lessons" you hear are about scaling back

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Check my math - NixOS vs the Most Complicated Program on Earth (MCPOE)

Beware those who promise increasing marginal returns

The 10 sentences heuristic for foreign vocabulary acquisition

The unreasonable effectiveness of VMs in hacker pedagogy

fd + xargs + bat = quick document review

wall: Broadcast message all Linux users

Some New Year experiments

Been quiet - studying Finnish

Speed paint videos for software installations

Getting `fzf` to print the preview pane

Vagrant lets you wrap VDI images

Most 2 digit numbers not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 are prime

Git aliases for fun and profit

Haskell has a rustup now?

Outage postmortem: Why didn't SelkoArchive get today's news?

Things Word has that SSGs, by and large, don't

traceroute uses UDP by default, not ICMP

Cloud translation is more expensive than I thought

Pomodoros and leverage ratios

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