Automation on Andrew Quinn's TILs

I still like Jenkins

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Before GitHub Actions, before GitLab CI/CD, and before the panoply of startups all promising to help you build your software faster and with less hassle, there was the humble, open source Jenkins. Or perhaps I should say is: Jenkins is still actively maintained to this day, and has actually been in use in basically every single place I have worked since graduating from high school, although not everyone who was using it was exactly happy with it.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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:

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.