Daily-Life on Andrew Quinn's TILs

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?

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.

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

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:

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.

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?

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

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?

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!

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.

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.