Design-Affordances on 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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.