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