Productivity on Andrew Quinn's TILs

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:

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.