Simple-Suboptimal-Solutions on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Back up your TOTP codes by just printing them

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Scan the Quick Response (QR) code above with your favorite Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) app. You should get a six digit number, rotating every 30 seconds, that looks something like

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237601
# as of Wed May 20 09:44:53 AM EEST 2026

If you then take the secret key that QR code maps to, say

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”

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 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?

Lua is a pretty good config language

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lua and Scheme occupy curiously similar places in my noggin, becuase my primary use case for both has been as scripting languages embedded into other, larger projects. Lua of course is basically designed for this job, but it’s a solid intermediate format to target even if you have no immediate intentions to use the programming language parts at all. A TSV file like

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10.0.0.5  192.168.1.1 80  tcp
10.0.0.6  192.168.1l.1  443 tcp

can be given a lot more structure on the cheap by writing a small transpiler of sorts to turn it into

Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before. In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every ~~Unix~~ EDIT: Linux system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default:

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❯ mount | grep '/dev/shm'
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)

Today’s lucky 10,000, indeed. It gets mentioned often in Hacker News comments, but surprisingly I couldn’t find any actual articles talking about it. The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again.

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.

LLMs make Perl great again

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation. So I was surprised to find out not only is it installed by default on Debian, it’s installed nearly everywhere by default. It’s even the non-shell scripting language of choice on OpenBSD!

Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Perl’s utter ubiquity is its longevity. The latest major version of Perl was first released in 1994. It came into existence on this planet less than a year after I did. It’s even arguably more portable than the median shell script - different Unices might use Bash, Zsh, Ksh, or even something newfangled like Fish, but for the most part a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program is a Perl 5 program.

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.

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

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.

Common-sense security for SSH on a new Debian server

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I went to DigitalOcean and spun up a tiny new, $4/month droplet – on my own dime! It sounds crazy, but I’ve never actually wanted to pay for hosting myself before. But I have a fun little web app cooking up, one that might eventually pay that $4/month back with interests, and I decided, why not, it’s time to finally put some of my own skin in the game with this whole sysadmin thing.

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

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

Valuable software is about letting people do new things

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier. The actual code which generates this archive is about 300 lines of Python . The basic value add for the user:

What you want: Better fluency in Finnish.
What you need: Practice. Lots of it.
What this gives you: GOTO 2.

This is emphatically not the kind of product, or use case, I would stumble upon as a brain-in-the-vat developer. It is a niche offering, one I only found because I actually got out into the world and tried to do something hard. In so doing, I recognized the possibility of building a tool that could help me in this non-programming endeavour. So I built it. And I’m proud of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.