Worse-Is-Better on Andrew Quinn's TILs

"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a teenager first getting into computers in the late 2000s I spent a lot of time reading old revered tomes like ESR’s The Art of Unix Programming and SICP . If present-day me were to isekai back in time and lose all of the technical knowledge I had but retain my current instincts, however, I would have left all of this on the table and just built a terrible new automation tool for the surprisingly scriptable MMORPG I was into in PHP 5, with as much disregard for clean code and security practices that I could muster[^1]. Then I would have put that tool online, continued to add new features to the ball of mud, and kept it running for 5-10 years before my first post-college interview. And then the vibe that would come across is less “He’s an egghead, and we like that, but we really need someone who actually does things” and more “He’s a meathead, but inside of that meathead is an egghead waiting to be revealed. We need this kind of junior dev yesterday.” I would have done this even though an objectively far superior tool had already existed for quite some time, making this project “feel like” dead weight in the wide world of software! But why?

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.

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?

Binary search isn't about search II. Loop invariant of leftmost element search

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the first “Binary search isn’t about search” post, we spoke about using assert statements to enforce your loop invariants. Our plain old everyday binary search invariant can be summarized as such:

For all x in L[0:l]¹, x is strictly less than T, the element we are searching for.
For all y in L[r:len(L)]², y is strictly greater than T, the element we are searching for.

Or, if we want to be even terser, we could note this as simply

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.

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.

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.

tmux is worse is better

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to split your screen up into multiple independent shells without needing a graphical environment at all. If you want to walk the path of true digital minimalism, vanilla Vim and tmux or its spiritual grandfather screen are all you need.