You Have to Type It Out

A note on how learning works (in my experience, anyway).

Async Rust Complexity

One reason things “feel hard” in this part of the ecosystem.

Pro Eclecticism: A Rant

Contra John Ahern at Theopolis.

Gut Feelings

Introspection only gets you so far.

Garmin Training Status – A Complaint

The feature ends up being useless to me because it does not model my real-world training very well.

Being a Fast, Cogent Writer Is Useful

It is also something you can get better at!

A Sanctus for Epiphany

Music you can sing (any time, but especially in this liturgical season).

One Problem With My Kobo Aura ONE

It works too well.

2023 in Review: The Rest of Life

2023 in Review: Professional

2023 in Review: Writing and Speaking

2023 in Review: Reading

2023 in Review: Sabbatical Report

2023 in Review

Difficult

On works of art which challenge.

Why Not OpenDoc-Alikes?

Maybe apps, for all their limitations, actually have some things going for them.

Why Not Type-Based Overloading in Rust?

Too much spooky action at a distance.

The Wizardry Frontier

Against the idea that accessibility and reliability (or other such dichotomies) must remain at odds in programming languages.

Typographical and Musical Scales

Mildly contra Matthew Butterick on music, grids, and how to relate them to typography.

Past: Leaving LinkedIn

Making good on a promise I made to myself five years ago.

Now: Sabbatical

Resting well and (by?) working hard.

Next: Role?

Ratchets over levers.

Next

Leaving LinkedIn, taking a 3-month sabbatical, and thinking about what comes next.

How to Do a TypeScript Conversion

Addressing a very common question: do-it-as-you-go or follow the dependency graph?

Where DRY Applies

The rule is taught early and often, but it ought to come with a clarification.

An Observation on Programming Pedagogy

One reason textbooks can be frustrating for practitioners.

Versioning and Big Binary Blob Art Files

Sharing my ad hoc version management for writing musical scores. (It works for Photoshop just as well!)

The Good News that God Does Not Change

A short reflection on Malachi 3:6.

Not Loving a Lens

Some feelings after a year and a half with the Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm 𝑓/1.8 ZA.

Do It the Dumb Way Sometimes

Simple tools for small, well-scoped problems, please!

Brain Rewiring in Progress

Learning Racket is making my head hurt in the best way.

Subscriptions Update

You can read what I read!

Unmeasurable Costs and Benefits

One major reason standard advice about “demonstrating value (or impact)” does not work well for foundational software, including (but not only) open-source library code.

Writing and Prestige-Building—A Reply to Will Larson

On “infrequent, high-quality content” as a tactic.

Analytics for Sites With Tech-Savvy Audiences

I compared Netlify’s numbers with Fathom’s. They are… very different.

Just Keep Climbing

Or: how to make progress.

Stay Curious About Your Tools

I have lately enjoyed digging further into Unix and macOS fundamentals—and it has reminded me to stay curious about my tools!

Unsafe

On a common meme: “Rust would not help because we would have to use a lot of unsafe”.

Reflections on a Month with BBEdit and Nova

What works, what doesn’t, and where did this experiment lead me in the end?

Extended Time Off Report

What I got up to over the past month! Because I relax by learning and doing.

My Current Mac Stack

The software I use every day, with commentary.

Quitting the Big Five—A Reply to Brad East

On the basic structure of my tech choices these days. Briefly.

Is TypeScript Good?—A Reply to Rach Smith

Taking a thoughtful post as an excuse to discuss software system dynamics through the lens of TypeScript.

Je ne sais quoi

Programming languages, cameras, computers, and other technologies—and feel.

Trying BBEdit and Nova

I am taking some time off, and this seems like a great time to mess with alternatives for my software stack.

On Ember’s New Major Version Cadence

Not just how this one specific process for one JavaScript framework is changing, but why—and why I hope it will be useful to other projects as well!

Sermon Notes

Specifically: why I do not take them.

Writing Tools

Obsidian, Bear, high-quality native apps vs. cross-platform Electron apps…

Is GitHub Copilot Any Good?

Betteridge’s Law applies, but the details of why I think so might still interest you.

About My Licensing Choices

Why MIT and Creative Commons Attribution? Why so much consideration of this at all?

Did Not Start

A little bit of running history from 2011.

dimension change/code review

Competencies

An observation on the dynamics of (sufficiently) large organizations.

❡ Length: An Observation

Blog posts, like essays (published online or in magazines) tend (I think!) to differ from books in just how long they let their paragraphs run.

Fork Software More

Not everything needs to be centralized and standardized.

Feature Idea: Week-Level Smart Training Plans

Training (at my level, anyway) is less about individual day-to-day work and more about what I do each week. The tools should support that!

Blog-Gardening in Public

Build Yourself Small Tools

Initial Notes on Elicit

Playing around a bit with the ML-powered research tool from the folks at Ought.org.

Special Null Syntax vs. Types and Functions

Why does Maybe.map feel better than ?? and friends to me? A sketch.

Product Idea: Meal Tracking for Athletes

All of the existing tools need broader design vocabularies.

An Orchestra in My Pocket

Well, in my bag anyway. Close enough. And astonishing.

Generative Work and Productive Puttering

They sometimes feel similar, but they aren’t the same. (And both can be good!)

Goal-Setting

On setting goals I might not meet—and adjusting them proactively throughout the year.

2022 in Review: The Rest of life

Less than I wanted of music, running, etc.; but some good things on the financial and spiritual fronts.

2022 in Review: Professional

My fourth year at LinkedIn: odd, and challenging—with some failures!—but not bad.

2022 in Review: Public Speaking

One conference talk, a couple podcasts, and—unexpectedly—a bit of YouTube-ing.

2022 in Review: Writing

Getting published in print, and a year to at least match last year for my normal blogging and open source work!

2022 in Review: Reading

I read a lot less than I wanted, but I still made my goal of 22 books in the year. I’ll take it!

OPML Files as… Annotated Bibliographies?

What if feed readers let you you make these old XML files into blog rolls, too?

Patterns for “Smart” Components in Ember

…which generalize to other frameworks pretty well, too.

Supernote, Dropbox, and Transmit

A handy little flow for getting documents onto and off of the SuperNote via Dropbox… without having Dropbox installed locally.

A UML Comeback?

Because the tools are positioned for sketching, now?

Reasoning About Reference Cycles

Rust’s lifetime types are challenging, but they bring a capability I miss all the time in other languages.

Journaling, One Day Along

A progress report: It had the desired effect. I like it!

Journaling

But in a very specific way.

John Cook and Brief Notes

A Note on Life Stages

A few reflections on parenting, hobbies, and time.

creation, incarnation, art, vocation

Writing Down What I Do—In Obsidian

An update on my years-long habit, with a new tool.

Dorico Tip: Solo Parts in String Sections

This was a bit subtle, so I'm writing it down for myself in the future (and maybe others, too!).

Organizing Many Software Projects

How I lay out my file system and how I tweak Git for working on literally dozens of different repositories.

Obsidian

A reply to an acquaintance’s question about what Obsidian is doing for me.

Trade-offs

They are real; but too often offered as an excuse to avoid thinking rather than a reason to think harder.

Marco’s Rule of Software Stacks (Expanded)

On being the biggest user of a given technology.

Long and Short

The value of different kinds of writing.

Open Source

Notes on the sheer scale of recently-completed open source efforts of mine.

Flow State

Maybe it’s less important than we like to think?

What Can I Do With 10 Minutes?

What can I do when I do not have long stretches of time to give deep attention to a task?

Turning on Some Apple Accessiblity Preferences

Because it makes for a better UI experience!

Some Thoughts on Zig

A positive framing (of one part at least!) from someone who is distinctly not here for what the language is selling.

A Pleasing Symmetry in Rust

Appreciating how Rust enum variants are mirrors of its kinds of structs.

The Tamron 35-150mm 𝑓/2–2.8 Di III VXD

Notes from a week at Disney World with this remarkable (mammoth!) lens.

The Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm 𝑓/1.8 ZA

Notes from a week at Disney World with Sony’s workhorse of a lens.

The Sony α7 IV

Notes from a week at Disney World with Sony’s latest full-frame camera body.

Conditional Modifiers and Helpers in Ember

A handy feature you can use in recent versions of Ember.

Misusing TypeScript Assertion Functions for Fun and Profit

A horrible (but very useful) hack I came up with yesterday for adding types to some old code.

SemVer for TS in Practice

Showing how the recommendations from www.semver-ts.org can actually work in the real world.

On Stationery

…and unreasonable joys in small, real goods.

A quarter-of-the-year check-in—

Don’t Universalize from Your Own Experiences

Snappy writing, careers in software development (and other fields), advice-giving, and over-generalizing.

Volume

On my need to write, and writing here less lately. (Or: writing something because I needed to gain a sense of momentum about my writing goals, and writing about writing comes easily, which is why bloggers resort to it when they’re tired.)

Notes on Exposure Notifications

Literally just notes, from an essay I never managed to write.

Eternals

Not a good movie, exactly, but an interesting one.

Don’t Sprint the First Mile of a Half Marathon

On establishing a sustainable pace at the start of a new year.

Buy Me a Book

Moving from Patreon to BuyMeACoffee for folks to support my writing if so inclined.

Reading Settings!

A few notes on pairing prefers-color-scheme and user configurability, as well as adding a little reading mode switch.

2021 End-of-Year Thoughts

Another year behind, another reflection on what happened (and what didn’t!) in this latest circuit of the sun.

Small, Non-Trivial Projects for Learning

For learning effectively, nothing is better than a real project which gives you a place to experiment and play.

2022 Colfax Half Marathon Plan

Plotting my recovery from COVID-19 and my path to maybe, just maybe, managing another PR in May.

Request for Comments: First-Class Component Templates ↩︎—❈

Given all the analysis from this series, a concrete proposal to move this forward!

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 6

Given the tradeoffs in the space, what is the best set of compromises we can make?

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 5

What about styles? (A bonus post!)

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 4

Keeping, and improving on, one of Ember’s fundamental commitments—and biggest strengths: its integrated testing.

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 3

Evaluating the tradeoffs of template language designs for tooling.

Anki and Spaced Repetition

Notes on working with a new system, 5½ months along.

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 2

Which template imports design has the biggest set of wins for teaching and understanding components?

Ember.js Template Imports: Part 1

Introducing the series and walking through the formats.

The Sony α7C

A mini-review after renting the camera and using it for almost a week back in July.

Cameras and Attention (Redux)

A mild “yes/and” on a theme often highlighted by contemporary tech critical commentary.

Spiritual Experiences—Intellectual and Emotional

A warning.

Theological Anthropology Comes First

You don’t get a healthy politics if you answer the question “What is a human?” incorrectly.

What if PageRank Was a Mistake?

A provocation on our algorithmic present and a curational (curative?) alt-history.

MusicXML and Percussion Notation

Digging into How Dorico and StaffPad represent percussion differently.

StaffPad to Dorico via MusicXML? Alas, no.

A tale of woe! …but with some tips for less woeful tales to sooth the bitter pill this is.

StaffPad Versions

Making it easy to keep track of your composing history in StaffPad.

My Current Photography Setup

Could also be filed under “from my sent messages.”

Revealed and Stated Preferences

On Ben Thompson’s weekly article on Instagram, Facebook, algorithmic feeds in general—and how economic analysis of behavior ranges from insufficient to awful.

Miscellaneous Updates

Or: it has been months since I wrote anything, so I’m scratching that itch.

Progressive Disclosure of Complexity and Typed FP Languages

Or, one part of why to some extent Elm, and to a significant degree PureScript Halogen, can be quite difficult for users to get their heads around at first.

Introducing “Heuristics for Good Software Design”

A series of posts in which I explain how I think about effective software design.

Naming and Framing

Or, why did Accelerate matter for DevOps?

A Gap in (My Knowledge of) the Developer Productivity Literature

Where is the equivalent of Accelerate for anything outside of DevOps?

A Useful Approach to Problem-Solving

(It’s useful to me, at least.)

Scarcities

In which what was supposed to be a quick, Robin Sloan- and Craig Mod-inspired, note on attention and cryptothings… somehow morphed into the dream of a research program for something much, much different.

I Am Not An Original Thinker

And it turns out that’s actually totally fine.

Using Classes for Functional Programming

We tend to think classes are inherently for object-oriented programming, but they are much more flexible than that in JavaScript and TypeScript (and other languages too).

Just Write

Even if you only have five minutes: write anyway.

Wrapping Up 2020 and Starting 2021

Goodbye, good riddance, won’t look back fondly on this one.

Understanding args in Glimmer Components

Clearing up a common confusion with a worked example.

Ember Octane is a New Mental Model

…not a 1:1 translation from Ember Classic—but that’s often a big win!

Reluctantly Returning to Social Media

I have to be on social media professionally… but I don't have to live there.

Notes on Thoughtbot’s “Stop Using 'any'”

A couple tweaks and improvements to a good post!

Writing Robust TypeScript Libraries

A subtler art than it might at first appear, if you intend to support JS or even loose mode TS.

Data Constructors, Part 2: Better TypeScript

A deep dive on more idiomatic TypeScript implementations of ML-style data constructors.

Initializing Class Fields in Ember Octane

One of the many small-but-lovely benefits of getting to use native classes in Ember Octane.

Things I Was Wrong About: Types

Because it would do us all good to be a little more honest about where we’ve changed our minds or simply been mistaken.

Autotracking: Elegant DX Via Cutting-Edge CS

A modern JavaScript reactivity system powered by Lamport clocks and incremental computation and depth-first searches: oh my!

Data Constructors, Part 1: Understanding by Implementing

Understanding an idea from Standard ML-like languages by implementing it in (boring) TypeScript.

Can You Recommend a Book on This?

Probably not, unfortunately. Maybe I can write something up, though?

Async Data and Autotracking in Ember Octane

Digging into the load helper and AsyncData type I introduced in an earlier post.

Migrating Off of PromiseProxyMixin in Ember Octane

An important refactor for getting rid of mixins and proxies.

Twitter and Me, Redux

A 2020 update on my take on that particular social medium.

Please Reply!

My Atom and JSON feeds gained a new “feature.”

On Ending “This Week I Learned”

At least for now, I don’t have time for this particular bit of blogging. And that’s okay.

Presence

A few notes on God-with-us in his Word and at his Table.

A Git Workflow for Managing Long-Running Upgrades

Using some lessons learned in the trenches of large upgrades.

Building the Slow Way

Or, part of why rewrite is taking a while: I’m in this for the long haul.

Reading Habits

How exactly do I go about reading, and what do I read these days?

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 8

SpaceX launched today, and I am launching the rough draft of “Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight” to honor it!

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 7

Memorial Day and Thursday night progress…

Making Illegal States Unrepresentable—In TypeScript

Showing how Scott Wlaschin’s approach in F^♯ translates to a language with a very different type system.

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 6

A surprising amount of progress over the weekend—the muscles are coming back!

This Week I Learned #5

This Week I Learned #4

Designing an Atomic CSS System

Making my CSS scalable from the outset.

mut (and set) and autotracking in Ember Octane

Understanding a surprising behavior—and fixing a refactoring hazard.

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 5

Fighting a horrible mood by making progress anyway. Not much. But enough.

This Week I Learned #3

Less reading this week… because more composing.

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 4 (Part 2)

Reworking rhythms to make the next section of this piece connect more clearly to the first.

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 4 (Part 1)

I have a version of this piece I could publish! Now to get the rest of it done…

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 3

The first draft of the first section is complete!

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 2

I wrote some good harmonic lines! I started learning a new notation software program!

Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 1

Sharing my work as it happens for this composition.

Follow-Up on Command-Line Finding and Filtering

A simpler solution that doesn’t require tr… if you have GNU utils or other alternatives.

find, grep, xargs, and newlines and null

Turns out tr is your friend for this kind of thing.

This Week I Learned #2

The Infra Engineer’s Blind Spot

Why I ended up down a rabbit hole instead of shipping.

This Week I Learned #1

JavaScript Functional Immutable Update Performance

What are the performance implications of “immutable functional updates”?

Superscript and Subscript Line Heights

A tip for better typography.

On “Saints”

Should we prepend the term to “Paul” or “Augustine”?

Waiting for Communion

A coronavirus reminder of our place in the time between the times.

Scripting Affiliate Links in Alfred

Perhaps weirdly, I haven’t done much of this before!

How I Publish This Site

Explaining how I run this site—everything.

Ulysses Publishing With WordPress on Linux

A tech tip for other folks using WordPress on custom Linux setups.

Please Don’t Just Screenshot Books!

A PSA to writers-on-the-web about how we share text.

An Atom Feed Apology

Doubly embarrassing for having now messed up both of my feeds.

Epistemic Status

Making explicit just how confident I am (or am not).

A Decadal Kind of Change

Rethinking this site—and my own vocations—as the 2010s give way to the 2020s.

Adieu to 2019

A year of rest and recovery, for which I’m profoundly grateful.

Writing Implements

Sheer delight—by way of writing in a Pano Totebook with a Uniball Signo RT1 0.38mm.

Endings and Edges

Reflections prompted by Michael Sacasas’ wrapping up a decade of blogging.

Decaffeinating

How and why I switched to mostly decaf coffee.

On Remembering Scripture

Time to stop leaning so hard on search.

Some Thoughts on micro.blog

I like the service. But I’m not using it.

25,462 Words

Reflections on a month of writing.

A JSON Feed Apology and Explanation

All my best efforts and this is still where we end up!

…but Running is Sunlight

(Why yes, that is a riff on Superman.)

Travel is my Kryptonite

It ruins all my normal habits and rhythms and tanks my productivity.

Twitter Bots and “Decline”

Picking up a dropped thread from Winning Slowly 7.13

Writing Requires Reading

…as my November-writing adventures make clear!

Relaunch!

A new website design and implementation for 2020 and beyond—with a new title to boot!