Blogs about Development

This week was VALA 2024 and I was lucky enough to attend and present a poster. The point of the post was essentially to act as a sneaky advertising billboard for Aus GLAMR, an aggregator …

I have been thinking about the question what makes a “good tool”? What are the characteristics that make me comfortable depending on a tool? What makes me delighted to use a tool?

Today I made a Colonel Blotto game where you play against GPT-4o, and after each round you can chat with GPT-4o to get commentary/analysis/coaching. Play with it at blotto.incoherency.co.uk until I run out of OpenAI …

Some time back, I stumbled upon this amazing idea of Git scraping made popular by Simon Willison. It involves using GitHub Actions to scrape data and save it directly into a Git repository. Essentially, for …

CrankWheel uses Maxio (née Chargify) for subscription management. It’s OK but I’ve never been super duper happy with it (mostly because I chose it for its flat fee structure, then later they switch to charging …

Monday, Apr 15 Monty Hall Problem (permalink) made by EvanC, submitted by RodEsp It's a great way to see that the Monty Hall Problem's unintuitive solution is actually correct. — RodEsp

The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already typed in”. This really resonated …

Do you get frustrated when you have to throw out fruits and vegetables that have gone bad?Have lots of kitchen scraps but can't be bothered to compost them due to possible smell, rodents, HOA rules, …

I've been thinking about online communities a lot lately, and had an idea about a new Masto instance, but maybe it wasn't such a good idea? I've been ruminating on what the perfect online community …

I’ve been unsatisfied with how entity creation works in Dinghy (now renamed “Zinc”) for a while. I said as much a few months ago on the forums and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. …

I love this aphorism about visionary leadership paraphrasing Saint-Exupéry: “Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea, by the light of …

Packaging Private Projects Neat Gitea features means easy APKs · July 16th, 2024 This is one I've been sitting on for a minute. I've been doing some dev work on an old repo of mine, …

Hello! I am pleased to announce a new version of my Linux Command Line Computing ebook. This is the longest book I've published so far (204 pages) — it took me more than 7 months …

I've been using Kitty terminal for five years now, and I'm really happy with it. Recently I got curious about how to make it look prettier (inspired by all the beautiful terminals I see in …

Just a few shots from this year’s Manchester - Blackpool (and back) ride. There was no finish line photographer last year, so this year was the first time I’ve had any photos of me on …

This is probably going to be short as this year is perhaps the most unproductive year I've ever had.As usual, I start this off with a compilation of monthly "highlights" that I've already listed in …

So there I was, tinkering away on a microcontroller project, when all of a sudden my AVR programmer stopped working.

I was invited to give a talk to a graduate-level NLP class about my work on Filipino resources. It was fun preparing and giving that talk because I was able to synthesize my thoughts and …

You’ve almost certainly seen those t-shirts and posters with the “ampersand” style of lists of names – these originated back in 2001 via Experimental Jetset’s design of the names of the members of The Beatles. …