BlogDB

Your Design System is Not a Solution

Design systems are tools, not solutions. They're not there to solve every problem for every team, but rather to put quality tools in the hands of skilled craftsmen.

Linkfest #24: Secret Cars, New Euripides, and "The Torino Impact Hazard Scale"

Hello there! It’s time for my latest “Linkfest” — i.e. "the opposite of doomscrolling”, in which I carefully and patiently boil the entire Internet to produce a delicious reduction of its most esse...

Generating random strings in Bash

How to generate random strings in Bash.

Background Clipping

A neat effect to use text as a window to the universe!

How To Find Your Customer In the Dept of Defense – The Directory of DoD Program Executive Offices

Finding a customer for your product in the Department of Defense is hard: Who should you talk to? How do you get their attention? How do you know if they have money to spend on your product? It alm...

Lose-able keys are a feature

In opsec, duress (“rubber-hose”) attacks are famously hard to address. Cryptographic keys that cannot be lost have poor protections against duress.Travelers can leave key fobs at home should they b...

Reasons I still love the fish shell

I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old...

Judging is a trap

I was going through my Obsidian notes and noticed that there are a couple of almost-finished posts that are actually quite good—more than a couple, in fact. My intuition tells me it’s both good and...

Observability wide events 101

What are wide events, why and how should you implement them?

Emojis are cool

I use a lot of emojis when I write (especially chat), and it has always struck me as interesting that most people around me don’t. “Don’t they want to convey how they feel about this?” I ask myself...

On Israel-Hamas War

Typescript Eleventy Config

Node 22.6 introduced the --experimental-strip-types flag, and eleventy 3.0.0 adds support for JavaScript module configs, which means we can set up an 11ty project written in TypeScript using esm an...

Setting up Mainsail on Ender 3 V3 KE

How to setup Mainsail and webcam support on Creality Ender 3 V3 KE printer.

AutoOOO Featured in Workspace Developer Spotlight

A little bit of self-promotion: AutoOOO has been featured in the Google Workspace Developer Spotlight, a series of interviews that Google conducts with developers of innovative Workspace add-ons. Y...

Smallest GIF? Meh! Tiniest data URL is a BMP!

There is the occasional need for the tiniest possible image, but what can we use as one?

The Legend of Playing All the Zeldas

I played all the main Legend of Zelda games. Here are my thoughts on them all.

RE: Write like you talk

Earlier today I was reading some new posts by Visa. There’s not much to say about that, except that he uses pretty normal words and writes very well. This might seem like an odd comment, but it ste...

Easily Entering Umlauts With a US Keyboard Layout

Easily Entering Umlauts With a US Keyboard Layout As a software developer, a US keyboard layout is great for entering all the special characters you need while coding and for using certain applicat...

What does the scanner see?

On Out of Office emails

This summer, I found myself multiple times reading out-of-office emails. Actually, this is not a new phenomenon: it has happened every summer since I started working. Obviously, it also happens out...