BlogDB

Consistent Handling of Git Repositories With Different Default Branches

Consistent Handling of Git Repositories With Different Default Branches Why Do I Care About Default Branches? Typically, I develop on a feature branch, and when the feature is ready, there is an ob...

Negotiation Assistant

Negotiation Assistant

Strange Loop's greatest hits

The LAST Strange Loop conference is right around the corner! The conference has accumulated 673 videos on its YouTube channel, which means there’s gold in them hills, but finding the gold might con...

Bethesda's Starfield is a disgrace to game development and a slap in the face to gamers

Nowadays PC gamers are used as guinea pigs when big gaming titles are released with major bugs, major performance issues, and other similar problems. Even though PC gamers are used as guinea pigs, ...

Lightweight container building blocks

Documenting various open-source tools and projects that I've found while experimenting with the Linux container technology.

Please don't write application launchers in `sh`!

`sh` is not a programming language! Write application launchers in proper languages!

At First, Schizophrenia Just Watches

At first, Schizophrenia just watches the girl.  …  She is three, and if something terrible were to happen to her—Schizophrenia must see the worst—the papers would have called her angelic. She is of...

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek Documentary, 18 Years Later

In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college inte...

Linux becoming a Windows / OSX clone

A rant about the complexity of modern Linux distributions, which places them on par with the opaqueness of Windows and OSX.

Teaching Magic

Teaching Magic

What to Do About These High Interest Rates

Whoa, have you seen what just happened to interest rates!? Suddenly, after at least fourteen years of our financial world being mostly the same, somebody flipped over the table and now things are q...

Rational Agents Cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma

Rational Agents Cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma

Ergonomic Emacs

TV Raman recently wrote a nice post about his tips for achieving better typing ergonomics in Emacs. His tips are very good. He utilizes a combination of key remapping software, and changes some Ema...

Finding out your public IP address via curl

How to find out your public IP address on the command line after reinventing the wheel using Rust, Axum, Nix, a docker image and Fly.io.

Navigating Learning in an Attention-Deficit Economy

Experimental design for similar studies

Here is a problem I’ve seen a few times: Suppose we propose a design for a test of a system. The experimental design is based on power analysis, so we select and execute the design that is 80% powe...

"Waterfall" doesn't mean what you think it means

Editor’s Note: After publication, Kris joined us on Changelog & Friends to discuss this article, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a dist...

A 3D Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life is a simulation developed in 1970 describing a grid of binary cells and transition rules for each cell which depend on the state of the cell’s neighbors. It’s capable of creat...

The Economics of Organized Play

The Economics of Organized Play

Undesired horizontal scrolling

One of the issues with responsive design and lots of people working on a single site is that there is a chance to make the page too wide accidentally.