Posts

My journey of greeting strangers I’ve held onto a garbled memory of a passage in the first few pages of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the few decades since I read it: Roads free of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you’re from and how long you’ve been riding. ...

My Qualifications Since this is my own blog I’m usually happy to avoid reminding you of how qualified I am. In this case it is easy to note that: I spent a dozen years teaching shell scripting on UNIX and Linux with materials that I wrote the majority of. The students were surprised and happy to have a teacher that had real industry experience. I’ve done 46+ code reviews for bash on Code Review StackExchange over the last decade. I’ve been a fan of bash and a detractor for csh and ksh for 30+ years. Terminology note For purposes of this article I’m going to talk about the “shell” referring to various shell implementations which traditionally end in “sh”. This excludes scripting languages such as Perl and Python. I’m not trying to say anything bad about Python here. There’s plenty of that already on the Internet. The most popular shells these days are bash, zsh, and fish. Most of what I’m going to say could apply to any of them, but some things will be specific to the Bourne Shell (/bin/sh) and compatible shells such as bash and ksh. ...

There’s a tremendous amount of hype and hate around AI these days. Most techies seem to be on the hype side and most normies are on the hate side. Everybody has “good enough” reasons for their takes on this. Nobody is obviously wrong. I don’t think the technology is far enough along that we can say it is clearly a net negative, like cryptocurrency has turned out to be, but the concerns that it could go that way are reasonable and we should not leave the risk abatement to the tech industry that has shown so little concern for its effects on our society. ...

Look, I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area long enough to know that “sunny California” is a reasonable approximation, but it is also a myth. We’ve got microclimates that change faster than JavaScript frameworks, marine layers that stick around like bad technical debt, and the general disappointment of expecting 75°F and getting fog instead. So obviously, I built a bureaucratic form. Because nothing says “California” quite like filing paperwork to express dissatisfaction with the weather. ...

Look, I know what you’re thinking: “Another dev scratched their own itch and now they want to tell me about it.” Guilty. But hear me out, because this particular itch has probably been annoying you too, and the scratch is genuinely useful. The Problem Nobody Talks About Here’s the scenario that broke me: I push a PR, immediately run gh pr checks --watch, and… it bombs out with an error because GitHub Actions hasn’t queued anything yet. So I wait. I run it again. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. And when it finally does start showing me checks, I’m staring at a list of job names with no idea whether that 3m 52s I’ve been waiting is normal or a sign that something’s silently wedged. ...

I’ve always liked the idea of backing into parking spaces, but for most of my life I didn’t think much about my motivation for this. After a while I decided that backing in was a sign that I wasn’t a procrastinator. The procrastinators pull straight into places because they’re not even thinking about the potential challenges of backing out later. (Sorry to throw shade on the procrastinators. My snark could be genetically linked.) Viewing the people that pulled straight into spaces as procrastinators satisfied me for decades, yet I always felt like it wasn’t thought through as well as it could be. Despite the philosophical hand-waving, I kept up my tendency to back into parking places. Through the years I’ve learned a few things that might be more convincing. Welcome to a journey through my confirmation bias. ...

Zip Files are Everywhere I grew up with PKZIP. It was a huge improvement over ARC files and other file formats that were supported on PCs in the 80’s and 90’s. Open source implementations of Zip have been available in Linux since the early days. In modern times, tools like 7-Zip provide a popular and friendly interface into the contents of these files. Hopefully this history is already familiar to you since I’m not going to focus on the usefulness of Zip to users, but how often developers have turned to it. ...

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in modern America are not departures from our founding principles but rather the fulfillment of ideals articulated by the nation’s architects. While the practical application of these values has evolved over centuries, the philosophical foundation for DEI can be traced directly to the words and vision of America’s founders, including George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration’s Promise and DEI’s Mission Thomas Jefferson’s most famous contribution to American political philosophy appears at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence: ...

Introduction I really enjoyed reading The evolution of Lua, continued that I learned about thanks to this Hacker News thread. This is a great perspective on the long-term (15 year) evolution of the Lua programming language. While discussing language evolution is not completely unheard of, it is rather atypical of the discussion we usually have around programming languages. Most often you’re only concerned about the syntax or features of a particular language version, usually the latest one. Sometimes you might look at release notes to see when a feature was introduced or a bug was fixed. Our day to day needs don’t often benefit from a longer term perspective. ...

Is anyone in my network looking for work these days? One of our family members works at Vocal Media. They’ve been very happy with their role, so I hope this Senior Software Engineer role could be worth your time to check out. It sounds focused on the data warehouse from the job description. So you don’t have to worry about me competing with you. Feel free to comment on this post or DM me if you’re actively looking for something now.