I recently bought a few spiral-bound notebooks from Muji - two for work, and two for personal use. My intention for the personal notebooks was to use them as a destination for inconsequential thoughts, schemes, grocery lists, todo lists, and so on. In digital note-taking software these are often called 'fleeting …

When writing a web service in Rust you may be tempted to do careful research based on your use case, to tailor your code to fit the needs of a typed language with strict memory safety, and to take a pragmatic approach to development. Doing things this way might make …

If you've hung out in Linux enthusiast circles lately, you'll have heard whispers that Arch Linux is no longer hot product. Instead, all the cool kids are using something called NixOS.

Since I bricked my Debian setup in an unfortunate accident involving compiling from source, I decided to give NixOS …

If you just want the VirtualBox VM for this article without the philosophising, skip to the appendix.

We live in a world full of distractions. In the modern "attention economy" it's more of a challenge to avoid content and advertising than it is to find it.

Nowhere is this more …

Wouldn't it be great if you could type out an article on your computer, push a couple of buttons, and have it appear on the web? No clunky page builders, no admin logins, and no mandatory updates.

With the right setup for your website, this is possible.

I wrote about …

Simple websites are better than beautiful ones.

I'll repeat that for the folks in the back.

Simple websites are better than beautiful ones.

Let me be clear what I mean by a simple website. I don't mean a Wordpress site with a minimalist theme. I also don't mean a Substack …

In a previous article I discussed the power of todo lists and their use in organising your tasks. I have a confession: for a long time I didn't use task lists. This is because of some practical issues which plagued me as a user of those tools. And when I …

After writing the lexer I could turn any math expression into a set of tokens. However, they were still organised as a list and couldn't be used to do any useful work. To go from a list of tokens to a program, I needed to write a parser.

The goal …

Trying to build a complex program in Python is like trying to build a house out of jello. I love it, but while Python's delicious, flexible, and lacks the annoying quirks of most languages, this relaxed nature is a dire problem for complex projects. Python uses duck typing:

If it …

Many of my students ask questions like:

• How long does it take to get your first job?
• How do I know I'm ready to apply for jobs?
• What do I need to know to get my first programming job?

They are often frustrated when I say "it depends". But this …