Elijah Potter's Blog

Someone Remixed Tatum A while back, I wrote a small tool, dubbed “Tatum”, for rendering Markdown to HTML for use alongside Neovim.

Some New Projects Are Using Harper I recently did some snooping (through Dependabot) on what open source projects have been using Harper.

Generating Weir Code with LLMs As you know, I’ve been working on a small programming language called Weir for generating corrections to natural language.

Updates on the Weir Language In my last blog post, I described the why, what, and how of the Weir programming language.

Building the Weir Language Most large organizations have a style guide.

Harper Can Apply Title Case In case you didn’t know: Harper can convert text to title case!

Harper Turns 1.0 Today Today, we published Harper’s 1.0.0 release.

Quality Requires Visual Design Earlier this week, I was looking through a table of user feedback about Harper.

Re: Collaboration Sucks Earlier this week, I came across a really great post from a product engineer over at PostHog.

Improving Rust Compile Times By 71% If you maintain or work on a project in any compiled language, particularly a language that is known for having a slow compiler, I believe it is critical to regularly schedule time to do an analysis of your build process

Finding Signal Through The Noise As the maintainer of Harper, I read through dozens of issues and pull requests per day and countless more per week.

Avoid Complexity For as long as I can remember, I’ve told people that the real challenge of software engineering isn’t writing code.

Using Codex is a Lot Like Baking The biggest problem with AI programming today is not what I expected a few years ago.

My Writing Environment As a Software Engineer TL;DR: Get a good text editor, and get good at using it.

Trying out the Helium Browser I’ve decided to give the Helium browser a shot.

Brainstorming a Harper Service SaaS products are all the rage these days.

Improving Harper for Old Laptops The most common complaint I’ve been hearing as of late relates to Harper’s performance.

Demos Make Life Worth Living The initial goal of any greenfield project of mine is to build a working demo.

What We Can Learn from New York City Today marks the end of my first week in New York City.

The Chrome Extension Supersedes the WordPress Plugin Several months ago, I announced the initial version of the Harper WordPress plugin.

I Spoke at WordCamp U.S. in 2025 I had the incredible opportunity to speak at WordCamp U.S. at Matt’s suggestion.

The Books I Have Read Since July of 2025 Whenever I can, I try to stop and reflect.

Harper Evolves I want you to read that title as literally as possible.

The Art of the Talk I’ve given dozens of talks over the years, yet I still feel like I have much to learn about public speaking.

Harper in the News The biggest complaint about Harper is that the quality of grammar checking still needs some work.

Better UI for Grammar Checking Grammar checking can be cumbersome, especially when its sloth gets in the way of your thinking.

Speaking at WordCamp U.S. in August I was recently encouraged to submit a talk proposal to the AI track at WordCamp US.

Why I Talk to Myself Each week I sit down and reflect on what I’ve learned.

Reflections on Expression Rules Just like grammar itself, Harper is rule-based.

Training a Chunker with Burn In a previous post, I detailed how I implemented a basic nominal phrase chunker using Transformation-based learning (not to be confused with the transformer class of neural network models).

Writing Good Documentation I believe that good documentation is more important than ever.

Writing an Expression Rule for Harper This is part of a series.

Writing a Phrase Correction for Harper This is part of a series.

Writing a Grammatical Rule for Harper Harper is a grammar checker that relies on concrete, legible grammatical rules.

Adding a Programming Language to Harper When I started the Harper project I knew I wanted to be able to use it for the comments in my code.

Local-First Software is Easier to Scale The title of this post is somewhat misleading.

Code Ages Like Milk A bold title, no?

The Books I Have Read Since April 2025 It has been a slow couple of months for my reading habit.

Harper for Firefox There’s a great deal of overlap between those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.

Refactoring More and Faster I’ve been deep in the refactor rabbit-hole.

Continuations on Transformation-based Learning The most common type of machine learning out there takes the form of some kind of neural network.

Transformation-based Learning for POS Tagging Harper is currently undergoing some pretty radical changes when it comes to its language analysis.

Quality Is the Most Important Metric Harper’s Chrome extension continues to come along beautifully.

Harper in Firefox Through SpellBolt We designed Harper to be the ultimately portable grammar checker, but we’re still working on living up to that promise.

Integration Testing Thousands of Websites with Playwright As I’ve accounted and discussed in previous posts, one of the hardest problems Harper faces is that of the great diversity of the internet.

Bypassing Hallucinations in LLMs Before I get too deep, I just want to get it out of the way: OpenAI’s o3 model is impressive.

Putting Harper in Your Browser When our users install Harper, they should expect it to work anywhere they do.

Always Think of the Hook First In his popular book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell made the case that there was one number that predicted your skill level in a field: the number of hours of dedicated practice.

The Status of the Harper Chrome Extension Elijah!

ChatGPT for the Moms My mom is a violently intelligent woman.