The Grimoire

Mistakes were made.

It’s time to tackle logs and tree farming.

Tar: the renewable energy source of tomorrow.

Welcome to the Mushroom Kingdom.

“A land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

“You have crashed on a planet almost completely covered in water.”

Welcome to PyBlock Hard Mode.

I’ve been a professional software developer since the early 2000s and an enthusiastic amateur even longer.

Entity and record types make a handy way to express “this has to exist before I can use it” in data access code.

Sometimes the defaults get in your way.

A by-no-means-exhaustive list of direnv configuration techniques I’ve found helpful.

If T implements Future, then &mut T also implements Future.

I am, increasingly, of the perspective that when a business pays programmers to automate some part of its business process, they do so because it will be cheaper to do that than to pay someone to remember that process.

A series of observations on choices that make small systems more successful.

Shut down your PagerDuty account, unless someone will die if you don’t answer it.

Cass: “So does Susano temper people?”

I put way too much effort into this dumb joke.

Musings on the differences between what characters “know” and what their authors know, and the gap created by FFXIV’s evolving relationship with its own narrative.

Computer science and development-adjacent papers and academic works I encourage people to read.

In 2020, Aphyr wrote A Satisfactory Way of Building, exploring the the idea of pattern languages through the forces and consequences imposed by Satisfactory.

A general and less tooling-intensive approach to automating routine project tasks.

I’ve found myself in the unexpected situation of having to write a lot of browser apps/single page apps this year.

A style guide.

An SQL schema and associated queries for handling permissions when roles can nest arbitrarily.