Luke Hansford

This is probably a quite specific issue, but it's also obscure enough that I wanted to share in case someone runs into the same issue!

It took me a little while to get this one out the door, but I can at least say that I decided on this list around the new year!

Current setup - hardware Prior to this year I'd been running everything on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an external SSD.

In 2025 I took a different approach than I usually do when it comes to new year resolutions.

A new tradition!

This is a short guide on how we added canonical request logs to a Flask service we have running at Fishbrain.

2025, like 2024, wasn't the most groundbreaking year for me, but I think I made some positive steps.

Last weekend I tried out using Zed a newish editor that, surprise surprise, has a sales pitch of tight AI integration.

A few years back I added what I intended to be an evergreen "note" about the tech stack I use.

I spend a good chunk of my development time in the terminal, and to help myself out I've been tweaking the prompt I work with there to give me as much context as I need.

I recently purchased a Kobo Libra Colour as a replacement for a Kindle that had an untimely meeting with a leaky water bottle.

I saw Chris Coyier do an update on his default apps list for 2024 and thought it was a neat idea, so here's where I'm at for default apps as of January 2025.

In the past I've tried out the idea of yearly themes (a la CGP Grey) to set direction for myself in the new year.

As far as years go for me, 2024 was a little more subdued.

"Default apps" posts were a bit of a meme towards the end of 2023 and I had planned on doing one, but I guess I'm only just getting around to it now. 📨 Mail Client: Thunderbird and Spark.

Recently I was inspired by this post on Reddit and started playing with customising the look and feel of MacOS.

At Fishbrain we work with many programming languages across multiple projects.

I spent some time this week setting up macros in Roll20 for my D&D character and thought it'd be nice to share what I learnt.

Over the last few years I've started to default to using Github Actions when it comes to CI.

I've long been a productivity nerd and over the years I've leaned into using Todoist as my daily driver.

Well well, it's been almost a year since I last posted on my blog (kind of, more about that later on), so it seems time for a yearly review. 2022 was an odd one for me.

Following up from 2022's [[posts/2022-the-year-of-habits|year of habits]], I am for 2023 to be my "year of health".

2022 is going to be my "year of [[notes/habits|habit]]".

I've being using ZSH as my default shell for probably about 6 or 7 years now.

Performance is one of things that we know we should pay attention to as developers, but in practice it can often take a backseat to just getting the thing you're building done.

Check out my previous post about a Digital Detox The detox continues, and I definitely notice myself being less drawn to pulling out my phone or switching over to Firefox for some mindless browsing.

Check out my previous post about a Digital Detox.

Recently I've been reading the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and in it he proposes the concept of a "digital detox", wherein a person would refrain from any optional digital activities for a month.

Well, obviously that didn't go as expected!

One thing I've been struggling with recently working on fishbrain.com is the high cost of hydrating server rendered React.

Reading An Honest Review of Gatsby I kind of wish I'd read this article from Sentry before trying to migrate the Fishbrain tech blog from Medium to Gatsby.

Reading Former employees accuse Cards Against Humanity of a racist and sexist office culture This article goes into the accusations of racism and sexism at Cards Against Humanity, specifically regarding co-founder Max Temkin.

A couple of years ago I started working with a Ruby on Rails codebase and was stunned by how more well thought out the test were in comparison to Javascript codebases I'd worked with.

Reading How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real Thinking in React Hooks

I've been a little sporadic with these posts this year.

Reading TypeScript 3.0: The unknown Type I'm immediately going to start using the unknown type in my TypeScript projects after learning about it in this post from @mariusschulz.

Reading Gradually, Then Suddenly Tim O'Reilly reviews 10 areas of technology that he expects to see breakthroughs in overcoming years.

Reading [We have the techno-logy: building a Eurorack system for live techno]](https://www.noiseengineering.us/blog/2019/1/4/we-have-the-techno-logy-building-a-eurorack-system-for-live-techno) Noise Engineering has put together an overview of what you need

Watching Building Impossible Programs Julia Evans does a great talk about building a Ruby profiler.

Reading How To Deal with Dirty Side Effects in Your Pure Functional Javascript This is a great intro to a more intermediate level of functional programming in JS (and maybe just FP in general).

Reading Annoyed by Restaurant Playlists, a Master Musician Made His Own This article feels like peak-Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Reading Memorizing these three statistics will help you understand the world The title is a little clickbait-y (though that's pretty run-of-the-mill these days), but the article itself is still worthy.

Reading What He Does With What He Has: Blawan Interviewed Like most people I became familiar with Blawan after hearing 'Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage', and his subsequent disappearance from the musical landscape always left me wanting more.

Reading UTC is enough for everyone...right?

Today I've got a bunch of short recommendations as I've been procrastinating compiling them for the last few weeks.

Well I broke the chain again, though to be honest it was more just to a lack of anything to talk about rather than procrastinating/forgetting to write something like usual.

I missed a few weeks there - Chinese New Year has a tendency to disrupt my routines - but I'm back at it now!

Reading The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth Pankaj Mishra is an author I always love to read so it was nice to stumble upon this NY Times Magazine article from him.

Reading How I review code A Tumblr engineer walks through his process for code reviews.

Part One Part Two Switching the switch / Converting the power to Eurorack format Foot switches are, understandably, a little hard to press down.