Writing helps me think. on warpedvisions.org

Years ago, something clicked when I read about Anthony Bourdain’s approach to feeding crowds.

Remember autoconf?

There’s a moment in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker that fundamentally changes how you see the game world.

I spent three hours last night hand-drawing pixel fonts in Pixen, placing each dot with care.

I was debugging a power issue with my thermostat last week when it hit me: I had no idea how many batteries were in my house.

We’ve been watching the AI gold rush unfold for the past two years now, and honestly?

I’ve been thinking about the current AI moment, and I can’t shake the feeling that we’re about to hit a wall.

Evolution has a weird obsession with crabs.

There’s a feeling you get when everything clicks into place.

As a hobby, I’ve been perfecting various burger recipes.

Your AI coding assistant hasn’t gotten worse; you’ve just hit the ceiling of what your current approach can handle.

After three months of AI-assisted development, I’m more productive than ever.

Something weird happened the other day.

After thirty-something years of working in terminals, I’ve developed a pretty strong bias toward doing things from the command line.

There’s a familiar anxiety in the air among software architects and engineering leaders.

When I was 8, a flakey tape drive ate three weeks of BASIC code.

We’ve all seen the ergonomic warnings.

I sat down a few weeks ago to ask Claude to help me analyze some user feedback data.

This style guide captures patterns from 20+ years of technical writing about software, design, and the human side of technology.

My dad only knew how to cook a few dishes, but he was proud of each one.

I remember an old cast aluminium pot, handed down from my grandparents.

I regularly stay at a corporate apartment with a nice little kitchen that has only stainless steel pots and pans.

This is the 42nd version of my personal website and weblog, once again self-hosted at Dreamhost.

Pork loin was on sale this week, packaged in half loins (roughly 3.5kg).

The site has been many different things over the years, from a tumble of links, rants, essays, and quotes, to a straight up log of essays.

Hi, I’m Bruce Alderson.

This is a hacky fridge-magnet recipe to use up some old herbs and sour cream.

There is a point in your career where you start to weigh what you want to say with what you can and should say.

Today I wanted a relish for a dish so I made some: ½ cup of chopped, sweet pickles ½ cup of chopped, pickled peppers (mild - medium) ½ cup frozen corn, diced, and fried (until edges are brown and crispy) ¼ cup diced onions (purple is what I had on hand) ½…

I like to tell people that I’m proactively lazy.

Adapted from my traditional and very knead-y pizza dough, which we discovered by accident that one time when we somehow left it in a cupboard for a few days.

There are a few ways to make pizza sauce, depending on how lazy you are.

I reworked my flexible Thai curry recipe into something that I can make in less than an hour (recipe here).

Today we were craving stir fry so I decided to practice the basic method two ways: lemongrass pork and sweet ginger/garlic pork.

I love food.

Today’s dinner was inspired by a social media photo from my morning feed.

I have a reminder on my TODO list that haunts me weekly: Problem: I’m not writing.

I find trends in style guidelines interesting, especially when shared style guides lag language usage in the wild.

This is the 40th evolution of warpedvisions.org.

I’ve been using Pico-8 as a virtual playground for playing with generative art ideas.

I’ve been playing around in PICO-8, working on some generative art ideas.

One of my art projects last year was an attempt at nerdy art in a retro PCB style: The idea was to use traces and board shapes to make something fun.

I set up a new dev laptop for myself over the Christmas holidays.

In the last year I read a lot less than normal, while at the same time I watched more streaming shows than I’m used to.

I was looking at buying a set of PFEIL carving tools this year, but was holding off as they’re pretty pricy.

When my sketchbook is stale and I’m not feeling inspired, I look to pop culture for inspiration and ideas.

One of my favourite reads is Kottke.org, a blog by Jason Kottke.

A coworker was asking me what I used for linocut, so I made a chart of the blocks on my desk.

Occasionally I like to sketch and carve things around our lemony brand.

2017 was a good year for JavaScript.