Will Richardson

And so, my fellow programmers: ask not what your compiler can do for you—ask what you can do for your compiler. — John F.

Look it was bound to happen at some point.

This started after I watched Drew Gooden’s video about the music industry, focusing on Spotify.

This isn’t really that surprising, but sometimes you’ve just gotta point out the obvious stuff, you know?

Last year I made a version of ECR (the Crystal templating language) that allows for automatic escaping of values injected into an HTML template.

The aim of the game here is to use as few macros as possible.

Every year on March 31st I have a sense of minor guilt, anxiety, and sheepishness.

My iPhone 15 Pro has four physical buttons.

The other day I wrote about the new tools that developers are using to get work done.

The last year seems to have been the biggest change in developer tools ever.

The purpose of my container-management tool pod is to make it easier to do development and deployment using containers, specifically with Podman.

All I really wanted to do was learn a little bit more about different models for error handling, but then I kept seeing “effects” and “effect systems” mentioned, and after reading about Koka and Effekt I think I’ve been converted.

I think I’m pretty good at shell scripting: I quote my variables, I know the difference between $@ and $*, I know about checking that variables are set with the ?

When I first came across dependency injection I was a sceptic.

There seems to be a recurring sentiment that pops up every now and again on Mastodon: “this project looks interesting, but the installation instructions say to use Docker, so I’m not interested anymore”.

This all started as I was getting confused about how syntax highlighting broke on my website, and my confusion as to what GitHub could have possibly done to break it.

I feel obliged to include a photo, since this post is about photography.

When I published my last post I did my usual quick check on the real website, just to make sure it had published, and find the obligatory mistakes that only appear once it’s public.

Nothing says “sophisticated and refined” like putting your signature at the bottom of your blog posts.

Last week I gave a short talk on my adventures doing weird things with tmux.

Earlier this year I wrote about how I’d swapped my home “production” server over to use Alpine Linux.

It’s been almost two years since I started using JJ regularly, and almost 18 months since I wrote some tips on how to use it.

Everyone knows that ECR—the templating system built into the Crystal standard library—works at compile time, which makes it as efficient as writing to an IO manually.

After writing my last post I wondered if I could improve ECR to avoid the need to call HTML.escape explicitly when adding values to the template.