mgmarlow.com - List of blog posts

Into the Breach is fantastic because it captures a particular kind of magic moment.

Xbox finds itself in the midst of a C-suite rotation and the classic destruction of thousands of jobs that follows.

Edit: I recently discovered https://indieweb.org/read which solves this problem by embedding feed information directly in the HTML rather than generating RSS/Atom.

My previous post details setting up Sequoia PGP for email encryption, where I gloss over technical details in favor of waxing poetic about the virtues of privacy.

The Discord Face ID debacle has reminded me that centralized platforms routinely abuse user privacy.

Like many software engineers I've been experimenting with coding agents as part of my day job.1 My approach is still in its infancy: a handful of tabs and sessions organized by tmux, terminal split in half while coaching Claude through planning and implem…

Monster Chess is my attempt at a chess puzzle game that doesn't require any knowledge of chess except the movement of the pieces.

The cryptic is a special kind of crossword that is unfortunately lacking popularity in the US.

A recent popular article compares React to Backbone, arguing that React is not much of an improvement.

Back in 2020, Ruby 3.0 introduced a system for writing type definitions for Ruby programs called RBS.

Out of the craziness that has been the last couple weeks of NPM supply-chain drama we're reminded that Deno at least had a few things right when it pushed for a secure-by-default stance towards third-party code.

I can't stop thinking about two puzzle games that came out last month.

Short version: I'm building a new Emacs package: Helix Mode.

Using Action Cable in React is surprisingly difficult.

The following is an email I sent a friend regarding Kafka on the Shore.

Six months after swapping back over to HEY for email feels like the appropriate time to check in on how it’s going.

Lately I've been addicted to a new daily word puzzle game called Bracket City.

My process for onboarding a new Mac: Remove all of the apps from the default dock.

I've been digging into Ruby's stdlib RSS parser for a side project and am very impressed by the overall experience.

(The type-checker, not the state of deep work) React's recent sunsetting of Create React App has me feeling nostalgic.

Today I found myself at the bottom of a rabbit hole, exploring how Zod's refine method interacts with form validations.

Some folks don't want their entire Emacs configuration to live in a single, thousand-line file.

Stumbled on the emacs-aio library today and it's introduction post.

Lichess is an awesome website, made even more awesome by the fact that it is free and open source.

A little while ago Apple Notes left me with quite the scare.

The holidays are always a great time for puzzles.

I'm always surprised when distilling a year into a single post just how many things take place over those 365 days.

I've blogged before about why I really dislike apps like Notion for taking quick notes since they're so slow to open.

This year I've substantially buffed up my crosswording skills.

The React homepage promises that "learning React is learning programming" and I think the framework somewhat delivers on it.

Type predicates have been around but today I found a particularly nice application.

What I traditionally would've used Rake tasks for has been replaced with data-migrate, a little gem that handles data migrations in the same way as Rails schema migrations.

There's something super elegant about Writebook's use of concerns.

My list of reasons for using Apple Notes isn't very long.

Earlier this year 37signals released Writebook, a self-hosted book publishing platform.

I've read a few stories about folks moving their email from HEY to Fastmail, but have not seen any in the reverse direction.

I finally have started working through Crafting Interpreters, a wonderful book about compilers by Robert Nystrom.

Emacs 30.1 is near on the horizon with the most recent pretest (30.0.93) made available in late December.

Recently I've been deep down a crossword puzzle rabbit hole.

I can't believe I'm writing another post about Awk but I'm just having too much fun throwing together tiny Awk scripts.

I picked up Awk on a whim and am blown away by how generally useful it is.

I've subscribed to Kagi for a few months now and wanted to collect some of my feelings towards it, particularly addressing whether I think it's worth paying $10/mo for a search engine.

I read 24 books in 2023, a total of just over 8,000 pages.

Tsoding's recent stream about React is a hilarious reminder of the complications of web development tooling and the lack of support for beginners who want to take a bottom-up approach to learning.

My partner and I are slowly working our way through the Myst series and have finally started Myst 3: Exile.

I'm taking a page from Tom MacWright's blog and am trying out a "Recently" series, where I summarize a few things on my mind since my last post.

I've been spending a bunch of time fiddling with Deno lately, mostly in the form of small scripts and Fresh projects.

My side project has exploded in scope.

I love small weekend projects.

Last weekend I had a great time building my own Flymake backend for Clippy (the Rust linter): flymake-clippy.