benjamin wil

Smith’s, often stylized as Smiths, R.I.P., was a beloved basement pub located at 777 Courtney Street, a short walk from the Greater Victoria Public Library’s downtown branch.

my summer off work is almost over. in a few days, i’ll be picking up some at-my-own-pace software contracting work. i don’t feel totally ready to do that yet, but it’ll be okay.

At the recent XO Ruby Vancouver event, Ryan Davis (zenspider) gave a talk called “Git Power Tools.”1 I would recommend it to any beginner or intermediate Git user whose team a) collaborates on a large codebase, b) collaborates using a rebase workflow, and…

after years of lurking on the kakoune user forums, i posted there for the first time. i requested feedback on my blog post from a week-ish ago. typically, the kakoune user forums get between one and three new topics posted per month. there are “only” a ha…

I wanted to conditionally add the current buffer’s word count to Kakoune’s modeline.

From my phone, I noticed that my website was displaying footnote backlink glyphs as emoji in my RSS reader.

so my website has two main feed sources: the main weblog, and this antisocial feed that came into existence via rss club. until now they’ve been fully separate things, but i noticed: other rss clubbers generally have a single unified feed. based on some e…

Developers and nerds have seemed satisfied with Markdown as a plain text format for a long time.

Recently, I implemented JSON Feed support for my static site generator, Lifer.

after deliberating for a while and doing some budget-math, i decided to take the summer off of work and attempt to recover from burnout. maybe i’ll write about that more over the next few months. this is the first time since i was fourteen that i haven’t…

You probably already know: there’s no excuse to not be using a password manager in 2026.

for over a month i’ve spent a weird amount of my free time trying to set up an android development environment (via react native, and then nativescript) on my laptop running the guix linux distribution. i even had a bit of help thanks to some writing about

it’s a bit weird: yellows and blues and reds. what do you think?

the process is still evolving, but i’m going to describe my notetaking system as of right now. i started from zero in novemberish last year and am getting happy with the cadence and quality of my notes as of starting this new system. the biggest change th…

i’ve published two (small) non-antisocial blog posts this month, which is about one more than usual: semantic style ruby blocks portable feature flags in ten-ish lines of ruby the topics probably aren’t interesting to most people, let alone most rubyists.…

It may make sense to use a mature feature flag library or pay for feature flags as a service in your complex application.

these are not the things that i necessarily would want to win, but what i think will happen.

Here’s another blog post vouching for writing Ruby blocks using the semantic rule.

hi. rss club showed up in my feeds today, and then i remembered that this feed is linked there and i haven’t used it in a while. and then i clicked on the feed and realized that nginx was rendering the feed with a mime type of text/xml rather than applica…

This month was the 32nd occurrence of the Victoria Film Festival here in Victoria, British Columbia.

Today I’m launching my website redesign.

As always, in an unranked order, here are the thirty best movies I was able to watch in 2025.

After EuRuKo in Viana do Castelo, I spent some time in Porto.

I was at EuRuKo last month, held in a small city in the Norte Region of Portugal called Viana do Castelo.

I’ve worked with more than one Ruby on Rails application that has a catch-all GET route at the end of its config/routes.rb file: Rails.application.routes.draw do resources :posts resources :users # This route is defined after all other routes as a…

I’ll be at EuRuKo, the European Ruby conference, in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, this month.

Recently I’ve had two occasions to think about how to typeset musical artist names when next to their album release names.

Note that this article criticizes GitHub’s Discussions feature (originally launched in 2017) as it exists now, in July 2025.

If you want me to read some text, use your computer’s text-copy commands to provide me with the data rather than taking a screenshot.

In one of the first scenes, Karsh explains to a date that the GraveTech cemetery he built, where Becca, his Jewish wife, is buried, is a “non-denominational” grounds.

While working on my static site generator, Lifer, I was occasionally annoyed by how my test feeds were being read by RSS feed readers.

Since releasing Lifer 0.3 in January I’ve released six more minor versions to get the project stable enough to start using.

In 2023, I wrote this guide to getting familiar with Ruby and Rails for my employer, Super Good Software.

I recently released 0.3.0 of my static site generator project Lifer, which I intend to use to build this website in the (near) future.

In no particular order, here’s my annual list of the movies I loved that I saw for the first time in 2024.

As usual: here’s my annual list of the thirty best movies I watched for the first time this year.

In 2022 I watched some movies for the first time, as I do every year.

I was in Providence, Rhode Island, for RubyConf Mini and had the opportunity to eat and drink at some amazing places.

I attended RubyConf Mini in Providence, Rhode Island.

Recently I released an EP 777.

As usual: here are thirty films, that I liked or thought were good, that I watched for the first time this year.

Earlier this year, I was invited to join the Gollum organization after making some contributions to the main Gollum repository.

I released an EP called No longer there.

Mark Francis Johnson’s Treatise on Luck is a book of poems that investigates luck: where it comes from, where it goes, and where it isn’t.

A marked improvement in my film consumption since 2019.

I just released a new LaunchBar 6 theme called Assimilated.

I released some music last week.

i decided it was time to make a dark colour scheme for this website. i haven’t touched the styles on here in a while, and it was weird to go through them and see how my brain had decided to organize them. i didn’t do a bad job. but, i dunno, definitely a…

Please also read Jennifer West’s introduction to the film.

There are plenty of full-featured git forges out there.