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.

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…

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I watched a lot of mediocre and objectively-pretty-bad movies this year.

For film-watching, 2018 wasn’t as good to me as 2017.

I updated my LaunchBar 6 theme Bijou (previously called El Capitan Small).

A public access Unix (or Unix-like) server is just a computer.

I just updated benjaminwil.info to use a new layout.

I am sharing with you thirty films that I saw this year, that I liked.

The Republic meets my threshold for something that is a movie, despite there being almost nothing to see.

Three years after first presenting Sleep when exhausted, I was invited back to the University of Victoria to give a short talk about it in David Leach’s WRIT 324 class.1 It turns out that giving a talk is the best possible excuse to revisit old work, espe…

I made a theme for LaunchBar 6, a Mac OS X-based launcher and automation tool.

The technical content of Sleep when exhausted, to anyone viewing its page source, is not by any means impressive and is crudely constructed.