Matthew Planchard's Blog

After 15 years, 1Password's response to my concerns about their donations to Omarchy prompted me to switch to Proton Pass.

A quick summary of how to maintain git history when moving a subdirectory of a larger project out into its own repository, e.g. when open sourcing a monorepo component.

Another quick pattern overview and/or reminder for those of us like myself who sometimes miss the obvious: if you need to get a message from some background task, to which you already have the Sender side of a Sender/Receiver pair, rather than creating a…

What use is a dynamic résumé generator if you aren't doing A/B testing?

(Or, Maximalist PDF generation with Nix, Make, Emacs, and LaTeX) — I realized recently that it had been five years since I updated my résumé.

TIL that the tree utility on most (all?)

A quick summary of a neat pattern I have found myself falling back on again and again in async Rust programming, in which a struct wrapping an owned Receiver provides one pure method that takes ownership and converts the object into a stream, and another…

Setting up a local NixOS headless server to route all traffic through a VPN via WireGuard, while still allowing local traffic on specific ports for SSH et al.

The state of tech blogging is abysmal.

UPDATE is a dangerous operation in a high-throughput postgres database, and so it is often best to prefer an insert-only schema.

A crosspost from our engineering blog at work, in which I describe how we managed to migrate databases receiving millions of writes per day to time-partitioned tables without incurring any downtime or performance degradations.

A collection of tips and tricks for riding Amtrak

Today I learned this one weird trick to download a single subdirectory from a github repo, without needing to add the repo as a remote, do a spare checkout, or any of the other typical workarounds.

A quick story of how NixOS saved Christmas

A common question when starting out with nix is "how do I install some particular version of some package?"

Looking back on over a year of writing Rust professionally.

One of the great things about Magit is that, through using it, I wind up learning new things about git itself.

As your emacs configuration gets more and more complicated, it can be non-obvious which of many installed packages (or even built-in emacs functionality) is being called at any given time.

2021 was quite a year.

An overview of lessons learned from my time at Bestow, both technical and cultural.

A friend sent me Hickey's talk, "Maybe Not," which discusses some of the design constraints and decisions around optionality in ClojureSpec.

Cross-posting a post I did for our blog at work walking through the process of compiling a Rust project to webassembly such that it can be made available in a variety of JavaScript contexts, including both node and the browser, with an associated example…

I decided to move my blog to GitLab, both for the source and for hosting (via GitLab pages).

I added nix support for the blog's development environment, including support for both the upcoming flakes feature and current/legacy nix.

It’s been a minute since I put out a list of selected reads, which means we’ve got quite a few today.

From fancy Rust libraries and applications for working with the command line to deep dives into the role of Greek tragedy in driving psychological catharsis to meditations on the relationship between chess and philosophy, this selection of reads covers a…

Rust's trait system makes it easy to add functionality to existing types.

Rust has been the world's most-loved programming language for five years running.

It’s been a wild ride this week, with RustConf and the Democratic National Convention generating a significant amount of interesting content to digest, along with the usual steady trickle of interesting reads.

An exploration of some of the ways we intentionally or unintentionally make extra work and churn for our colleagues, how we justify it to ourselves, and how we can avoid it.

Communication is fundamental to the success of an engineering organization, and communication as a core value must be actively promoted in order for the organization to be successful.

Make and its associated Makefiles have been around forever, and have gotten a bit of a bad rap due to people encountering and writing arcane, poorly documented examples.

creating an RSS (Atom) feed from scratch

actually generating tag content

finishing up refactoring

collecting tags and posts into a nice HashMap

refactoring header parsing in preparation for tag support

Why bother having a custom blog at all?

lessons from growing up on the Gulf Coast

how to compose parametrizations for combinatoric testing

getting a compiler to run on a very old system