Some Go web dev notes
I spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks working on a website in Go that may or may not ever see the light of day, but …
Julia Evans
Reasons I still love the fish shell
I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love …
Migrating Mess With DNS to use PowerDNS
About 3 years ago, I announced Mess With DNS in this blog post, a playground where you can learn how DNS works by messing around and creating records. I wasn’t …
Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I’d missed)
I’ve been writing Go pretty casually for years – the backends for all of my playgrounds (nginx, dns, memory, more DNS) are written in Go, but many of those projects …
Entering text in the terminal is complicated
The other day I asked what folks on Mastodon find confusing about working in the terminal, and one thing that stood out to me was “editing a command you already …
Reasons to use your shell’s job control
Hello! Today someone on Mastodon asked about job control (fg, bg, Ctrl+z, wait, etc). It made me think about how I don’t use my shell’s job control interactively very often: …
New zine: How Git Works!
Hello! I’ve been writing about git on here nonstop for months, and the git zine is FINALLY done! It came out on Friday! You can get it for $12 here: …
Notes on git’s error messages
While writing about Git, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks struggle with Git’s error messages. I’ve had many years to get used to these error messages so it took …
Making crochet cacti
I noticed some tech bloggers I follow have been making April Cools Day posts about topics they don’t normally write about (like decaf or microscopes). The goal isn’t to trick …
Some Git poll results
A new thing I’ve been trying while writing this Git zine is doing a bunch of polls on Mastodon to learn about: which git commands/workflows people use (like “do you …
The “current branch” in git
Hello! I know I just wrote a blog post about HEAD in git, but I’ve been thinking more about what the term “current branch” means in git and it’s a …
How HEAD works in git
Hello! The other day I ran a Mastodon poll asking people how confident they were that they understood how HEAD works in Git. The results (out of 1700 votes) were …
Popular git config options
Hello! I always wish that command line tools came with data about how popular their various options are, like: “basically nobody uses this one” “80% of people use this, probably …
Dealing with diverged git branches
Hello! One of the most common problems I see folks struggling with in Git is when a local branch (like main) and a remote branch (maybe also called main) have …
Inside .git
Hello! I posted a comic on Mastodon this week about what’s in the .git directory and someone requested a text version, so here it is. I added some extra notes …
Do we think of git commits as diffs, snapshots, and/or histories?
Hello! I’ve been extremely slowly trying to figure how to explain every core concept in Git (commits! branches! remotes! the staging area!) and commits have been surprisingly tricky. Understanding how …
Some notes on NixOS
Hello! Over the holidays I decided it might be fun to run NixOS on one of my servers, as part of my continuing experiments with Nix. My motivation for this …
2023: Year in review
Hello! This was my 4th year working full time on Wizard Zines! Here are a few of the things I worked on this year. a zine! I published How Integers …
Mounting git commits as folders with NFS
Hello! The other day, I started wondering – has anyone ever made a FUSE filesystem for a git repository where all every commit is a folder? It turns out the …
git branches: intuition & reality
Hello! I’ve been working on writing a zine about git so I’ve been thinking about git branches a lot. I keep hearing from people that they find the way git …