Today I learned: that comm
is a thing! Suuuuper handy little command line tool for when you need to get the lines that are common to two files, or the lines which aren’t common to two files (which is what I needed).
Archive
Every single post on the site. Subscribe via Atom or JSON feed, or via email.
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2021
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Jan
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22
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Using Classes for Functional Programming — JOURNAL
We tend to think classes are inherently for object-oriented programming, but they are much more flexible than that in JavaScript and TypeScript (and other languages too).
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20
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19
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13:47 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
This piece by Michael Sacasas on last week’s failed insurrection takes a somewhat grimmer outlook than I do in the end, but his analysis is nonetheless illuminating. Worth your time to read the whole thing.
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11:10 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
Let those who have ears, hear:
a radical appeal can be a mass message. But you have to know who you’re talking to, you have to give a shit about what’s likely to motivate them, and you have to get past repeating that something is unfair.
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18
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19:52 ❈ — NOTES
What the heck do people who do this stuff for a living use for editing ID3 tags and publishing? The cheap-or-free tools available out there are terrible for the “I want to make this piece of music seem professionally-produced” scenario: they all focus on “manage your library!”
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14:26 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
Notional Machines and Introductory Programming Education is an outstanding survey — focused on a key element in teaching year-1 CS students: “notional machines” (which are not the same as “mental models”!). Teaching is a huge part of my job, and this was quite illuminating.
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09:44 ❈ — NOTES
Status: not far from the point where I just sell my iMac in favor of running a 5k monitor off of my M1 MacBook Air, which is literally twice as fast.
Only thing holding me back is RAM, which does matter for large music productions.
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14
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08
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07
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06
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05
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04
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Just Write — JOURNAL
Even if you only have five minutes: write anyway.
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holiness and jealousy — LIBRARY
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03
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20:58 ❈ — NOTES
I’m rereading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with my 8½-year-old as she reads them for the first time.
Upside: she adored The Hobbit and immediately dove into Fellowship.
Downside: I could barely keep up with her and I have to go back to work tomorrow. 😅
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God as the Holy One and God as Redeemer and Saviour — LIBRARY
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02
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09:12 ❈ — NOTES
(Equally applicable to ‘spiritual’ quotes and C.S. Lewis. But then you have to re-misattribute this.)
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not primarily morally legislative but soteriological — LIBRARY
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01
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16:35 ❈ — NOTES
As promised in yesterday’s year-end post, I’ve put up a Speaking page on my website. If you’d like me to appear on your podcast or speak at your conference, now you know how to get in touch!
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God is holy as he bends down to us in mercy — LIBRARY
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2020
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Dec
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31
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Wrapping Up 2020 and Starting 2021 — JOURNAL
Goodbye, good riddance, won’t look back fondly on this one.
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09:59 ❈ — NOTES
Recent discovery:
git worktree
is a super handy tool for working on multiple branches in parallel without needing separate clones of the whole repository. Lighter weight and therefore faster!
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30
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29
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28
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27
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the trap of thinking that we know what’s going on here — LIBRARY
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18:36 ❈ — NOTES
Dear Apple: would it have killed you to include a headphone port on the iPad Pro? Using it for music production would be a lot easier if you had.
cables, ugh
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22
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Understanding
args
in Glimmer Components — JOURNALClearing up a common confusion with a worked example.
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16:25 ❈ — NOTES
At long last — literally over a year late! — we just published our revised, Octane-ready docs for ember-cli-typescript. They’re far from perfect, but we’ll iterate from here. And keep your eyes open: lots more motion in this space over the next six months!
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21
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20
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14:37 ❈ — NOTES
I just discovered MailMate (@mailmateapp), and I think it may just have been designed specifically for me and no one else. 😂
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the requirement for theological reason — LIBRARY
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19
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18
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09:26 ❈ — NOTES
I have gotten spoiled over the last decade by tools like Pandoc which let me assemble a final document from a set of smaller documents. Working with Google Docs for work… there is just none of that. One more thing I dislike about Google Docs.
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08:18 ❈ — NOTES
While I understand what Apple is trying to do with increased security for Macs, I am getting fed up. My work machines don’t allow changing the Security & Privacy settings… so I simply cannot use tools like @RogueAmoeba’s Audio Hijack on Big Sur. heavy sigh
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13
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12:44 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
I just posted my roughly-annual entry to our family blog — with pictures and lots of little updates from the year.
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11
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19:23 ❈ — NOTES
Automatic-semicolon-insertion makes a number of potential design moves for JavaScript hard-to-impossible — like ‘just’ making existing statements into expressions (which is otherwise at least close to feasible).
So…
"use semicolons";
, anyone? 😏 -
11:01 ❈ — NOTES
Getting ready to upgrade my main machine to macOS 11. First things first, though: I have a ton of musical scores in Sibelius’ format, I’ve since moved to Dorico, and my old version of Sibelius doesn’t launch on Big Sur. So: spending my morning exporting everything to
.mxl
.
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08
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07
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Ember Octane is a New Mental Model — JOURNAL
…not a 1:1 translation from Ember Classic — but that’s often a big win!
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06
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20:14 ❈ — NOTES
I’m in an archival mood this evening, so I’m exporting all my old Sibelius files into MusicXML and MIDI: proprietary formats are bad for long-term storage!
Along the way, I’ve discovered music I wrote in the 2000s that I had completely forgotten about. 🤯
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13:28 ❈ — NOTES
I built a tiny tool to delete all my old tweets, since previous passes via online apps weren’t doing the trick (something something Twitter API limitations). Was a fun little exercise!
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05
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16:32 ❈ — NOTES
Cleaning up my Twitter follows list (cutting it from ~500 to ~50 tops) is a kind of hilarious way of seeing my own personal history reflected in the timeline of who I followed when. 😂
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Reluctantly Returning to Social Media — JOURNAL
I have to be on social media professionally… but I don’t have to live there.
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03
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02
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19:01 ❈ — NOTES
I’m restraining myself from quoting from every. single. paragraph in John Webster’s Holiness, but wow: this book is packed. The quote I scheduled for tomorrow morning is positively 🔥.
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reason is a field of God’s sanctifying work — LIBRARY
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01
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Nov
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30
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the unholy science? — LIBRARY
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Private Chat and DMs Are Good, Actually — ESSAYS
Don’t forget the lessons of physical offices when thinking about chat.
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28
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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore — LIBRARY
Robin Sloan’s debut novel was just astonishing.
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11:46 ❈ — NOTES
Robin Sloan has a great and glorious talent, and it is this: to take things we have learned to treat as mundane, and infuse them with enough mystery-or-magic-or-both that we feel the wonder of them again. It is genuinely marvelous.
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11:01 ❈ — NOTES
A friendly notice, prompted by a conversation with a friend: you are not only welcome but encouraged to borrow from the design and content of this site — which are licensed under MIT and CC-BY 4.0 respectively. All you have to do is give credit and get your own font licenses!
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26
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15:58 ❈ — NOTES
Playing around with Dendron a bit as an interesting note-taking tool. Not my thing, but it strikes me that the “hierarchical” approach it takes could actually work very well with a traditional Luhmann-style Zettelkasten.
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10:59 ❈ — NOTES
Sooooo much to learn about Logic Pro and the new virtual instruments I got via early-Black-Friday-sale… but I’m having a ridiculous amount of fun with it. (Good samples make a huge difference!)
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25
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10:09 ❈ — NOTES
Just set up scheduled builds for this site using Netlify and GitHub Actions (following this handy guide) so that I can schedule drafts for the future and have them go live automatically.1 It’s pretty astounding how great these kinds of free tools are at this point.
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24
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20:09 ❈ — NOTES
I need to figure out
howwhere to rehost my newsletter content. There was a lot of good stuff in there, even if it had the same challenge of any regularly-published content and thus a mix of stuff that is just fine as well. -
17:14 ❈ — NOTES
I’ve just added an ‘Updated’ section to my home page. Hopefully it’s a nice little signal that this site is a living space where I make changes from fixing typos and grammar to (potentially) outright changing my mind about something!
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15
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19:55 ❈ — NOTES
Per the Geekbench scores, the new MacBook Air is about 65% faster in single-core and 75% faster in multi-core operations than my maxed-out 27″ iMac from early 2016. 🤯 Absolutely bonkers.
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19:43 ❈ — NOTES
When I’m really worn out, I reread fiction I love. So yes, I did just reread Leviathan Wakes for the fifth or sixth time. #2020, people.
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13
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08
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07
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03
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20:54 ❈ — NOTES
Consider this your friendly semi-regular reminder from me that a really tightly-edited podcast is an enormous amount of work. A ~30-minute Winning Slowly episode normally takes a solid
3 – 4 hours of “production” work! -
08:13 ❈ — NOTES
I do believe my weekend adventures in Prolog slightly broke me. I keep trying to end statements in JavaScript this morning with periods instead of semicolons. 😂
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Oct
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31
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Notes on Thoughtbot’s “Stop Using ‘any’” — JOURNAL
A couple tweaks and improvements to a good post!
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12:45 ❈ — NOTES
I have a sneaking suspicion that many things I used ad hoc and fairly complicated decision tables (sometimes in Excel!) for in the past, I will now at least sometimes use Prolog to solve instead.
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12:20 ❈ — NOTES
Okay, Prolog is cool. (Still reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, though it’s taking a few more weeks than that.)
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27
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22:13 ❈ — NOTES
Did my civic duty and voted this evening. One takeaway: there is an enormous gap in information about local politics. (Good luck finding out anything about a county judge’s record without just reading the court records yourself.) The internet effectively killed the previous version of local newspapers, and their replacement has yet to appear.
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16:22 ❈ — NOTES
Today I set up my camera as a camera for using the just-released software support for it. Two observations:
- It works really well!
- I had no idea just how wide the lenses on the built-in webcams are until I set this up a foot away from me with a 35mm lens. 😅
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26
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20:30 ❈ — NOTES
I started reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore tonight and even a chapter in, I am just delighted. (I feel obliged to ask: is Mr. Penumbra a secret alias for Mr. Rogers?)
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25
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21:30 ❈ — NOTES
Just finished reading Zeynep Tüfeçki’s utterly masterful Twitter and Tear Gas. The book is astonishing. It gave me better frames for thinking about a great many things I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and it is a masterful work of academic scholarship presented in a way that just about anyone could read.
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15:07 ❈ — NOTES
I’d love to see Apple put its money where its mouth is on privacy and human rights: iOS 15 should make it straightforward (even if not the default) to install apps from outside the App Store. Repressive regimes would hate it.
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10:03 ❈ — NOTES
Learned how to use the
INDEX
andMATCH
functions in spreadsheets this morning. I’m always amazed at how powerful spreadsheets are — and all with relatively simple tools.
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24
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Writing Robust TypeScript Libraries — JOURNAL
A subtler art than it might at first appear, if you intend to support JS or even loose mode TS.
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10:33 ❈ — NOTES
I continue to hold out hope that Apple will ship a 14″ laptop redesign akin to the 16″ they released last year — perhaps with the ARM transition. I love my 13″… but it’s just a hint too small.
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22
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18:57 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
Really enjoyed listening to this podcast episode with my friend1 Stephen Carradini discussing social media from his vantage point — both as a Christian and as a professor at ASU focused on the subject. Give it a listen!
yes, and long-time cohost ↩︎
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10:23 ❈ — NOTES
Yesterday I started converting a small utility app from a jQuery+Node setup to an Ember Octane app — with TypeScript, of course! — which we could deploy statically via simple static hosting a la GitHub Pages or whatever… and it’s a really good experience.
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21
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20:16 ❈ — NOTES
As of 15 minutes ago, my almost-7-years-running Winning Slowly cohost Stephen Carradini and I have now published more episodes this season than any previous. Good job, us!
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13
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Data Constructors, Part 2: Better TypeScript — JOURNAL
A deep dive on more idiomatic TypeScript implementations of ML-style data constructors.
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20:15 ❈ — NOTES
The iPhone 12: in which Apple finally returns to the best form factor the phone ever had. (And the Mini is closest to its best incarnation: the original SE.)
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12
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19:58 ❈ — NOTES
After spending a year in aperture priority, I finally graduated this evening to manual mode with automatic ISO. It’s lovely. (And the Sony α7R IV, which I first tried out via rental exactly a year ago, is still just the best.)
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11
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17:30 ❈ — NOTES
What I actually want for my website: an opinionated(-but-matches-my-opinions, of course) site generator written in Rust which acts like a static site generator but has a tiny server with a tiny CMS and uses Glimmer for its templating engine.
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God teaches us — LIBRARY
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06
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Initializing Class Fields in Ember Octane — JOURNAL
One of the many small-but-lovely benefits of getting to use native classes in Ember Octane.
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Sep
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30
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21:58 ❈ — NOTES
So much for seven books; the evening’s total is nine. (I blame the last two entirely on Brad East.)
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21:41 ❈ — NOTES
I can neither confirm nor deny reports that I ended up buying seven books instead of just the one I needed for an upcoming Winning Slowly episode.
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28
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Finding Holy in the Suburbs — LIBRARY
A solid popular-level book — which I wish pushed just a little harder than it does.
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Politics & The Order of Love — LIBRARY
A good book, if not quite the one I hoped for.
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26
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Things I Was Wrong About: Types — JOURNAL
Because it would do us all good to be a little more honest about where we’ve changed our minds or simply been mistaken.
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24
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09:21 ❈ — NOTES
Every so often, I try to switch back to Sublime Text from VS Code, because Sublime is so much faster and lighter-weight. But the feature gap is just too big at this point. What I still — desperately — want: an editor with Code’s extensibility, but truly Mac-native and fast. (Onivim and Nova: both interesting, but not quite there in various ways.)
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23
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19:53 ❈ — NOTES
Finally finished the Ruby chapter in Seven Languages in Seven Weeks and started into the chapter on Io… and am reminded why Io delighted me so much from the first time I encountered it half a decade ago. It’s just so incredibly elegant!
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22
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20:15 ❈ — NOTES
I spent more time on this ~2,000-word post than any I’ve published in the last year. Net, I probably wrote around 8,000 words to get it down to the correct 2,000 in the end. And I’m still barely satisfied with it. Writing, people.
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Autotracking: Elegant DX Via Cutting-Edge CS — JOURNAL
A modern JavaScript reactivity system powered by Lamport clocks and incremental computation and depth-first searches: oh my!
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20
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18:21 ❈ — NOTES
I have a problem, and it’s called too many interests. I started reading Boyd’s Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra today, because I’ve long wanted to fill this gap from my college math. But maybe I should finish other in-progress books first?
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19
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A Chalcedonian conceptual grammar for love and justice — LIBRARY
What if we thought of “love” and “justice” like the hypostatic union?
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16
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20:02 ❈ — ❈ — NOTES
Mere Orthodoxy — “defending nuance and word counts on the internet since 2005” and my favorite Christian publication anywhere period at this point — has launched a Kickstarter! I’m proud to have been published in its pages a few times over the years, and hope that this crowdfunding campaign succeeds such that I can actually be published in its physical pages in the years ahead.
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11
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07
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15:54 ❈ — NOTES
Podcast pet peeve: interview hosts who talk over their guests, and don’t even bother to smooth it out with a light edit. It makes it really clear you’re not actually editing at all, and frankly shows a lack of respect for both the guest and the listeners!
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All is broken and incomplete, and politics can not heal the rupture. — LIBRARY
Summarizing the basic shared commitments of all Augustinian liberals, whatever their many other differences
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05
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Data Constructors, Part 1: Understanding by Implementing — JOURNAL
Understanding an idea from Standard ML-like languages by implementing it in (boring) TypeScript.
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04
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Tracking in the Glimmer VM↩︎ — ❈ — ELSEWHERE
Chris Garrett (@pzuraq) explains to me how autotracking and the Glimmer (Ember) template layer connect!
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Aug
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30
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18:10 ❈ — NOTES
A doctrine of the church is only as good as the doctrine of God on which is built.
— John Webster, “He Will Be With Them” (Kantzer Lectures No. 6), 14:55
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29
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Can You Recommend a Book on This? — JOURNAL
Probably not, unfortunately. Maybe I can write something up, though?
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12:50 ❈ — NOTES
On the defense (mounted too often) of someone’s ill behavior online that “I know this person in real life and he’s not like this”: the internet is part of real life and what you do online is inescapably a part of your character.
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28
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Async Data and Autotracking in Ember Octane — JOURNAL
Digging into the
load
helper andAsyncData
type I introduced in an earlier post.
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22
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the mixed moral qualities of any age — LIBRARY
In which Eric Gregory makes it clear that this book is extremely for me.
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11:27 ❈ — NOTES
A reader replied to my previous note and informed me that Laravel’s Blade templates have components with “slots” built in. Good for Blade! Now we just need everybody else to catch up…
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21
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16:35 ❈ — NOTES
We really, really need server-side template languages to catch up to, you know, 2014, where components are a thing and you can do this:
<Quote @src={{this.book}} @loc='p. 123'> Look ma! Content *within* a *component*! </Quote>
Nunjucks/Jinja macros are the closest I’ve seen and… they’re not even close in terms of expressivity. This is why people build things with React/Vue/Ember/etc. just for server-side stuff: because the DX is miles ahead.
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09:20 ❈ — NOTES
I’m ridiculously excited to sit down and listen to the whole of Christopher Tin’s newly-released To Shiver the Sky — an album I backed on Kickstarter back in early 2018. Worth the wait? YES.
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19
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21:06 ❈ — NOTES
Almost fifteen years since the first time I encountered an RSS feed (and therewith XML), I actually spent the time tonight to learn what
<![CDATA[...]]>
is.Related: I believe I have (finally!) finished fixing my Atom feed output all the way. 😅
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09:42 ❈ — NOTES
I can’t really listen to podcasts or watch talks and work at the same time. I also can’t watch talks and walk or run at the same time. What I can do is listen to talks and walk or run at the same time. But there are a lot of great talks I want to learn from!
Solution: youtube-dl plus Overcast Premium’s file uploads feature. Boom.
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17
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Migrating Off of
PromiseProxyMixin
in Ember Octane — JOURNALAn important refactor for getting rid of mixins and proxies.
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16
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Twitter and Me, Redux — JOURNAL
A 2020 update on my take on that particular social medium.
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Good theology demands good theologians — LIBRARY
How spiritual formation is not mere interiority or “authenticity” but death-and-resurrection at the hand of the living God.
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15
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13
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Polemic is Hard — LIBRARY
One can only take so much bludgeoning-of-bad-ideas before growing weary of a book.
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13:54 ❈ — NOTES
I just tried to switch to Slack and ask a colleague a question, and I could not for the life of me figure out why it wasn’t working: everything else I hit was.
…then I remembered that I blocked Slack for the next hour and a half so I’d stay focused. 😂
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theological self-criticism — LIBRARY
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08
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17:36 ❈ — NOTES
Finally decided to pick Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I guess I’m finally going to have to spend more than twenty minutes with Ruby. 😅 (I’m mostly excited about Prolog, Clojure, and Haskell.)
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09:29 ❈ — NOTES
Trying out something new this weekend: spending some time doing a weekly review, along similar lines to what Ben Kuhn does… if a bit more limited on the time allocated to the review.
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the story of modern theology — LIBRARY
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06
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04
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21:46 ❈ — NOTES
Started reading Mary Midgley’s Evolution as a Religion for the September episodes of Winning Slowly. This is going to be quite the ride.
(Let’s just say that her grasp on the problems of evolution-as-religion is better than her grasp on the nature of religion itself.)
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03
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Christian Theology’s Place in the University — LIBRARY
Or, John Webster cracking very wise.
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Humans of Open Source↩︎ — ❈ — ELSEWHERE
Chatting with Sean Chen about open source, Christian humanism, and working in public.
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02
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01
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Jul
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31
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20:32 ❈ — NOTES
Reading Eric Gregory’s Politics & The Order of Love at the recommendation of an internet acquaintance. I’m… cautiously hopeful?
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Perfectionism Without Perfectibility — LIBRARY
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30
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06:40 ❈ — NOTES
Reda Lemeden, from whom I got the idea of This Week I Learned in the first place, on his own experience of the same challenges:
But I remain convinced this is a habit I’d like to keep — if anything, it helps me rebuild confidence in my ability to follow through commitments of this kind.
I had to make different choices by circumstance, but intellectual work as a kind of discipline is something I cannot affirm more heartily.
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28
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25
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14:21 ❈ — NOTES
For the technically minded among you: I just made some small tweaks to the site’s design… and you should note that you can always see what I’m up to and why by just reading the Git history.
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Please Reply! — JOURNAL
My Atom and JSON feeds gained a new “feature.”
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24
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On Ending “This Week I Learned” — JOURNAL
At least for now, I don’t have time for this particular bit of blogging. And that’s okay.
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An anti-culture — LIBRARY
What theology must be if it is to be healthy and fruitful as a field.
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20
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18
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07:12 ❈ — NOTES
As I’ve been working working to build this site into something flexible and robust enough to handle all the kinds of things I want to do with it, I keep coming back to wanting to be able to define custom content types, and to easily compose them together. Markdown is great as a text authoring format, but it’s not rich enough for many things we do.
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Good Theologians — LIBRARY
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17
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16
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15
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01
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A Git Workflow for Managing Long-Running Upgrades — JOURNAL
Using some lessons learned in the trenches of large upgrades.
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Jun
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28
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15:59 ❈ — NOTES
In semi-related news: my fingers are remembering how to play somewhat more complex things on the piano again, and it’s been really, really good for my soul.
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15:53 ❈ — NOTES
Just published the last issue of my newsletter. It’s been a great run, but time to focus on other things — not least so I can actually finish some of those other things!
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27
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21
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19
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17:00 ❈ — NOTES
I was hoping for a pleasant afternoon implementing a markdown-it plugin for “line blocks” to support poetry. It was… not a pleasant afternoon.
markdown-it is fast, but between its API design (:shudder:) and its mostly-missing docs (:sigh:) it’s terrible to work with. I quit.
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13:00 ❈ — NOTES
Honestly, seriously wrestling with the fact that I’ve made a little progress on the rewrite web app this year and no progress on the iOS app this year. How the heck am I ever going to finish this thing at this rate?
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15
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14
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07
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21:03 ❈ — NOTES
Back at my week-level bullet journaling. It’s always helpful (even when I don’t get through everything on my list); I just need to make it stick!
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Building the Slow Way — JOURNAL
Or, part of why rewrite is taking a while: I’m in this for the long haul.
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May
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31
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Reading Habits — JOURNAL
How exactly do I go about reading, and what do I read these days?
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30
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 8 — JOURNAL
SpaceX launched today, and I am launching the rough draft of “Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight” to honor it!
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28
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 7 — JOURNAL
Memorial Day and Thursday night progress…
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25
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Making Illegal States Unrepresentable — In TypeScript — JOURNAL
Showing how Scott Wlaschin’s approach in F♯ translates to a language with a very different type system.
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24
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 6 — JOURNAL
A surprising amount of progress over the weekend — the muscles are coming back!
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This Week I Learned #5 — JOURNAL
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11:46 ❈ — NOTES
It astounds me that there is no text editor on iOS which gets everything right (like syntax highlighting) for writing about programming, and in fact none which do everything right on modern iOS, including keyboard and now pointer support, Files support, and syntax highlighting.
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17
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19:01 ❈ — NOTES
Lightroom CC needs an update to work with the new iPad Magic Keyboard and trackpad. Once it has that, it’ll be down to one or two features to be hands-down better than the desktop version. (Which is pretty astounding, if you think about it!)
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16:18 ❈ — NOTES
With today’s This Week I Learned and issue of Across the Sundering Seas, I’m somewhere north of 50,000 words published this year. Now, if only some of those were essays…
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This Week I Learned #4 — JOURNAL
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16
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15
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Designing an Atomic CSS System — JOURNAL
Making my CSS scalable from the outset.
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13
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20:27 ❈ — NOTES
Next thing I’m thinking about with rewrite (while trying not to over-think): design systems! I want to build this in a scalable, maintainable way.
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mut
(andset
) and auto-tracking in Ember Octane — JOURNALUnderstanding a surprising behavior — and fixing a refactoring hazard.
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08:11 ❈ — NOTES
Last night I threw away almost all the build config I’d been blinded by this spring while working on rewrite: webpack config, TypeScript integration, you name it. What I have left: a simple bunch of npm scripts that I can run in parallel in different terminal sessions:
{ "scripts": { "clean": "rm -rf dist/*", "build:static": "cp static/* dist", "build:css": "sass --load-path=./node_modules src/style.scss dist/style.css", "watch:css": "sass --watch --load-path=./node_modules src/style.scss dist/style.css", "build:elm": "elm make src/Main.elm --output dist/app.js", "watch:elm": "watchexec -w src 'elm make src/Main.elm --output dist/app.js'" } }
It’s not fancy, but it gets the job done just fine for the things I’m actually working on — rather than things I’ll need eventually — and that’s exacty the right balance at this point.
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12
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10
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09
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08
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21:20 ❈ — NOTES
Dear readers (and listeners-to-music!): I thought I had nothing to share from today’s composing… but I was wrong! I made some progress! If you saw the Day 5 post when it went up, pop back over and give the update a look’n’listen.
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 5 — JOURNAL
Fighting a horrible mood by making progress anyway. Not much. But enough.
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This Week I Learned #3 — JOURNAL
Less reading this week… because more composing.
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07
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 4 (Part 2) — JOURNAL
Reworking rhythms to make the next section of this piece connect more clearly to the first.
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 4 (Part 1) — JOURNAL
I have a version of this piece I could publish! Now to get the rest of it done…
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06
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 3 — JOURNAL
The first draft of the first section is complete!
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14:28 ❈ — NOTES
Status: just emailed my old composition professor at OU asking for recommendations on orchestration books. ♬ The one class I really wish I’d taken while studying composition.
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05
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 2 — JOURNAL
I wrote some good harmonic lines! I started learning a new notation software program!
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08:10 ❈ — NOTES
A pain point for would-be readers with the way I’ve designed this site: there’s no easy way for people to subscribe to just one specific topic at present. I can generate per-topic feeds… but I’m already seeing painfully-rapid growth in build times.
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04
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Composing a Fanfare for Crew Dragon: Day 1 — JOURNAL
Sharing my work as it happens for this composition.
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Follow-Up on Command-Line Finding and Filtering — JOURNAL
A simpler solution that doesn’t require
tr
… if you have GNU utils or other alternatives.
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03
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20:24 ❈ — NOTES
Well, it only took me till almost six months after launching this site revision, but the About page is finally finished!
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13:05 ❈ — NOTES
I got curious, and (after some command-line shenanigans) figured out that I’ve written/collected about 22,000 words of notes in my Zettelkasten so far in 2020. That’s… a lot of notes. 😅
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find, grep, xargs, and newlines and null — JOURNAL
Turns out
tr
is your friend for this kind of thing.
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02
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This Week I Learned #2 — JOURNAL
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19:35 ❈ — NOTES
Things fancy cameras cannot help with: setting your 𝑓-stop too low so you don’t get everyone in focus.
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Apr
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29
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The Infra Engineer’s Blind Spot — JOURNAL
Why I ended up down a rabbit hole instead of shipping.
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06:34 ❈ — NOTES
New approach to goals: write a little every morning, work on rewrite a couple evenings a week. Trying to make massive amounts of progress is hard right now for a variety of reasons, but if I can make a little progress every week I’ll get somewhere.
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28
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26
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09:00 ❈ — NOTES
Between my new This Week I Learned entries, an interest in having all my notes in one place, and a desire to actually use my notes system more effectively I’m trying something new with my reading: notable things I read (and my comments on them) will now live in Bear instead of Pinboard. I expect this will help a lot with active review of my reading notes. (I may go ahead and do something I’ve thought about for a while and pull all of my Pinboard notes over to Bear, too!)
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25
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16:07 ❈ — NOTES
I just updated the first entry in my “This Week I Learned” series because I realized I’d left off a couple items I meant to include — the first items I bracketed for inclusion, in fact! What can I say? It was a long week. 😅
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24
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09
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JavaScript Functional Immutable Update Performance — JOURNAL
What are the performance implications of “immutable functional updates”?
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08
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Superscript and Subscript Line Heights — JOURNAL
A tip for better typography.
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05
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On “Saints” — JOURNAL
Should we prepend the term to “Paul” or “Augustine”?
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Mar
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30
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29
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28
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21:00 ❈ — NOTES
With today’s issue, I have officially made it through a quarter year of publishing Across the Sundering Seas on my target schedule. A nice little victory!
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25
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22
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Waiting for Communion — JOURNAL
A coronavirus reminder of our place in the time between the times.
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21
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The Lost World — LIBRARY
Not quite as spectacular as the first entry… but still a lot of fun.
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17:21 ❈ — NOTES
Perhaps the single most-broken thing in iOS’ Files app: the fact that you cannot specify a default app to open a file in. An arbitrary app wins. It’s infuriating.
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15
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Jurassic Park — LIBRARY
A book that knows it is both a sci-fi thriller and sociotechnological commentary.
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08
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19:42 ❈ — NOTES
Status: working on figuring out how to wire up Elm and Rust-via-WebAssembly using webpack. I’ve spent the last four years in Ember and before that I was wiring up Gulp. So this is new. 😅
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16:13 ❈ — NOTES
Quick Git tip: if you’ve manually edited your Git configuration file and removed a given remote, you may find yourself in a spot where you now have a bunch of branches associated with that remote… which you cannot delete. The only way (I could find) out of this problem was to re-add the remote, and then run
git remote rm <the name of the remote>
. That deleted the remote and all the references to its branches -
10:34 ❈ — NOTES
Wanted: something like The Archive, but for iOS. Bear is beautiful and I love it, but I want my notes on disk because then I can do anything with them from anywhere — not just what one app can come up from. (And yes, a document object model like people dreamt of in the 90s would also solve this well, but for today I’ll take what I can get.)
And yes, this is what I’m working on with rewrite.
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05
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20:46 ❈ — NOTES
I’m not quite sure how this had never occurred to me before the last week or so, but I ordered some refills for my current favorite gel pen and it only at that point occurred to me that I could put those refills in a different pen case. 😂 At some point I’ll have to try that.
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14:35 ❈ — NOTES
One of the critical things Jira gets wrong — besides just generally having pretty bad information architecture — is that it treats issues as a tree instead of a graph. But that’s often not how projects and tasks actually relate to each other!
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03
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01
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God’s self-commitment to creatures — LIBRARY
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18:09 ❈ — NOTES
After digging in further: Zig is not doing quite what Rust is. It is an updated C, which eliminates some of the worst foot-guns, but fundamentally does not try to eliminate memory-unsafety… which profoundly disappoints me, even if I still wish Zig success.
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14:33 ❈ — NOTES
Zig is the first language that I’ve seen which seems interested in seriously playing in the same space as Rust.
And it does it in a substantially different way, which I like! It feels (reading docs) kind of like a “doing the kinds of things Rust does but with C instead of C++ as its direct competitor.”
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Feb
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29
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16:41 ❈ — NOTES
I really, really wish GitHub had a slightly lower entry point for Teams/Organizations. I’d like to do everything for rewrite in a single organization on GitHub, rather than all under … but $25/month is frankly kind of steep for one developer. I’d be happy paying $10/month for just organization management, with the jump to $25 for supporting multiple developers. As is, though… GitLab looks appealing, whatever its other weaknesses.
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15:38 ❈ — NOTES
This feels good. Substantial increase of January’s time and mileage… despite the fact that this ended up being something like the 4th snowiest February on record along the Colorado Front Range! I spent a loooooot of time running in the snow this month.
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11:30 ❈ — NOTES
A quick sketch of an idea which I hope to test out by the end of the day: the best way to handle “responsive” routing in an Elm app — for a master-detail view where the master view isn’t visible when at a detail route on screens below a sufficient size — is to just use a port and send a message on screen size change.
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28
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23
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17:25 ❈ — NOTES
I’ve spent a good chunk of this afternoon working through and tweaking and fixing some things about this website, and as much as I like 11ty, at this point I would love to be doing this work in Elm instead. A tool like elm-pages seems very appealing.
As for why: I just spend a lot of time sad about JS “sorry bro that’s
undefined
” stuff and templates being totally type-unaware. Even something like Gatsby + TS would probably be better here, but Elm’s rigor and top-to-bottom integration of types and rendered HTML and CSS would be a huge win for the way I build websites.
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20
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19
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20:21 ❈ — NOTES
This is, perhaps, a little odd, but: one of the little things I’m most excited about with Winning Slowly right now is that — at long last, and years overdue — we’re actually doing something with Patreon. We’ve had it, and had minor benefits for it for a long time. Now we’re taking it seriously: keeping it up to date, publishing extra materials there, etc. Crazy talk, I know!
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18
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13:20 ❈ — NOTES
One thing that makes me eager to upgrade to the next-gen iPad when it comes out (…and I’m actually seriously contemplating the 12.9″ this time around) is how fabulous it is to be able to do the entire workflow for things like cameras on it with just normal cables.
It is already my default device for photo editing (Lightroom on iPad is 💯) and I think it’s going to be my default for podcast editing after having done Winning Slowly 8.03 in Ferrite. (To anyone interested in podcasting, I’d absolutely recommend Ferrite over anything else out there at this point. The experience of editing a podcast with that app and an Apple Pencil is just phenomenal.)
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15
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Scripting Affiliate Links in Alfred — JOURNAL
Perhaps weirdly, I haven’t done much of this before!
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13
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Adding a Reading List Page — LIBRARY
A central place to see what I’ve read and what I’ve said about it!
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09
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How I Publish This Site — JOURNAL
Explaining how I run this site — everything.
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02
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Ulysses Publishing With WordPress on Linux — JOURNAL
A tech tip for other folks using WordPress on custom Linux setups.
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Jan
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26
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Problematic — LIBRARY
You keep using that word. I’m not sure you know what you think it means.
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Fall-Centered Theological Anthropologies — LIBRARY
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23
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Tiamat’s Wrath — LIBRARY
The things only the eighth book in a series can do.
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18
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Please Don’t Just Screenshot Books! — JOURNAL
A PSA to writers-on-the-web about how we share text.
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12
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Tell Me Your Priors! — LIBRARY
A gap I wish David H. Kelsey’s introduction in Eccentric Existence had filled.
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11
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An Atom Feed Apology — JOURNAL
Doubly embarrassing for having now messed up both of my feeds.
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10
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Epistemic Status — JOURNAL
Making explicit just how confident I am (or am not).
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01
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A Decadal Kind of Change — JOURNAL
Rethinking this site — and my own vocations — as the 2010s give way to the 2020s.
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2019
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Dec
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31
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Adieu to 2019 — JOURNAL
A year of rest and recovery, for which I’m profoundly grateful.
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Dark Matter — LIBRARY
I could not put this book down. Also, it was kind of creepy.
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Recursion — LIBRARY
Blake Crouch’s latest thriller is — delightfully — about something.
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19
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Writing Implements — JOURNAL
Sheer delight — by way of writing in a Pano Totebook with a Uniball Signo RT1 0.38mm.
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13
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Endings and Edges — JOURNAL
Reflections prompted by Michael Sacasas’ wrapping up a decade of blogging.
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10
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08
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Decaffeinating — JOURNAL
How and why I switched to mostly decaf coffee.
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04
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On Remembering Scripture — JOURNAL
Time to stop leaning so hard on search.
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01
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Some Thoughts on micro.blog — JOURNAL
I like the service. But I’m not using it.
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Nov
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30
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25,462 Words — JOURNAL
Reflections on a month of writing.
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28
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A JSON Feed Apology and Explanation — JOURNAL
All my best efforts and this is still where we end up!
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27
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…but Running is Sunlight — JOURNAL
(Why yes, that is a riff on Superman.)
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26
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Travel is my Kryptonite — JOURNAL
It ruins all my normal habits and rhythms and tanks my productivity.
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21
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Twitter Bots and “Decline” — JOURNAL
Picking up a dropped thread from Winning Slowly 7.13
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18
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Writing Requires Reading — JOURNAL
…as my November-writing adventures make clear!
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17
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