YAML Anchors and Aliases
The YAML Spec defined a simple way to reuse values in YAML documents by means of Anchors and Aliases. ...
Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part One
As of 2022, I’ve been using zsh as my primary shell for 14 years. Over that time I’ve experimented with and accumulated a lot of configuration, scripts, hacks, plugins and themes. I’ve settled on a configuration that I’m mostly happy with, over this series I’m going to share my current setup. ...
Encourage Your Peers To Contribute To Open Source
Contributing to Open Source is important to the quality and maintainability of the software and engineering communities we rely on every day - so why is it that so many developers/engineers never participate? ...
Making Work Visible - Avoid DMs
We create more value by having conversations in public instead of behind closed doors. ...
The Best Of - 2022 Edition
Near the end of each year I note down a summary of the best apps I’ve enjoyed using throughout the year, here’s 2022. ...
It's 2022 and we're (still) not deploying enough
We’re (still) not deploying enough It’s 2022 and not deploying frequently enough is still one of the most common causes of software failure. ...
DALL·E 2 - Selected works
Over the past month I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, below are some of the interesting images I’ve generated. “DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” “A renaissance oil painting of two developers arguing over which javascript framework is the worst” “A Ralph Steadman painting of 7 cats sitting on a fence, and one raven” ...
Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises
Beginner Harmonica Practice Exercises Way back in around 2008 I wrote up a doc with a list of beginner harp exercises and practice riffs, at the time it was uploaded to a few forums and a shared Google doc - both have since disappeared. To this day I still get regular emails asking for a copy of it so I thought I’d copy it to a post here. Note: I haven’t updated these since around 2011. ...
Firefox Addons for 2022
Firefox Addons - 2022 Edition My list of must-have Firefox addons - 2022 edition Updated: 2022-11-07 Privacy and Security Firstly - you should have Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled. Don’t Track Me Google LocalCDN UTM Tracking Token Stripper Note: You can accomplish some of what this does by setting up the removeparam uBlock origin rules I’ve listed below. Multi-Account Containers Useful for setting sites such as Amazon, eBay, Twitter, LinkedIn, Banking etc… each to always open in their own isolated container. The official addon for whatever Password Manager you use. Firefox Translations uBlock Origin Probably the single most important addon. ...
Goodbye Evernote, Hello Bear
Until recently I used Evernote for my notes, web clippings and document drafts, I was a subscriber going on 14 years and had over 3000 notes. However in recent years Evernote has gone downhill to the point it could be considered hostile to it’s users. The native macOS app was replaced with an Electron Javascript webframe and like almost all Electron apps I’ve tried it was plagued by poor performance, memory leaks and aggressive idle CPU utilisation and above all else it now lacks the low latency feeling the native application had. ...