I’ve been going through a pile of old bitquabit posts. While many of them hold up over time, the more technical ones frequently don’t: even when I was lucky and happened to get every technical detail right, and every technical recommendation I threw out held up over time (hint: this basically never happens), they were written for a time that, usually, has passed. Best practices for Mercurial in 2008 are very much not best practices now. But it’s a bit tricky: whether something I wrote is…

As I mentioned in a recent post, I manage my blog using a static site generator. While this is great to a point—static site generators can handle effectively infinite traffic, they’re stupidly cheap to run, and I can use whatever editor I feel like—the downside is that I lose tons of features I used to have with dynamic blog engines. For example, while it’s almost true that I can use any editor I want, I don’t have a web-hosted editor like I would in WordPress or MovableType, and I likewise…

When the Apple Watch first came out, my initial reaction was basically disgust. Everywhere I looked, I saw people already Krazy Glued to their phones, missing the world around them to live instead in the small mini-Matrix in their pocket. Now, Apple was proposing to add additional distractions right on our wrist, making it even easier to ignore real life and stay focused on a screen instead. Not only was the Apple Watch not for me; it was a sad commentary on how tech was ruining our lives. Yet…

Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life. 1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and…

Every couple of years months [checks wristwatch] weeks, we reinvent a file format for no particularly good reason. Don’t get me wrong; we come up with all kinds of reasons to justify what we’re doing—easier to read, better for the environment, It’s Got Electrolytes™—and sometimes, the new format does genuinely represent a meaningful or necessary improvement. But more often than not, we’re just reinventing things out of boredom and a nagging sense, deep down, that if we don’t keep changing…

This should be a hard blog post to write–after all, it’s the one where I openly admit I had an emotional breakdown and saw a mental health professional–but it’s actually easy. And it’s easy because it has a good ending: facing long odds and a frustrating situation, I ended up turning everything around and getting a place where I love my job and I’m a happy person again. But this is not one of those times where the journey was the fun part. No, I’d really preferred to have skipped the journey…

Yesterday, Microsoft continued down a path that they’ve been pursuing for awhile by providing even tighter ties between Windows and Linux–including allowing running unmodified Ubuntu binaries directly in Windows. Reactions were, to say the least, varied; many people were preparing for the apocalypse, others were excited about being able to use Unix tools more easily at work, and still others were just fascinated by how this was technically accomplished. These reactions mostly made sense to…

Edit: Mere days after posting this (and unrelated to this post), Google publicly apologized for the Android 6 roll-out delay and pushed out Android 6.0.0 to Nexus 6 devices. They then followed that up extremely rapidly with the Android 6.0.1 update. I think this bodes incredibly well. Project Fi is still a very new service, and I’ve little doubt that Google has to work out some kinks of their end. For the moment, I’m going to take a step back, watch, and see if this new rapid update cycle is…

When I was in high school, I used to do competitive speech.[1] I didn’t really want to do competitive speech as such; what I wanted to do was competitive debate. After all, debate was way more fun: you got to argue, on purpose, about things with little actual consequence! And you got more points for being the best arguer! What’s not to love? Sadly, my school didn’t have enough people to do both debate and speech; we had to pick one, and since the overwhelming majority of my fellow classmates…

React, if you’ve somehow missed it, is the new hotness in web programming. The idea is simple: each React component describes its view idempotently, in JavaScript. The view is rendered entirely based on a small amount of state the component keeps internally. Given the same state, a given component will always render identically. This in turn means that when data changes, React can apply just what changed to the browser’s DOM, saving it from having to re-rendering the entire page. In fact, the…