I've been experimenting with different pagination UIs. It's so common to have arrows, but I've realised they're redundant here. When you have the adjacent values as well as the final value, you don't need > and >> arrows too. Thoughts?

In many respects I feel an LLM benefits from a monorepo. I've vibe coded a bunch of helper CLIs recently and end up repeating the same preferences for all of them. I want all my CLIs to use clippy, parse arguments with clap, etc. They're distinct tools in distinct repos though.

I think you could build an interesting IDE with a tiny embedded LLM in addition to the usual tooling. Features like 'extract method' would be much nicer if an LLM could provide a name. Choosing a good name is virtually impossible from just a typed AST.

Delighted to see that TOML has released a new version! TOML is overall a great standard but I understand they had limited people with the power to cut a new release. github.com/toml-lang/to...

You can often estimate the age of a website based on how well it displays on mobile. All my sites end up with media queries in the CSS for narrow screens. It's so hard to design a single UI that scales from phone to desktop otherwise.

I find it odd that people recommend Docker for sandboxing agentic coding tools. Isn't it easier to just create a separate user account on the machine? It's an established security boundary, and viewing output is easy (just make the user's home directory world readable).

I'm never sure what to name my remotes in git. I tend to use 'mine' so I can add other forks later, but sometimes I use 'gh' or the traditional 'origin'. What do others use?

Caddy is really growing on me. It's nice having a web proxy that includes letsencrypt functionality without any additional configuration. I've tended to use nginx with a separate letsencrypt setup for projects before, and it's much more awkward.

Co-Authored-By: An old Stack Overflow answer, blindly accepting the compiler's suggestions, and a linter.

One subtle behaviour of Claude that wasn't obvious to me: whilst each conversation is transient, permissions persist across conversations. So if you've given permission to run e.g. 'cargo test' or even 'cargo run', you need to be sure that all future invocations are safe too.

I'm never sure how to convert words with hyphens into SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE. For example, should built-in function be BUILT_IN_FUNCTION or BUILTIN_FUNCTION?

I've added an eval button to the website of my programming language! It's a been a lot of work to lock down appropriately. It still needs some UI polish but it's so nice to be able to try snippets immediately. www.garden-lang.org

I'm trying to decide what program I should show on the home page of my PL. Hello World is too simple to show much syntax. Fibonacci is OK but the reader may not know what print(fib(10)) should show. Maybe print(greet("World")) is better? It gives you a function definition at least.

Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)

Delighted to see that Typescript 7 is moving to conventional LSP for its IDE services! devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/p...

I've been using "Expected Int, but got String" for my type error messages, but I've been wondering if I could do better. "Expected Int here, but this value has type String" or "This expression requires Int, but the value is String". Do you have a favourite?

IPv6 adoption is approaching half! www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6... shows 46% as of today.

Difftastic 0.67 is released! * Added support for protobuf, improved bash and YAML. * Updated 16 parsers to the latest upstream version (thanks Antonin Delpeuch!) * A ton of display polish for word highlighting, alignment, and binary files. github.com/Wilfred/diff...

If you created a large, successful OSS project, would you want to be BDFL or move on after a period? I see tradeoffs on both sides, although it's not a decision I've needed to make myself.

A cute systemd feature to get the system clock roughly correct: if the system time is before the compilation time of the systemd binary, it moves the clock forward to that time! lwn.net/Articles/714...

I've not seen this before: a captcha to distinguish adults from children! The in-app purchases were behind this screen. The primary user is a 3 year old who can only count to 20 😊

I've been learning some Common Lisp by writing some simple JSON munging programs. I'm sure it's not best practice — I should probably deserialise to CLOS automatically — but it's a nice way to get comfortable with the basics. It feels weird deliberately ignoring helpers though.

"After I linked difftastic, one of my friends immediately used difftastic to find a stealthy bug, five stars!" www.scannedinavian.com/tools-built-...

Shower thought: using a tool like cargo-semver, could you build a package registry where the uploader never chooses the version number? E.g. your last release was 5.2025-09-13 and you've just changed a type, so today's release is 6.2025-11-05.

One advantage I've come to appreciate about Dash/Zeal docsets: it's really nice having focused search. The text search is constrained to the languages I care about enough to download the docset, substantially increasing the relevance. In Google I'd need to specify the language.

I'm playing with Zeal/Dash so I can view stdlib docs offline. (I've been coding on public transport recently, without a reliable data connection.) Anyone have tips for making the most of this setup? AFAICT docsets are basically HTML underneath.

GIMP is huge tool that I certainly haven't mastered, but it's so useful to have around. I used it this week to convert images from obscure formats to common ones. It's a great swiss army knife and runs everywhere.

It is *really* hard to find a good screenshot for a CLI tool when users are on a mobile browser. This is the best I've come up with so far. I'm showing the terminal GUI to show where you'd use the tool. I'm also trying several standalone screenshots to make it more comprehensible.

I've added syntax highlighting to the prompt of my programming language! It's not strictly necessary, but it's nice to have. It caught a bug with lexing incomplete string literals too.

One interesting aspect of collecting coins in a platformer like mario: it makes the level stateful. You can see if you've been somewhere before based on whether there are coins present.

Ooh, difftastic is now listed on the official git website! git-scm.com/tools/comman...

It's so hard to talk about probabilities. Casual conversation often conflates 'the likelihood of an event happening' with 'how strongly I believe in my assessment'. For example, I'm very confident (say 90%) that the coin in my pocket is 50% likely to land on heads.

I see that *up has become an increasingly common name for toolchain installers: rustup, ghcup, even juliaup. I think Rust was the first to use this terminology? I'm curious how similar the different *up tools are.

I'm trying to improve the readability of the --help output from difftastic. I'm experimenting with making example invocations bold, so they are easier to distinguish from the text. I'm also trying OSC 8 to make my URLs clickable. Opinions welcome :)

I would have thought that invoking a C compiler would be a solved problem. Looking at Rust's cc crate there's a remarkable long tail of corner cases to fix. Exotic CPUs, microarchitectures, compiler differences, operating system differences, etc. github.com/rust-lang/cc...

LLMs seem to handle dependency upgrades really well. The task is well-specified, there's usually a build/test suite to check correctness of the modifications, and there's often a changelog they can consume too.

Do any tech streamers try new software live? It'd be a really fun way of doing UX testing.

For hobby projects, I really like software where I can do small features or tweaks. Sometimes I don't have time for anything more substantial. Website projects are great for this. Are there other areas?

I've been writing docs for different programming language operators (+, *, == and so on). Each one gets a separate web page. I've suddenly realised that / is much harder! docs/+ and docs/== is fine, but docs// just doesn't work as a URL in a static site. Any ideas?

I've released difftastic 0.65! Highlights of this release: * Better parsing of Clojure, Common Lisp, Kotlin, Rust and Zig. * Quality of life improvements for binary files. github.com/Wilfred/diff...

Text to speech systems seem to have largely avoided the uncanny valley effect. I've encountered robotic sounding voices but it's way less unsettling than bad CGI. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe looking at faces is just way higher bandwidth so more things can go wrong?

I'm surprised by how many different weather forecasts I can get out different apps. Surely there aren't many API providers for weather predictions? Alternative conspiracy theory: do weather apps that predict nicer weather get more downloads?

I've been playing with labels on my code blocks. Sometimes I have useful labels, other times it's just "Example 2". It's also unclear exactly where I put the label: Inside the box? Outside? Are there any docs sites that do this really well?

I've been playing with labels on my code blocks. Sometimes I have useful labels, other times it's just "Example 2". It's also unclear exactly where I put the label: Inside the box? Outside? Are there any docs sites that do this really well?

Do users of immutable systems (i.e Nix or Guix) upgrade more or less often than other platforms? There's less pressure to upgrade (unlike a rolling release distro) but in principle upgrading is easier.

Is there a programming equivalent of the strawberry problem, i.e. a specific coding task that LLMs are consistently bad at?

Trying to let my 3yo try as many different technology interfaces as possible. Mouse: not too bad, especially after reducing sensitivity. Keyboard: WASD is easy to lose track of in a sea of buttons. Controller: requires both hands together, especially the left, which is tricky.

Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax! www.garden-lang.org/blog/syntax....

GNU Make defaults to a single worker, and newer build tools (e.g. ninja) default to the number of physical CPUs.I wish there was an option for 'leave me a little bit of my machine to do stuff'.

Today I learnt that Racket *intentionally* doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.) blog.racket-lang.org/2009/03/the-...