Ever since I started using terminal applications, I have wanted to try building my own. They are less complex than a web app, and don’t require any server to run[1]. In picking a problem to solve, I wanted something that would be beneficial to me, but also something that could realistically help others. Having explored vja as a command line tool for Vikunja, I thought it made sense to make a terminal user interface that performed similar functions. Ratatui seemed like a great library to use, although I was skeptical about having to use rust. With the help of chatgpt, I was able to get to a minimum viable product, and publish the app on crates.io.

I was settling down to read AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor and thought “should I be taking notes on this?”. It is a topic that is likely to be relevant to my career, and also something that I may want to bring up in conversation professionally. It would be helpful to be able to point to a chapter in the book and say “here, they are saying it, not me”. By “they”, I mean the experts… right? Can the author(s) of the books I read be considered experts? Sometimes — but there are certainly times when I want to reference someone’s opinion rather than some research that was performed. Something was said eloquently and I now want to parrot that beautiful phrasing onwards. To do so, I need the source, because while I remember the idea, I don’t remember the prose. The more I think about it, the more taking obsessive notes about articles and books seems paradoxically like a doomed egotistical mission to sound more intelligent, while also not trusting ourselves enough to be accurate conduits of information.

I love stumbling upon tools that are very easy to install and get setup, but make a huge difference on a day-to-day basis. Usually these tools get rid of a small annoyance, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Equally important, they shouldn’t require a huge amount of commitment that locks you in if the tool ever disappears. I’ve tried to include a variety of tools, and I hope that one of them gives you an “ah!” moment, the same way they did for me. Also as a plus, this page isn’t filled with ads and gets straight to what you came for when you clicked the title!

Do you know exactly where your Multifactor Authentication (MFA) codes are stored? Are they tied to a device? Up in the cloud? Do you need a password to access them? What happens if you lose your device? These are all important questions to know, given that 80% of people use MFA in some form for their personal accounts. Losing a MFA method is a frequent cause of being locked out of accounts, and getting them back can be a huge pain, if it is possible at all. Yubikeys are small physical devices which you can buy two of (as opposed to the feasibility of buying two phones) and are not nearly as complex as they seem. They can be a great solution for storing MFA codes, and they just work.

Time seems to be moving faster and faster each year. Months seem like weeks and weeks seem like days. Time, for the first time, starts to feel finite. The thirties are approaching, and with that, the pressure to be on the “right track”, whatever that means. Everyone around me seems to be asking themselves three questions: Why do I suddenly have back pain? When did things get so serious? Is this all there is?

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that both CNN and Reuters are moving to put paywalls in front of their content. Ironically, you probably won’t be able to read that article unless you are a subscriber to the WSJ. Quality news isn’t getting harder to find, but it is getting harder to afford. The cause of this isn’t a single factor, rather a blend of social phenomenal that are all colliding to form the state of the web in 2024. Advertising revenue, while not flat, is dependent on eyeballs on pages. With the introduction of better large language models, copycat sites have begun to spring up, rewriting stories via chatbots. These are next to impossible for news outlets to chase down, and can flood search results to drown out real stories. News outlets are increasingly requiring accounts to read free content, in an effort to avoid this, however they still have to compete with fresh content generated from scratch. It is a hard time to be a journalist, at a time when the work they do should be valued more than ever in a rapidly changing world.

Links are the primary way we navigate the internet. With just a simple string of characters I can point you to specific resource on another server that I think you should check out for one reason or another. This can be incredibly useful for citations, in which researchers want to include many articles worth of knowledge to support their claims, but cannot fit all that text within their own article. These get included at the end of the article, in the References section, and historically they would have included metadata to allow someone to go find a physical resource in a library. In the digital age it is now common and expected to digitally link to the location of the resource on the internet. It is vital that the link placed in the references stays stable and resolveable, because once published scientific papers usually aren’t edited unless there is a necessary revision or retraction. So, what defines these “permalinks”, and are they really as stable as we think?

There is an app for everything. Wondering when to use the washroom during a movie? There’s an app for that. Unhappy with the latitude and longitude system? Why not use three words instead? More choice in software is great at a global scale - it increases the chances that you will be able to find the one app that fits your specific use case - however, we shouldn’t confuse that with a need to use all that software for everything in our individual lives. More software doesn’t necessarily make for a better life. If anything, it carries an administrative burden; more things to keep track of that distract us from focusing on what really matters.

Universal Resource Locator (URL) shorteners have been around since the early 2000’s[1]. A URL shortener takes an otherwise ugly hyperlink and converts it to something short and catchy. This can be helpful if users have to manually type in an address, such as from a PowerPoint presentation, or if the number of characters are limited (such as on an advertisement). However, they also normalize following links where we have no idea what is on the other end. Additionally, using a URL shortening service means that critical communication can be out of the control of the original organization. Here I’ll outline the benefits and pitfalls of URL shortening (as I see them) and why I ultimately don’t see why they are worth it.

The very first project I built was a very simple html and css personal website. It build off a theme and was just a resume in online form. It felt silly next to some of the fancy websites around the web, but it was mine. In setting it up, I actually learned a lot, such as how to buy a domain, how to host a site somewhere, and how to track changes using git. We often learn so many small things by doing. Now many years later, I can setup a new domain in a few minutes, but there are still many things that are at the frontier, and there always will be. Checking for broken links through a CI pipeline may seem to some to be a waste of time (after all, who really cares) but it isn’t about the result, it is about the process. It is precisely because it is so low stakes that makes it such a great learning opportunity. The worst thing that can happen is that the CI pipeline doesn’t run and I go back to the drawing board. This post goes over some of the broader lessons learned throughout the process of learning by building.