Here’s where I put things that don’t otherwise fit in a blog post as well as links to content I find interesting. It’s always changing and never complete.
I used twitter for a while, automatically replicating my tweets on the main page. The tweets are archived here.
I no longer do this since twitter has paywalled their API.
Elon’s 5 steps to process improvement:
- Make requirements less dumb: Question and verify requirements to ensure they are not error-prone and to remove unnecessary work.
- Delete parts or processes: Remove unnecessary parts or process steps.
- Simplify and optimize: Simplify or optimize the design and process.
- Accelerate cycle time: Streamline the manufacturing process to speed up cycle time.
- Automate: Automate the manufacturing process to ensure efficiency, reliability, and cost reduction.
Importantly automation is the last step, not the first. This is the opposite of what many people think!
- Ignore existing constraints, start from the ideal and work backwards.
- Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog – Bartosz explains complicated systems and concepts such as GPS, colour spaces, cameras and lenses in the amazingly understandable way, complete with from-scratch WebGL (and other) interactive diagrams.
- The Asahi Linux blog – such a high concentration of extreme technical expertise, applied to something I thought impossible without manufacturer support.
- Phoronix – Michael Larabel covers Linux & Linux hardware extremely thoroughly and with great integrity
- Jeff Atwood’s blog – opinionated, often right! He’s the guy behind stack overflow and discourse, so there’s a lot to learn from him.
- Andrew Holme’s website – I used to work with Andrew. He’s made some impressive things in his spare time – like a GPS receiver from scratch!
- Chris Bishop’s blog – A friend with a some serious network skills and his own ASN
- Chips and cheese – Incredibly deep dives into hardware architectures
- Jeff Geerling’s blog – Lots of experimentation with Linux and strange things with server/hobby hardware
- Rodrigo Copetti’s blog – super interesting and astonishingly well communicated posts about game console architectures among other things
- Ken Shirriff’s blog – Deep dives into electronics and processor architectures. The charger tear-downs are particularly illuminating
- I Code 4 Coffee – Lots of hardware and game hacking
- Rob Hague’s blog – I work with Rob, always an interesting read. Especially if you like keyboards ;-)
- Ben Cartwright-Cox’s blog – All sorts of software hacking
- Phoboslab – Lots of video game and otherwise 3D pipeline hacking
- GMUNK – the insanely creative guy behind so many future user interfaces, cool looking adverts and the Windows 10 wallpaper
- Eddie Pace’s blog – I’ve had the pleasure of working with Eddie for several years. He’s a talented developer with some serious knowledge and skills in multiple, sometimes unrelated fields.
- aintnobodygottimeforthat – Frill has made various highly precise clocks and runs one of the UK’s top NTP servers
Jeff’s also the guy behind commonmark, a standardised Markdown variant
Some books really stand out to me. I reckon I need to read some from https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-developers/ so I can grow this list!
He’s focussed on consumer rights more recently, particularly right to repair.
No affiliation, just typefaces I like.
- Pragmata Pro (Iosevka SS08 is a good free alternative)
- Fira Code – My current terminal font
- Berkeley Mono – Great for instrument panels!
- Raleway – A sans serif typeface with a clean, modern look. A little like Helvetica, but with a bit more character.
- Futura – A classic geometric sans serif typeface. Great for signage and headings.
Since 2006 I’ve had a personal website; though I think I’ve spent 10x as much time writing blog engines or themes as I have writing blog posts! It took me a long time to settle on a platform where I feel I can be productive without having to fiddle around too much with content management.
History:
- 2005-2006: Microsoft Frontpage based self-hosted, hosted from ADSL
- 2007: Dreamweaver / PHP based custom websites, hosted from ADSL
- 2007-2009: PHP based custom websites written with Geany, hosted from ADSL
- 2012-2016: Custom SPA blog engine with client-side markdown parsing. Bad for SEO! Hosted on a VM.
- 2016-2017: Ghost with default theme, hosted on a VM
- 2017-2019: Hugo with default Ananke theme, hosted on a VM
- 2019-2020: Hugo with Mediumish theme, heavily stripped back, hosted on a VM
Since 2020, this website is made from scratch with hugo with a focus on typography, quality UX and SEO. Anything off-the-shelf or modified never quite felt right.
It’s optimised to load lightning fast using:
I write articles with neovim, validate with VNU validator, spellcheck with typos, lint with eslint, stylelint and proselint. All automatic, of course.
Theme features:
- Audio player
- Video player
- Highly responsive blog cards
- Featured star system
- Hero cover images
- HTML and PDF optimised CV generation
- Image scaling and compression (webp/jpg)
- Gallery support
- Tag intersection system
- First-class code embed highlighting/download support
- Active table of contents
- Fully responsive design, with focus on typography and readability
- Horizontal nav bar, panning support for mobile
- Article GUIDs RSS feed articles for persistent IDs
- Nix derivation for reproducible builds
- Automatic slug synchronisation from title, with redirect resolution
Post-processor features:
- Audio player spectrogram + waveform generation
- Video player automatic poster generation
- Automatic relocation of footnotes to end of section
- Single page bundling, tree shaking, and minification
- Automatic below-the-fold lazy loading
- 400% A+ score on Google Lighthouse
- Automatic image cleaning
- Video/audio codec validation
- Broken link checking (internal always, external on demand)
- Linting of spelling/grammar
- Header linking
- Validation of HTML/CSS/JS
- LaTeX maths rendering
- Automatic inlining of images based on heuristics (SVG and rasterised)
My CV is generated from a YAML template using Hugo and LaTeX with Jinja2. Optimised for file size with ghostscript, cleaned with exiftool and qpdf.
This website and CV is built as a nix derivation.
Phew! That was dense technobabble!