$ ls /etc/

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.

Microblog

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.

Advice

Process Improvement

Elon’s 5 steps to process improvement:

  1. Make requirements less dumb: Question and verify requirements to ensure they are not error-prone and to remove unnecessary work.
  2. Delete parts or processes: Remove unnecessary parts or process steps.
  3. Simplify and optimize: Simplify or optimize the design and process.
  4. Accelerate cycle time: Streamline the manufacturing process to speed up cycle time.
  5. 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!

Ideation

  1. Ignore existing constraints, start from the ideal and work backwards.

Blogs


  1. Jeff’s also the guy behind commonmark, a standardised Markdown variant ↩︎

Books

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!

Videos

Youtubers


  1. He’s focussed on consumer rights more recently, particularly right to repair. ↩︎

Articles

Learning

Reference

Typefaces

No affiliation, just typefaces I like.

Speaker designs

This website

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:

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:

Post-processor features:

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.3


  1. Phew! That was dense technobabble! ↩︎