The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Eric Holscher

ericholscher.com

Welcome to my personal website. This is mostly a place to put my blog posts, with a few other things thrown in when I get excited about them. Blog Entries: Here are my 10 latest posts: Thoughts on ...

Software / engineering practiceDev tools / editors / IDEsTravel

’10’15’20’25
Posts
255 from 7 Jan 2007 to 25 Oct 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://ericholscher.com/blog/archive/atom.xml

2026 1

  1. Single-track conferences with a formalized hallway track

2025 36

  1. Thoughts on the Camino de Costa Rica
  2. Atop the Oregon Cascades, a University of Oregon team finds a huge buried aquifer
  3. A pattern for updating dependencies in a Docker image
  4. 31 days of posts
  5. Nat Bullard’s deck on decarbonization
  6. Society for Technical Communication (STC) shutting down
  7. Adam Jacobs on open source business
  8. Two good Deepseek explainers
  9. Staying in Europe (Schengen) longer than 90 days as an American
  10. The easiest way to find an AWS instance
  11. A NY Times piece on Mt Bachelor
  12. Noah Smith on the LA fires
  13. Wool & Sand are solid books
  14. Stack Overflow’s decline
  15. International travel and community
  16. Foreign Policy Live: Fareed Zakaria’s ‘Age of Revolutions’
  17. Alternative company structures
  18. Understanding maps
  19. Travel bag research
  20. The Camino de Costa Rica
  21. An updated vision for Read the Docs
  22. AI in tech writing roundup
  23. The Anti-Social Century
  24. Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti’s technical writing predictions for 2025
  25. The tech ad market seems slow currently
  26. The 2020 Oregon Wildfires
  27. Exploring CSS Variables
  28. Exploring CSS Variables
  29. Everything Bartosz Ciechanowski makes is gold
  30. Steven Pinker on Progress
  31. AI makes computers do what I want them to do
  32. Podcasts I’ve been enjoying
  33. Podcasts I’ve been enjoying
  34. 2024 Tech Wrapups
  35. Money and Identity
  36. The Best Introduction to LLMs I’ve Found

2024 1

  1. AI search should sustain open source, not just index it

2023 1

  1. We don’t do that here: Setting social norms

2019 1

  1. Using a Welcome Wagon to Help First-Time Conference Attendees

2018 4

  1. One Percent for Open Source
  2. Conference Mentorship
  3. The post I never published
  4. Business questions I’m working on in 2018

2017 4

  1. Breaking Cliques at Events: The Snowball Rule
  2. The Pac-Man Rule at Conferences
  3. Documentation is JSON for the Brain
  4. “My Code is Self-Documenting”

2016 7

  1. Questions after talks at conferences
  2. Semantic Meaning in Authoring Documentation
  3. A Selfish Appeal for Documentation
  4. Funding Open Source with Marketing Money
  5. The Power of Sphinx: Integrating Jinja with RST
  6. An introduction to Sphinx and Read the Docs for Technical Writers
  7. Why You Shouldn’t Use “Markdown” for Documentation

2015 3

  1. The Importance of Being Welcoming
  2. Why I’m building a company: Structure
  3. Making Read the Docs Sustainable

2014 4

  1. Announcing Read the Docs for Business
  2. Read the Docs goes full-time
  3. How I Judge the Quality of Documentation in 30 Seconds
  4. Sphinx isn’t just for Python

2013 14

  1. 2013 Year in Review
  2. Read the Docs 2013 Stats
  3. A Better Javascript Workflow with Django
  4. Codes of Conduct, an Organizers Perspective
  5. A New Theme for Read the Docs
  6. Google Summer of Code Book Sprint 2013
  7. Announcing Grok the Docs
  8. Sphinx Live Preview
  9. Writing a Beginners Guide to Documentation
  10. A letter to an old friend
  11. Help me improve documentation
  12. Prepping for the Pacific Crest Trail
  13. Announcing Write the Docs
  14. A Walk in the Woods

2012 5

  1. 2012 Year in Review
  2. Interesting projects on Read the Docs: Teaching
  3. Help fund Read the Docs
  4. The festival that felt like a hug
  5. Why Read the Docs matters

2011 4

  1. Read the Docs Update
  2. Using Reviewboard with Git
  3. Read the Docs Updates
  4. Handling Django Settings Files

2010 25

  1. Required Reading
  2. Using Haystack to index non-database content
  3. Correct commands to check out and update VCS repos
  4. Site upgrades
  5. Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 4
  6. Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 3
  7. Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 2
  8. Building a Django App Server with Chef: Part 1
  9. Using ZNC, an IRC bouncer
  10. Running Hudson matrix builds on multiple machines
  11. Django Testing Mailing List
  12. Celery Tips
  13. Virtualenv Tips
  14. Djangocon Talk
  15. New features on Read The Docs
  16. Lessons Learned From The Dash: Nginx SSI
  17. A better webhook for code hosting
  18. Lessons Learned From The Dash: Easy Django Deployment
  19. Announcing Read The Docs
  20. Conference Fun
  21. Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Delayed Execution
  22. Django Inspect: A generic introspection API for Django models
  23. The role of designers in the Django community
  24. Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Documentation
  25. A simple Perl IRCBot

2009 38

  1. Correct way to handle default model fields.
  2. Writing Code with Designers
  3. Finding Missing Indexes That Django Wants (Postgres)
  4. Announcing Kong: A server description and deployment testing tool
  5. You should stay for the sprints
  6. Django Testing Code Coverage
  7. The importance of striving for awesome.
  8. Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: APIs
  9. What they didn’t teach me in college
  10. Correct way to handle mobile browsers
  11. Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Database Migrations
  12. Adding testing to pip
  13. Class Based Template Tags
  14. Making Template Tag Parsing Easier
  15. Large Problems in Django, Mostly Solved: Search
  16. Easily Running the Django Test Suite
  17. Hacker Book Club
  18. Pretty Django Error Pages
  19. Token Testing Talk Slides: Djangocon 2009
  20. Debugging Django in Production Revisited
  21. Enable setup.py test in your Django apps
  22. Migrating Django Test Fixtures Using South
  23. A playground for Django Template tags and filters
  24. EuroDjangoCon Talk: Testing Django
  25. Django’s Summer of Code students announced!
  26. Testing AJAX Views in Django
  27. Adding Google Analytics to Sphinx Docs
  28. Really easy SSH tunneling
  29. Twitter Spam
  30. Google Summer of Code
  31. Pycon and Euro Djangocon
  32. Automatically apply patches from Django’s (or any) Trac
  33. Incredibly useful SSH flag
  34. Using rsync with django
  35. Django Conventions Project Update
  36. Encouraging Web Interaction for University Students
  37. Review of Pro Django by Marty Alchin (1/2)
  38. Django now has fast tests

2008 83

  1. Year in Review
  2. Starting a Django Conventions Project and Reference
  3. Post a day in review
  4. The value of conventions, aka testmaker for template tags.
  5. Testmaker 0.2: Rewritten and improved
  6. Django Aggregator v2 now has tagging, and you should too.
  7. Luck and a New Life in Lawrence
  8. Gentlemans agreement on Django templates
  9. Busy Busy
  10. A start to the uber community
  11. Debugging Django in Production Environments
  12. Should reusable apps have templates?
  13. Encouraging Testing in Django
  14. The importance of not deleting blog posts (read: ideas)
  15. Practical Django Testing Examples: Views
  16. Announcing Django Crawler and django-test-utils
  17. The times, they are a changin
  18. The problem with Django’s Template Tags
  19. Software that I use: Essentials 2008
  20. Making a Django Uber-Community
  21. Introduction to Python/Django tests: Fixtures
  22. New Design
  23. Introduction to Python/Django testing: Basic Unit Tests
  24. Introduction to Python/Django testing: Basic Doctests
  25. Python gems of my own
  26. A blog post a day keeps the doctor away
  27. Big list of Django tips (and some python tips too)
  28. Getting started with Pinax
  29. Screencast: Django Command Extensions
  30. Using pdb to debug management commands and unit tests (Debugging Django Series,Part 4)
  31. Using pdb, the Python Debugger (Django Debugging Series, Part 3)
  32. Screencast 2: Logging in Django, for fun and profit
  33. Screencast: Debugging with the Django Error Page
  34. Using Mock objects in Django for testing the current date
  35. Easily packaging and distributing Django apps with setuptools and easy_install
  36. Testmaker .002 (Even easier automated testing in Django)
  37. Automating tests in Django
  38. DjangoCon September 6-7, at Google!
  39. Setting up Django and mod_wsgi
  40. DjangoCon 2008
  41. Jim Henson before Sesame Street
  42. Beatles Lecture
  43. Living well
  44. Bear Head
  45. Things I say all the time
  46. Job
  47. Lawrence Day 1
  48. Change of RSS address
  49. Goodbye East Coast part 1
  50. Power through conversation
  51. Graduation
  52. My Second Poem Ever
  53. Browser Login Discovery
  54. Predictive text FTW
  55. Crazy times
  56. All majors are the same
  57. Why I love the CLI
  58. Website Interface Design
  59. Awesome 3d
  60. Perfect Abstraction
  61. Job hunt
  62. Security Vulnerabilities on the Internet
  63. Bill Clinton
  64. NCUR 22
  65. Another neat ad
  66. Sweet ads
  67. Obama & Va
  68. Work this week
  69. Time to use that education
  70. Graduate
  71. OCR with context
  72. My dad was wikipedia
  73. Weekend
  74. Hackers and Painters
  75. America…*sigh*
  76. Books to read
  77. Code on Launchpad
  78. Cool Music Video
  79. Earthquakes in politics
  80. OpenID FTW
  81. Facebook Scrapage
  82. Facebook Update
  83. Iowa

2007 24

  1. Stanford U
  2. Merry Christmas
  3. Python Easy Install
  4. Lego Lovers
  5. Browser Tabs
  6. Getting Real
  7. Ideas need context
  8. First Post
  9. Django
  10. Schoolwork
  11. Last semester in stone
  12. Writing Advice?
  13. Cool site: archive.org
  14. Fall is coming (and good content)
  15. Firefox Extensions I Use
  16. Digg/Wordpress plugin ideas
  17. UMW Blog Ring
  18. Goal
  19. Network KVM
  20. People
  21. Music
  22. Updating website
  23. Iphone
  24. Good Software is SO hard to find..