The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Joel Dare

joeldare.com

Field notes on shipping fast, privacy-first, evergreen web products.

Software / engineering practiceAI / MLLinux / Unix

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
141 from 1 Jun 2020 to 15 Sep 2026
Posting
weekly (31 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog

2026 25

  1. Ten Commandments
  2. Simplicity is the Most Important Software Design Consideration
  3. A Local Open-Weight Model Builds Its First Web App from a GitHub Issue
  4. How I Reduce Tokens in Skills
  5. Automating a Claude Skill
  6. Running Claude Code in a Clean Environment
  7. My AI Skill Conventions
  8. A Markdown Code Fence Is Just a CSS Class
  9. Building a Set of Rules for My Dark Software Factory
  10. My macOS Trash Isn’t Emptying
  11. My Dark Factory Software Stack
  12. Creating a Minimal Dark Factory
  13. Building a Static Site with Pandoc
  14. GitHub Builds are Unreliable
  15. When Bugs Feel Like Sabotage
  16. How to Make Hollow 3D Prints
  17. The Human Harness
  18. Built to Last Web App
  19. The Life of a Blog Post
  20. Buy and Set Up a Domain Name for Your Blog
  21. How to Get a List of Markdown Files Updated This Month
  22. Create a Blog on GitHub with Markdown in 15-Minutes
  23. Books I’ve Read
  24. I Charge for a Single-File Web App I Can’t Protect From Piracy
  25. How I Plan to Write Better Show HN Posts

2025 49

  1. How I Built a Rolling Collector to Grab X Threads for AI
  2. How to Create Git Aliases that Supercharge your Workflow
  3. Leveraging my Website for Everything I Do
  4. Why I’m Starting to Hate VS Code
  5. My Favorite Local AI Models
  6. A Tour of the Telegard BBS System
  7. I Replaced Google Analytics with a CSV File and an AI Agent
  8. I Wrote an ImageMagick Field Guilde
  9. Productivity from a Traditional Digital Watch
  10. My Build Takes Too Long
  11. ImageMagick with a URL
  12. Informing Engineering Decisions with Bite-Size Data
  13. Resizing Images for the Web with ImageMagick
  14. The 14kb Problem
  15. Ways to be a Stunning Creator
  16. Creating Software Engineering Flow Charts with Graphviz Dot
  17. Creating a Docker Container for the Lynx Browser
  18. Doing Things the Hard Way
  19. Custom Window Size and Position on Mac
  20. Always Exclude .DS_Store in Git
  21. My Blogging Manifesto
  22. Running Local Ollama Models with Codex CLI
  23. SSH Tunnels: My VPN Alternative for Privacy on the Go
  24. How I Turn a Web Page Into a Mobile App
  25. My Plan to Build an AI Chat Bot in My Bedroom
  26. Things I’ve Learned About Mailing Lists
  27. Font Choices From Around the Web
  28. How I Got My First 100 Email Subscribers
  29. Keep Email Simple
  30. Why I’m Writing Pure HTML & CSS in 2025
  31. Do Redirects Kill Google Traffic?
  32. Trying to Stop Procrastination with My Receipt Printer
  33. Where I Put Personal Binaries in MacOS
  34. Resizing Video for the Web
  35. A/B Testing Without the Overhead
  36. How to Lose Money with 25 Years of Failed Businesses
  37. Improve Spell Checking on macOS
  38. Reducing Animated GIF File Size with ImageMagick
  39. Combining Multiple Images into an Animated GIF with ImageMagick
  40. Screen Share with a Sleeping MacBook
  41. Hosting Markdown on GitHub with Neat CSS
  42. Setting a Cookie with JavaScript to the Day you Die
  43. Git without a Central Repository
  44. Deploying a GitHub Pages Site from www Using a gh-pages Branch
  45. Deploying the www Folder on GitHub Pages
  46. Interesting Tools
  47. Ledger Cheat Sheet
  48. Create a Custom Icon for Add to Home Screen on iOS
  49. Cron Problems Under MacOS

2024 25

  1. My Wishes and Dreams
  2. Which CPU does the TRS-80 Color Computer Use?
  3. Learn Assembly Language Programming
  4. Using Awk on CSV Files
  5. Setting up XRoar to Emulate a Color Computer 1
  6. Designing a Washer with OpenSCAD
  7. How to Track Your Engineering Work
  8. Creating an Email Mailing List
  9. Private Analytics and My Raspberry Pi 400
  10. Adding a Simple Like Button to My Website
  11. Creating a Minimal Docker Container
  12. Reverting to a Previous Git Commit
  13. AI Prompts I’ve Found Useful
  14. Programming a Hacker News Clone with AI
  15. Running Local LLMs
  16. My Command Line Todo List
  17. Swap Paste and Match Style on Mac
  18. Setting up a Domain
  19. Clone a GitHub Gist Locally
  20. 3D Printable Button for Sewing
  21. Cricut Joy Sharpie Extra Fine Adapter
  22. Sharpie Extra Fine
  23. Using Neat CSS on GitHub Pages
  24. OpenGPG Key Expire Time
  25. Export Your Kindle Library

2023 4

  1. Save Screenshots to a Specific Directory on Mac
  2. Writing Packages in Go
  3. Building a PHP App with Docker
  4. Replacing a Dead Speaker Battery

2022 13

  1. Creating a Go Package
  2. Why is My Interest Rate Rising?
  3. Systemd Log Output
  4. Caddy PHP Config
  5. Planting More Seedlings
  6. I’m a Scanner
  7. Bash Script Template
  8. Coding in Ukraine
  9. Copy a Directory Recursively Using SCP
  10. Rounding Image Corners with ImageMagick
  11. Stack Images with ImageMagick
  12. Gains I’m Seeing From My Second Brain Tool
  13. Why I’m Using HTTP Basic Auth in 2022

2021 6

  1. Point and Shoot Camera Comparison for Low Light Shooting
  2. Filling Your Hot Tub
  3. A Simple Go (golang) API Template
  4. Small Go Binaries
  5. 52 Launches in 52 Weeks
  6. How I Use Github as My Blogging Platform

2020 3

  1. That Time I Built a Crack for Nearly all Shareware
  2. Creating a Drag and Drop Bookmarklet
  3. Old Wiki

Undated 16

  1. Minimal Viable Programs
  2. Book Formatting
  3. Learn JavaScript by Making Art
  4. How I Setup Nginx as a Reverse Proxy
  5. Sending Email with Sendgrid
  6. Installing OpenSCAD on MacOS
  7. Status Updates on my Blog
  8. SQLite WAL Mode
  9. How to Create an HTTPS (TLS) Server in Go
  10. I Built my own Second Brain Software Tool
  11. Website Writing Process
  12. Using Awk to Prepend or Append Data to Each Line
  13. Using Awk or Sed on CSV or Text Files
  14. How to Make a Markdown Website
  15. Quick Calories
  16. Printing on Smaller Paper Sizes