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Dev tools / editors / IDEsSoftware / engineering practiceAI / MLEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
95 from 1 Jan 2001 to 17 Aug 2026
Posting
monthly (14 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://til.andrew-quinn.me/index.xml

2026 12

  1. Don't use an LLM for your README.md
  2. Claude Max 20x plan as open source subsidy
  3. AI slop grenades and the principal-agent problem
  4. Back up your TOTP codes by just printing them
  5. Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary
  6. I still like Jenkins
  7. The --i-tell-you-shut-up flag
  8. Claude Mythos and the EU Cyber Resilience Act
  9. The long death of programming languages
  10. Claude Code and executive function
  11. Claude Code disproportionately benefits those who touch type
  12. Lua is a pretty good config language

2025 29

  1. Copy-Item is 27 percent slower than File Explorer drag and drop on Windows
  2. "Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors
  3. Lessons learned from 2 years of operating a teensy-tiny news archive
  4. Where is the DevOps for Yocto?
  5. LLMs solve the biggest problem with language textbooks
  6. Code should be clean because business isn't
  7. tarsnap is cozy
  8. It's okay to solve a problem twice
  9. You don't need CGO to use SQLite in your Go binary
  10. Incentivize grandchildren by writing them into your will
  11. The second wave of spaced repetition apps
  12. Experiment registry: Can I simply enjoy everything I do?
  13. Switching Vim colorschemes based on which keyboard layout I have active
  14. Using LLMs to generate small semantic perturbations for language learning writing practice
  15. The language learning "Delta" Anki card pattern
  16. Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm
  17. LLM, JavaScript, GitHub Pages, localStorage: A recipe for free apps anyone can use
  18. Create multi-stage Anki card answers with HTML's tag
  19. LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition
  20. Consider the cronslave
  21. LLMs make Perl great again
  22. Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs
  23. Vibe coding and complementary goods
  24. Binary search isn't about search III. Loop invariant of rightmost element search
  25. Binary search isn't about search II. Loop invariant of leftmost element search
  26. Binary search isn't about search
  27. Things you should never do: Use Expect to autotype SSH passwords in scripts
  28. SQLite is learnable
  29. `python -m http.server` as ephemeral Dropbox

2024 30

  1. Common-sense security for SSH on a new Debian server
  2. Enforce GPL compliance by offering bounties?
  3. The self-hosted to DevOps engineer pipeline
  4. PHP, Go, and Braindead Deployment
  5. PHP and Web Dev Phobia
  6. How I ask GPT-4 to make tiny Python scripts in practice
  7. The highest personal ROI program I have written so far
  8. My pet theory of how great software gets started
  9. What scripting languages come out of the box on Debian 12?
  10. Valuable software is about letting people do new things
  11. Layers of abstraction for me, not for thee
  12. Software engineers as mental athletes
  13. OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
  14. Quickstarts and Slowstarts
  15. Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive
  16. Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
  17. Trackballs are great for the mostly-mouseless
  18. tmux is worse is better
  19. Disable your browser history to write better internal docs
  20. I'm turning 30 so naturally I'm switching to OpenBSD
  21. PHP is Web Shell
  22. Language learning treated as breadth-first search
  23. Most "life lessons" you hear are about scaling back
  24. Check my math - NixOS vs the Most Complicated Program on Earth (MCPOE)
  25. Beware those who promise increasing marginal returns
  26. The 10 sentences heuristic for foreign vocabulary acquisition
  27. The unreasonable effectiveness of VMs in hacker pedagogy
  28. fd + xargs + bat = quick document review
  29. wall: Broadcast message all Linux users
  30. Some New Year experiments

2023 23

  1. Been quiet - studying Finnish
  2. Speed paint videos for software installations
  3. Getting `fzf` to print the preview pane
  4. Vagrant lets you wrap VDI images
  5. Most 2 digit numbers not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 are prime
  6. Git aliases for fun and profit
  7. Haskell has a rustup now?
  8. Outage postmortem: Why didn't SelkoArchive get today's news?
  9. Things Word has that SSGs, by and large, don't
  10. traceroute uses UDP by default, not ICMP
  11. Cloud translation is more expensive than I thought
  12. Pomodoros and leverage ratios
  13. One problem with user-scoped `systemd` timers
  14. Promoting Blog Tag Reuse with `fzf`
  15. The Rule of Four
  16. Hugo's Secret RSS Feeds
  17. Hosting on Azure? Don't forget to declare UTF-8
  18. Git controlled, user-scoped, recoverable-after-install `systemd` services and timers
  19. That damned Debian 10 one-liner I always need to let me `sudo`
  20. Art of the dotflag -- `.nojekyll`, `.gitkeep` and their ilk
  21. A good place to symlink local builds
  22. No such thing as a Post-Push Hook
  23. Multi-line string literals in Fish

2001 1

  1. Readme