Tag: software
Tabell over lovlige tegn for IDN i .no-domenet
Tabellen i «Generelle krav til domenenavnet - hva kan det søkes om?» er litt underlig formatert når den er satt i to liksom-kolonner. Jeg kunne tenkt meg at den ble formatert mer på følgende vis: Bokstav Navn på bokstav Unicode áa med akutt aksent 0x00E1 àa med gravis-aksent 0x00E0 äa med omlyd 0x00E4 čc med...
What I didn't know I was navigating as a Junior Engineer
Lately I've been feeling like I'm doing a lot, but also not sure what I'm becoming yet. Some days I'm deep in frontend technical trivia (typography, interactions, pagination or virtual scrolling). Other days I zoom out and think :"Wait, what problem are we even solving for users? Is it worth solving?" Also, I'm reading about training pipelines, datasets, reward models… wondering how all of this fits together. It feels messy.
Code Accountability - 2026
Stay curious about your systems
As AI changes how engineering work gets done, we still have to build and maintain our understanding of the systems we're responsible for.
Aeronaut
I've been enjoying using Aeronaut, a Bluesky app for mac that feels quite native. Still tend to use the site in browser, but it's a nice dedicated option to have.
The Future Of Software Is Small
The dominance of SaaS platforms in business and pleasure today is a cyclic one. If you went back in time to the 1980's and told them that 21% of the industry was using the same CRM platform they'd probably nod serenely, knowing that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Giving DuckDuckGo Another Chance
A few days ago, I wrote about my quest for a better search engine. For the past few months, I had been using Kagi, but I have since canceled the subscription. As a consequence, I returned back to DuckDuckGo. However, I felt it wasn't able to satisfy my needs... but was I right?
Finding a Good Search Engine
From February up until now, I have been using a paid search engine, Kagi. Two weeks ago, I canceled my subscription to try giving DuckDuckGo - or maybe another search engine - a go. However, I still find the search results quite lacking!
Building Software For Fun
Time and time again, I have come across articles about writing "useless" software, or programming as play. These sort of articles always wake up something in me. They focus on programming as a fun, playful thing, instead of making things with a hard purpose.
Wide Events, Personal Software, and You.
I recently built a fun little project called 777-BSKY. It looks at Bluesky trending topics, does some math, figures out what's most popular and slaps some TTS on it. You can call a phone number and have the output read back to you, kinda like Moviefone except all of the movies are talking about the twilight of the American experiment.
Sustainable Software
About a week ago I had a nice long conversation with my brother about wine. This is something that happens a lot in my family: my brother is a wine rep, my uncle spent a while running a small wine importer, I've worked in wine production and sales, and the rest of my family really enjoys drinking wine even if they've kept it out of their professional lives. I am the annoying friend who likes to talk about and think about the wine we're drinking at dinner but I pale in comparison to most of my fa
Introducing locol
The best projects to work on are the ones that scratch a few different itches at once. I've wanted to write a native macOS application for years now, but I've always found building GUIs to be tedious and -- frankly -- hard to wrap my head around. I've also wanted a better way to manage a local OpenTelemetry Collector on my Mac for quite a while as well. Thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence and a little bit of gumption, I've accomplished both of these goals. Introducing locol.
One Weird Trick
I was reading Mike Masnick's piece in TechDirt the other day where he discusses tech optimism in the face of, well, everything that's going on in the world right now. I don't really want to bore you with a repetition of the ills facing society here at the beginning of 2025, other than to say there's a lot of them. Instead, I want to talk about why I'm optimistic, too.
When The Ware Isn’t Firm
A viral car review by tech-reviewing’s biggest name highlights the all-too-common pitfalls of shipping before the firmware is ready.
Cropping Into A Debate
I took a pretty rough swipe at GIMP last week, and rather than letting sleeping dogs lie, I’d like to explain my POV on the popular open-source image editor.
Embracing Failure in Software Development
Exploring the Importance of Embracing Failure in Software Development and the Value of Learning from Mistakes
Hiding in the Basket
A conversation about Easter eggs hiding in software, why they’re fun, and why they might not always be seen as good things by IT admins.
Building for longevity
Argues for considering the long-term maintenance burden when making technical choices. Every dependency, language, and infrastructure decision carries ongoing costs. Choosing boring, stable technology minimizes that burden and lets you focus your limited time on what matters.
Floppy Copy Classics
A few copy-protection schemes, of varying levels of success, you’ve possibly run into over the years. Don’t lose your code wheel.
USA Yesterday
Looking back at a sports-themed online service the now-40-year-old USA Today launched way back in 1989. Not all disks were left unscathed.
These Eyes Are Trackin’
Pondering the tale of Gator, a company that created a password manager way back in 1999, but ruined goodwill by going full spyware. (Oops, I mean adware.)
Change to Custom Directory Alias With Completions in Zsh
For quite some time, I've had a helper function on my Zsh config to quickly be able to cd to specific directories.
Respect Your Power Users
Pondering why, in the internet era, it has become so common for big tech companies to treat their power users like dirt. (Yes, this is about Google Reader.)
The Commodification of DevOps
It's been quipped more than once that most amazing Silicon Valley innovations are simply a bunch of nerds poorly recreating a service that already exists, but with an app. While I find this to be in some ways a truism (after all, there is nothing new under the sun), it's a fairly trite observation. What's far more interesting is how the organizations that build and deliver these 'innovations' themselves develop, and the process of that development is especially interesting due to the pressure-cooker of free money and labor elasticity that has characterized the 'startup economy' over the past twenty years or so. What's any of this have to do with DevOps, you may ask? Simply this -- DevOps is a reaction to the commodification of Agile, and the rise of SRE is a reaction to the commodification of DevOps. To reduce the thesis further, many of the trends you see in software development and delivery can be understood as a cyclical reaction to anarchists running headlong into the invisible backhand of the free market.
Custom GitHub Actions with Docker
A walkthrough of building a custom GitHub Actions workflow using Docker instead of marketplace actions. Covers the action file, Dockerfile, entrypoint script, and workflow configuration for building a Zola site and deploying it to Netlify.
Painting Outside The Lines
Adobe was already a big company when it first sold Photoshop, but its biggest competitor, Paint Shop Pro, was built by an airline pilot in his free time.
What makes an API simple?
Explores the tradeoffs in API design between minimal request inputs and richer contextual data. Argues that 'simple' should mean simple to use correctly, not just simple to look at. When an API encapsulates business logic, shifting complexity onto the API can reduce errors for consumers.
How I'm currently writing Haskell
A walkthrough of a Haskell development environment built on NixOS, Vim, GHCid, and Hoogle. Covers the Nix and Cabal setup, fast compiler feedback with GHCid, testing with hspec, and documentation lookups, all prioritizing simplicity and locally contained tooling.
Let’s Break Up Adobe
Why the creative software giant Adobe deserves a place in the broader discussion of breaking up tech giants like Facebook and Google. It's not just Photoshop.
Close Your Open Tabs
A case in favor of browser tab minimalism, or closing the tabs you’re not using. Sometimes, information overload has its limits.
Clippy Couture
Clip art gets a bad rap as an artform, in part because it’s everywhere. Let’s give it some grudging respect by filling in some historic gaps.
The Other Browser War
Why a new “feature” Opera added to its browser this week really makes me wish they’d ask me to pay them money for the right to use their browser.
Fake Elf News
Back in 1999, the viral game Elf Bowling gained an unfounded, false reputation as a piece of malware and spyware. It was viral, but it wasn’t a virus.
A Eulogy for Eudora
The early graphical client Eudora was how people checked their email in the ’90s. But in the end, only the power users stuck around. Here’s what you missed.
The Original In-App Purchase
It wasn't just about games. In the '80s and '90s, shareware democratized the way computer software was sold. Unfortunately, adware sort of dimmed its charm.
Tales Of The Interwebs
Protecting internet history is an important task, so we've taken it upon ourselves to save some of the best stories.