After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.

Back in 2017, I was building a rich text editor in the browser. Unsatisfied with existing libraries that used ContentEditable, I thought to myself "hey, I'll just reimplement text selection myself! How difficult could it possibly be?" I was young. Naive. I estimated it would take two weeks. In reality, attempting to solve this problem would consume several years of my life, and even landed me a full time job for a year implementing text editing for a new operating system.

how one little joke can get so, so out of hand

Git has been the de-facto version control system used by nearly every developer in the world for almost a decade now. While most of us know the basics, there are depths and hidden valleys of our Git tooling that even the most experienced of us may have never even heard of. Join Scott Chacon, a GitHub co-founder and the author of Pro Git, to dig into the hidden depths of obscure command line invocations to get more out of the amazing tool you use every day.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors.

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.