Wilfred Hughes

@wilfredh
1.5K Followers
1.4K Following
3.6K Posts
Programming languages, human factors, and a healthy dose of Emacs.
Bloghttp://www.wilfred.me.uk
Pronounshe/him

My 3.5yo is learning to use a mouse, and it's super interesting.

He's mastered clicks and drags, but he hasn't yet figured out lifting up the mouse when run out of mouse pad. That's a tricky case where you deliberately break the relationship between mouse and cursor movement.

I'm surprised there aren't more tools out there for starting a new project with some default config files.

There's `cargo new` but it's Rust specific and very minimal. create-react-app is React specific.

The only option I know of is cookiecutter. Surely it's a common problem?

Excellent series on Self, both the programming model and the tool chain.

I love how opening an inspector on a value (e.g. nil) then shows a link to all occurrences of the value in other open inspectors!

https://blog.rfox.eu/en/Programming/Series_about_Self/Environment_and_the_programming_language_Self_part_one_environment.html

Environment and the programming language Self (part one; environment)

I bring you a message about a language that has been at the birth of many others, but almost no one knows it. A rumor of a graphical environment offering options like no other, but almost no one using it. I also bring information about a virtual machine supporting reflection almost to infinity, reaching almost half of the operating power of C in numerical calculations in its time, yet today forgotten.

I'm experimenting with imitating window UI elements when showing code snippets on my website.

What do you think? Do the familiar dots of the title bar help, or is it just confusing decoration?

First image is the current style, the second image has the window UI.

I've started naming my servers digiocean1.example.com, digiocean2.example.com and so on. I wish I'd done this much earlier.

I already have domain names for the actual deployed services, but it quickly gets confusing when you start moving things around.

I'm adding uptime data to my personal LLM bot. Does this information belong in the system prompt?

That was my initial plan, but I'm thinking that a tool would be better. Tools let me see information provenance ("queried the uptime tool").

There's also a small caching benefit.

I've released difftastic 0.68! A smaller update, but still worth upgrading:

* Improved Bash, C, Go, Lua, Nix, Perl, Python, Rust, Scala, Swift and YAML parsing.
* Minor display and git compatibility fixes.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.68.0

Really elegant developer tool: Go's inline IDE feature is used with deprecation markers, so call sites are autofixed from OldApi() to NewApi() based on the implementation of OldApi.

https://go.dev/blog/inliner

//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner - The Go Programming Language

How Go 1.26's source-level inliner works, and how it can help you with self-service API migrations.

Are there any developer experience advantages for `x := 1` over `let x = 1`?

A `let` keyword probably improves parsing error behaviour, and makes declarations more visible.

:= is more concise though.

What is the lowest resolution image that is still recognisable?

I made a space invader craft project at one point and spent a bunch of time wondering if I had enough materials.