I find it odd that people recommend Docker for sandboxing agentic coding tools. Isn't it easier to just create a separate user account on the machine? It's an established security boundary, and viewing output is easy (just make the user's home directory world readable).

I'm never sure what to name my remotes in git. I tend to use 'mine' so I can add other forks later, but sometimes I use 'gh' or the traditional 'origin'. What do others use?

Caddy is really growing on me. It's nice having a web proxy that includes letsencrypt functionality without any additional configuration. I've tended to use nginx with a separate letsencrypt setup for projects before, and it's much more awkward.

Co-Authored-By: An old Stack Overflow answer, blindly accepting the compiler's suggestions, and a linter.

One subtle behaviour of Claude that wasn't obvious to me: whilst each conversation is transient, permissions persist across conversations. So if you've given permission to run e.g. 'cargo test' or even 'cargo run', you need to be sure that all future invocations are safe too.

I'm never sure how to convert words with hyphens into SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE. For example, should built-in function be BUILT_IN_FUNCTION or BUILTIN_FUNCTION?

I've added an eval button to the website of my programming language! It's a been a lot of work to lock down appropriately. It still needs some UI polish but it's so nice to be able to try snippets immediately. https://t.co/XCTHECr0Td

I'm trying to decide what program I should show on the home page of my PL. Hello World is too simple to show much syntax. Fibonacci is OK but the reader may not know what print(fib(10)) should show. Maybe print(greet("World")) is better? It gives you a function definition.

Claude asked me a question today: was I looking for an Emacs plugin (because I was talking about elisp) or a Rust program (because I have configured Rust preferences)? I'm really impressed, it's rare to see LLMs ask follow-up questions. (I wanted Emacs in this case.)

I've been using "Expected Int, but got String" for my type error messages, but I've been wondering if I could do better. "Expected Int here, but this value has type String" or "This expression requires Int, but the value is String". Do you have a favourite?

IPv6 adoption is approaching half! https://t.co/r7U396d4xS shows 46% as of today.

Difftastic 0.67 is released! * Added support for protobuf, improved bash and YAML. * Updated 16 parsers to the latest upstream version (thanks Antonin Delpeuch!) * A ton of display polish for word highlighting, alignment, and binary files. https://t.co/szav1RS2aB

If you created a large, successful OSS project, would you want to be BDFL or move on after a period? I see tradeoffs on both sides, although it's not a decision I've needed to make myself.

A cute systemd feature to get the system clock roughly correct: if the system time is before the compilation time of the systemd binary, it moves the clock forward to that time! https://t.co/sondjHbgl0

I've not seen this before: a captcha to distinguish adults from children! The in-app purchases were behind this screen. The primary user is a 3 year old who can only count to 20 😊

I've been learning some Common Lisp by writing some simple JSON munging programs. I'm sure it's not best practice — I should probably deserialise to CLOS automatically — but it's a nice way to get comfortable with the basics. It feels weird deliberately ignoring helpers though.

"After I linked difftastic, one of my friends immediately used difftastic to find a stealthy bug, five stars!" https://t.co/GoisykAIyZ

Shower thought: using a tool like cargo-semver, could you build a package registry where the uploader never chooses the version number? E.g. your last release was 5.2025-09-13 and you've just changed a type, so today's release is 6.2025-11-05.

One advantage I've come to appreciate about Dash/Zeal docsets: it's really nice having focused search. The text search is constrained to the languages I care about enough to download the docset, substantially increasing the relevance. In Google I'd need to specify the language.

I'm playing with Zeal/Dash so I can view stdlib docs offline. (I've been coding on public transport recently, without a reliable data connection.) Anyone have tips for making the most of this setup? AFAICT docsets are basically HTML underneath.