Consulting available under the business name Siilikuin. For inquiries please email my first name at siilikuin.com.

Hugo 101

2023.10.21

Hugo 101 :: (optional) Steal His Look I like making sure other people can get exactly the same access to all the tools I use. If anything you see me do today looks interesting, feel free to ask me how I did it! Or you can grab all the tools I will use at once by following these simple steps. Install VirtualBox Download Ubuntu Create an Ubuntu virtual machine - great official instructions!

Thoughts on 29

2023.08.15

I turned 29 today, in this, the year of Our Lord 2023. I don’t have any particularly profound thoughts on 29. It’s a liminal year - next year I’ll be 30, hopefully with a kid in tow, I mostly see this year as continued preparatory work for when I finally have a family to call my own. But even though they’re prosaic, I do have a lot of things I’m quite proud of either doing or continuing this year, which I would like to share here, in roughly descending order.

Working Effectively With the Modern Shell

2023.05.05

These slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell-slidy.html A more normal HTML version @ https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell/ What I hope you leave with Use fzf Use zsh (minimum) Learn (some) vi tldr »= gpt »= man who am i hey i’m andrew https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell/ https://twitter.com/zephyr_on_call https://staging.bsky.app/profile/sonder.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/in/heiandrewquinn/ 🇪🇺🇱🇷 => 🇮🇪🇺🇸 -> 🇫🇮 northwestern grad 2020 - bs in ee + minor in math devops by day fullstack+ai by night (best w/ django/htmx) why the shell? composability complexity speed on speed 0.

AI bounties revisited

2023.03.24

The recent news of ChatGPT plugins has me waxing nostalgic about the days when I lived in the United States, studying electrical engineering and equal parts furious and depressed that AGI might well destory the world before I ever get myself properly settled in it. Ah, the glory days… Well, I’m doing a lot better now, both psychologically and emotionally. Having a beautiful wife and a full time job does wonders for the soul!

Hugo :: Netlify -> Azure

2023.03.23

Recently my fzf post went really, really viral on Hacker News! This touched off a virtuous cycle where I was also featured in the TL;DR Newsletter, which I’m pretty sure is AI-generated? I digress. This was an exciting thing to see, except for the fact that Netlify is now banging on my door asking me for $110 in surprise bandwidth costs. Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody expects the SaaS Inquisition. I humbly submit tht, as an ops guy, I should know better than anyone to keep things as braindead as possible - and Netlify is an absolutely, delightfully braindead option for me.

Copilot in the shell with Ctrl+X, Ctrl+E

2023.03.22

A tiny convenience I recently discovered: Hitting Ctrl+X, Ctrl+E in a terminal window will put your command into your text editor so you can massage your commands. I often have long ansible or kubectl commands I want to either run, or insert slashes into to put into my company’s internal documentation. I do it here with vi (badly!), but there’s nothing stopping you from customizing things so you can do it with whatever floats your boat by setting the $EDITOR flag in your .

So you've installed `fzf`. Now what?

2023.03.21

Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can come at a steep cost over time for people who constantly flit back and forth between different tools without investing the time to learn their own kit in depth. As someone with a healthy respect for the tacit knowledge of people better than me, I think a great 80/20 heuristic is “Learn the oldies first”: venerable Unix tools like cat, ls, cd, grep, and cut.

How I Learn Things

2023.03.13

The TL;DR’s TL;DR Read books. Not too fast. Use Anki. TL;DR Pick something to learn from the learning queue. Is it useful, given my current ambitions? If no, delay. Is it easy, given what I already know? If no, delay. Is it cool, given what I currently find cool? If no, delay. Read a book on it. Take Anki card notes, chapter by chapter. While actively reading: Review 10 new Anki cards, per book chapter, per day.

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