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The personal blog of Andrew Quinn.
Consulting available under the business name Siilikuin. For inquiries please email my first name at siilikuin.com.
2024.03.27
Greetings, fellow traveller. By this point in your journey you may have ran across the enigmatic Eric S. Raymond a couple of times; I assume you have hit upon this page because of a legendary and exact blade he has forged called reposurgeon. However, you, like me, are young, and are not yet wise enough in the ways of SVN to even make a toy conversion to Git – fear not.
2024.03.02
Since wiping my Github over a year ago I’ve taken a much more, let’s say, impatient approach to my work.
I have a lot of things I want to do, and a lot of things I want to see exist. Most of the things I want to see exist are niche enough that they won’t exist if I don’t make them. So, over time, I’ve refined a few anti-patterns and anti-techniques that let me build the worst possible version of a thing I myself will just barely put up with using.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 .
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.
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.
This blog's cloc:
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CSS 1 13 20 65
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