Stable Sort on

The dark forest of political communication

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have no views I care to vocalize about the current political situation in the United States, or anywhere else you may associate me with. I am personally totally politically inert, the equivalent of neon gas in a tube, and a steadfast adherent to philosopher Michael Huemer’s prescription in In Praise of Passivity to boot. I have never voted and refused to say the pledge of allegiance in kindergarten after my teacher kindly printed it out for me so I could review its contents after class and understand the implications of it.

Digital resiliency 2025 - checklist

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Companion to digital resiliency 2025. Follow to become moderately more digitally resilient. This list does not implement every single suggestion from that post. But it puts you in a really good position to implement more later if desired.

Cheap wins

So called because altogether these will probably cost you less than $10 total in the first year, and under $100 in the first decade. (At least if your data needs are similar to mine in scope.)

Digital resiliency 2025 - my first self-audit!

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

(⭐ See the digital resiliency 2025 checklist if you just want to quickly go through and implement the nuts and bolts of this for yourself!)

I like security! 🔒 Even though my personal data is about as interesting as turnip soup, I really enjoy thinking about things like “threat models” and “risk optimization”. I happened to have some time on my hands this summer, so I finally decided to pull all my geeky security knowledge to use and perform my first-ever digital resiliency audit. To atone for my past security sins, and to hopefully avoid new ones. Doubtless I will continue to iterate and improve upon the tactics I discuss here in years to come, but for now I think this is a pretty good start!

Militant contentment

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 07:32:26 +0300

The world has gotten much, much richer over the 31 years I’ve been alive, and so have I. My parents, Irish immigrants and perpetual laggards to technology, now not only both have cell phones, they both have smartphones, and they can see the videos I send them a few times a week of our beautiful baby boy 4000 miles away in rauhallinen Finland. I have been able to work at home for over 90% of my post college career, long enough that I can earnestly say I’m starting to get a little sick of being employed as Spooky Action At A Distance Man. I both make more money than I really know what to do with and am disproportionately poor by the standards of virtually everyone I grew up with, mostly by virtue of moving out of the United States. How on Earth did all of this happen? And why do I feel like I am the only person I know who feels this way?

Death worries me because I have things to do

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:14:00 +0300

7 or 8 years ago, while I was by no means suicidal, I did have a kind of blase take on death. Like if it happens, it happens; it might hurt momentarily, but then I’ll just be gone, and the world will roll onward. That is almost unthinkable to me now as a husband and father.

— Andrew Quinn (@hiAndrewQuinn) May 10, 2025

I think about my wife sleeping in the other room, and I look down at this tiny 10 pound baby sleeping in a box next to me, and I feel this overpowering urge to stay here for them. To treat my own body right, and better than I ever did before.

On turning 30

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 01:03:24 +0300

Contra my previous Thoughts on 29, I did not just turn 30. I started being 30 almost a year ago, and I will soon stop being 30 and start being 31. This is a new writing technique I recently learned of called the non-prophetic perfect tense, in which you describe past events that are so certain to have happened that you refer to them in the past tense as if they had already happened. Because they did.

1000 days without drinking

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:14:16 +0300

According to Beeminder, today marks 1000 days since I decided to go sober. I don’t know if it is 1000 days since my last drink, exactly, but it’s certainly possible.

I feel accomplished. Indeed, the only thing I regret about reaching 1000 days now is that I ever started at all. What few promises civilizational culture likes to toss around about alcohol being a “social lubricant” don’t apply if you’re drinking bottom shelf vodka alone in the basement, like I was.

Thoughts on language learning at the end of the world

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 13:41:12 +0300

Four years into learning a second language to fluency, I am forced to admit this is probably the hardest thing I have ever done, intellectually.

This claim probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone else who found themselves with good reason to learn another language as a fully-formed, employed adult. It is probably made a little easier in my case by the fact that I studied multiple languages back in high school. But I hated the process even then, and that was with Romance languages which have English in their direct lineage. It may come as a surprise to younger readers, who grew up in a world where they were already half-immersed in English thanks to the Internet, and likely don’t understand just how vital those 10-20 years of early immersion were to their current level of skill, whatever it is. That is a much different experience to someone who had never even heard a word of their L2 until the fine age of 25.

Inside, outside, and elsewhere in Finnish locative case pedagogy

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:47:34 +0300

Finnish has six “locative” (location-based) cases, which are generally first explained to students with the following table:

Movement	Internal (Inside)	External (Outside/On)
Static	Inessive (-ssa/-ssä)	Adessive (-lla/-llä)
Moving Towards	Illative (-Vn, -hVn, -seen)	Allative (-lle)
Moving Away From	Elative (-sta/-stä)	Ablative (-lta/-ltä)

Or, to use an example from the Finnish word kauppa (store):

Movement	Internal (Inside)	External (Outside/On)
Static	kaupassa (in the shop’s interior)	kaupalla (at the shop’s perimeter)
Moving Towards	kauppaan (into the shop’s interior)	kaupalle (toward the shop’s perimeter)
Moving Away From	kaupasta (out of the shop’s interior)	kaupalta (out from the shop’s perimeter)

I’ve always found this a little weird. I think I’ve finally pegged why.

We should use prediction markets for long term software maintenance

Mon, 26 May 2025 09:54:37 +0300

I have long espoused the works of Gwern Branson, and his essay Choosing Software is no exception. If I were to sum up the vibe of it, it would be: It is not enough for software to be good - it must also be lindy. There isn’t much point in eating the learning curve for, say, Emacs if Emacs isn’t going to be around long enough to see a good ROI on it.

Perfect Commit Checklists

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:58:59 +0300

⚠️: Unlike most other entries, this one requires some JavaScript to make the checkboxes work. Nothing you put here is saved to my server! It’s all in your localStorage.

Simon Willison’s post, “The Perfect Commit”, is one of my favorite posts to reference when anything I’m starting to work on gets large enough that I can’t keep the full context in my head. I decided to distill it down to a fast, interactive checklist that you and I can both use to ensure we did everything “by the book” (or, if we’re not doing it by the book, to make sure we can at least explain to ourselves why not!).

A gentle introduction to ESR's `reposurgeon`

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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. I will give you just enough to get started.

Why and how I build terrible things

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 12:48:08 +0200

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. Let’s dive into some of them.

Hugo 101

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 16:59:57 +0300

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!
- “Virtual machine” = a computer that runs inside your computer like a normal program
Run the 3 scripts at https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

Hugo 101 :: these slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/hugo-101-slidy.html

a more normal html version @ https://andrew-quinn.me/hugo-101/

Hugo 101 :: what i hope you leave with

(optional) some shell bling
how to use hugo…
- … to make a website!
- … to get that website online!
- … to build and tinker around with other people’s websites!
  - … like fireship.io! (github link!)
  - … like utilitarianism.net! (github link!)
  - … like digital.gov! (github link!)
confidence! websites aren’t hard!

Hugo 101 :: what i need from you

Keep that terminal OPEN and HAVE FAITH. Hugo is a command line-based tool, we’re going to use it a lot. We might even use multiple at once
- If you get lost, feel free to ask for help! We’re all friends here.
- If you’re shy, try asking ChatGPT for help. ChatGPT is stupid good at helping you out with shell commands:
  1. Describe what you are trying to do
  2. Copy and paste what you did into the shell
  3. Ask it for a better version

Minimum viable terminal programs:

Thoughts on 29

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 05 May 2023 11:37:03 +0300

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
🇪🇺🇱🇷 => 🇮🇪🇺🇸 -> 🇫🇮
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

0.001- seconds: speed of unknowing
0.01 seconds: speed of instinct
0.1 seconds: speed of thought
1 second: speed of consciousness
10 seconds: speed of frustration
100 seconds: speed of switching to a competitor
1000+ seconds: speed of SaaS

let’s talk about `fzf`

what is fzf
how to install
fzf for directory jumping
fzf for command history
fzf as repl

the rustification of tools

rust is big now
covering the classics
grep => ripgrep
find => fd
cat => bat (i’m serious)

let’s talk about `vi`

visual editor
kind of a pain to learn
learn it anyway
- vscode extension
exists everywhere*
barely uses resources at all (cpu, ram)

why optimize for resources?

csikszentmihalyi would like a word
did you not remember speed
engineering === optimization within constraints
long battery life is good too

let’s talk about `zsh`

bash is ubiquitous
bash has a lot of problems
Strictly speaking bash exists at a really uncomfortable saddle point between the need to be quick and user/flowstate-friendly, and the need to be robust as an automation tool and and
tldr: you still gotta run your scripts tho
may i recommend zsh

`zsh` + `oh-my-zsh`

unlike bash, you get sick + actually useful plugins
unlike fish, most of your scripts run fine w/o modifications

`starship`

another rust project
cross-platform shell … theme … thing
- i like to just run it as is but install it everywhere

why optimize for beauty and fun?

csikszentmihalyi would like a word

Hugo :: Netlify -> Azure

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 05:51:22 +0200

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. Hook it to a Git repo, tell it it’s time to build, and relax. Since the median website has precisely 0 viral posts, I defend my choice to go with the smartest tool in my collection, and only go dumber – and cheaper – when a real business case is presented to me.

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

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:06:44 +0200

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 .bashrc-like.

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

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:11:06 +0200

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. (sed and awk, too, if you have the good fortune of landing yourself in an actual modern sysadmin role.)

How I Learn Things

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:02:54 +0300

The TL;DR’s TL;DR

Read books.
Not too fast.
Use Anki.

TL;DR

Pick something to learn from the learning queue.
1. Is it useful, given my current ambitions? If no, delay.
2. Is it easy, given what I already know? If no, delay.
3. Is it cool, given what I currently find cool? If no, delay.
Read a book on it.
1. Take Anki card notes, chapter by chapter.
2. While actively reading: Review 10 new Anki cards, per book chapter, per day.
3. Once the book is finished, drop down to 1 new Anki card per book chapter per day.
4. Regardless of whether I’m still actively reading or not: Always finish the ’learning/learned’ Anki queues for that day. If you aren’t hitting that goal, ignore your new cards until you reach it.
Build a project using it.
1. The project must be useful, given my current ambitions.
2. The project must be easy, given what I already know.
3. The project must be cool, given what I currently find cool.
Rinse and repeat.

Your learning queue and you

Everything is a world unto itself. -CGP Grey’s lawyer dad, apparently, as relayed by one of his podcasts

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hugo 101

Websites for little guys

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Working Effectively With the Modern Shell

Talk @ the Tampere Coding Sauna, May 2023.

2023-05-05T11:37:03+03:00

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

0.001- seconds: speed of unknowing
0.01 seconds: speed of instinct
0.1 seconds: speed of thought
1 second: speed of consciousness
10 seconds: speed of frustration
100 seconds: speed of switching to a competitor
1000+ seconds: speed of SaaS

let’s talk about `fzf`

what is fzf
how to install
fzf for directory jumping
fzf for command history
fzf as repl

the rustification of tools

rust is big now
covering the classics
grep => ripgrep
find => fd
cat => bat (i’m serious)

let’s talk about `vi`

visual editor
kind of a pain to learn
learn it anyway
- vscode extension
exists everywhere*
barely uses resources at all (cpu, ram)

why optimize for resources?

csikszentmihalyi would like a word
did you not remember speed
engineering === optimization within constraints
long battery life is good too

let’s talk about `zsh`

bash is ubiquitous
bash has a lot of problems
Strictly speaking bash exists at a really uncomfortable saddle point between the need to be quick and user/flowstate-friendly, and the need to be robust as an automation tool and and
tldr: you still gotta run your scripts tho
may i recommend zsh

`zsh` + `oh-my-zsh`

unlike bash, you get sick + actually useful plugins
unlike fish, most of your scripts run fine w/o modifications

`starship`

another rust project
cross-platform shell … theme … thing
- i like to just run it as is but install it everywhere

why optimize for beauty and fun?

csikszentmihalyi would like a word

Stable Sort on

The dark forest of political communication

Digital resiliency 2025 - checklist

Cheap wins

Digital resiliency 2025 - my first self-audit!

Militant contentment

Death worries me because I have things to do

On turning 30

1000 days without drinking

Thoughts on language learning at the end of the world

Inside, outside, and elsewhere in Finnish locative case pedagogy

We should use prediction markets for long term software maintenance

Perfect Commit Checklists

A gentle introduction to ESR's `reposurgeon`

Why and how I build terrible things

Hugo 101

Hugo 101 :: (optional) Steal His Look

Hugo 101 :: these slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/hugo-101-slidy.html

Hugo 101 :: what i hope you leave with

Hugo 101 :: what i need from you

Thoughts on 29

Working Effectively With the Modern Shell

These slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell-slidy.html

What I hope you leave with

who am i

why the shell?

on speed

let’s talk about fzf

the rustification of tools

let’s talk about vi

why optimize for resources?

let’s talk about zsh

zsh + oh-my-zsh

starship

why optimize for beauty and fun?

Hugo :: Netlify -> Azure

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

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

How I Learn Things

The TL;DR’s TL;DR

TL;DR

Your learning queue and you

Hugo 101

Working Effectively With the Modern Shell

These slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell-slidy.html

What I hope you leave with

who am i

why the shell?

on speed

let’s talk about fzf

the rustification of tools

let’s talk about vi

why optimize for resources?

let’s talk about zsh

zsh + oh-my-zsh

starship

why optimize for beauty and fun?

let’s talk about `fzf`

let’s talk about `vi`

let’s talk about `zsh`

`zsh` + `oh-my-zsh`

`starship`

let’s talk about `fzf`

let’s talk about `vi`

let’s talk about `zsh`

`zsh` + `oh-my-zsh`

`starship`