Programming Posts 📝

I have been learning to reflect on the question "where is the a-ha moment" as I produce technical content, both in video and text form. The "a-ha moment" articulation was unknown to me until recently, but when the point was explained to me you could say I had an "a-ha" moment myself. Meta indeed. I have become more focused on showing the outcome of a project upfront, particularly in technical guides. If a visual representation of the outcome is available -- a video or an image -- I shall use that instead.

TL;DR: I now have my own DNS resolver at jamesg.blog with some fun utilities. Read the GitHub documentation for a complete reference manual of all queries, and keep reading below for an explanation of the project and how it works.

I am continuing my foray into learning more about Linux and Unix. Over the last few days, I have learned about some shortcuts on the terminal that have made me think: "I wish I knew this existed long ago." (I'm not sure if the shortcuts I have learned are portable to every terminal, but they work on macOS and should work on Linux too.)

I have installed Plan 9 on my Raspberry Pi. I am excited to start using it. I can't use Plan 9 yet because I need a new keyboard and mouse to use with my Pi. So, this evening I decided to peruse the online Plan 9 manual pages. I am excited and have been eagerly trying a few commands on my Mac to see what commands are also on my Mac.

For the last few days, the server on which this website (and many others I run!) started acting strangely. Every so often, nginx would stop working and I'd have to restart the service manually. I had restarted nginx two or three times over the last few days so I knew something wasn't right. I spent some time this afternoon figuring out what was wrong. I found an issue with certbot renewals and nginx that, when resolved, fixed the errors I found in nginx and the /var/log/syslog file on my computer.

I was trying to implement the Fisher-Yates algorithm earlier this evening. This algorithm lets you randomly shuffle the contents of a list. I wanted to provide a list of songs and return a shuffled list. I decided to use Lisp for this since I don't know much Lisp and I want to build my skills.

Earlier this week I watched Alex Chan's Sans I/O programming talk. In the talk, Alex argues the importance of separating I/O and program logic, with reference to a situation where his team was unable to use already-available parsing libraries for BagIt data because said libraries depended on local access to a file. This talk resonated with me because it made me realise I tend to couple I/O and logic in my code without realising it. I'd highly recommend watching the talk in full, or at least reading Alex's accompanying summary on their blog.