Posts

  • Bash lints beyond ShellCheck

    ShellCheck is great, but it can’t catch everything. This is a collection of lints which I believe ShellCheck doesn’t currently detect.

  • Faux idempotency

    Writing idempotent code is great. It should always result in the same final state, so it’s easy to test. And a failed run shouldn’t affect the next one, making it reliable and safe. But as you’ve noticed I used “should” in both places, because code which looks idempotent may not be.

  • Consistent fonts in Firefox

    Are you sick of every single website using different fonts in the name of branding? You can easily force websites to use the browser default fonts:

  • Rarotonga tourist tips

    The Cook Islands recently opened up to tourists from New Zealand. Since the COVID-19 situation meant we wouldn’t be able to meet our family and friends without something like four weeks of hotel quarantine, we decided instead to take this first chance at an overseas experience in over a year. A friend happened to have booked a vacation overlapping a couple days with ours, so after arriving we met up for a chat. We learned a bunch of things about practicalities on the island, and this is a collection of those I can remember plus a few more we found out afterwards.

  • Dependabot on GitLab

    GitHub has made it as easy as six lines of YAML to get started with Dependabot, and I wanted to get as close to that as possible.

  • JetBrains IDEA repository sync

    If you have a paid version of IDEA, you probably already know that you can automatically sync your settings to the currently active account. That doesn’t cover all use cases though:

  • echo 'I wrote a Bash book!' >> /dev/world

    I wrote a book — The newline Guide to Bash Scripting! I’ll let the intro speak for itself:

  • We need programming mentors

    tl;dr Mentoring is probably the best way to advance the art of programming, by keeping hard-earned lessons fresh.

  • August bug

    Remembering a classic "time travel" bug reminded me of a fun time in Bash. How to reproduce in four handy steps:

  • Test naming tips

    No naming scheme is going to guarantee good names, so here are a few intentionally vague test naming guidelines: