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Aug 2026 | 28 posts

What I’m learning in 2024

2024 has been a learning fueled year, Diving deep into things I never would have previously thought I would. It’s been a bit of a mix of the 🔥hot twitter trends, and exactly what tech twitter tells you not to do. It just goes to show community is great, the tech community is filled with strong opinions, but you need to think about what really makes sense for you, your career and your customers (or lack there of). tech # k8s tailwind fastapi htmx jinja opnsense successful one day builds # play-outside reader thoughts thoughts chrome-extension Kubernetes # Damn did I sleep on k8s for way took long. This is like exactly what I’ve needed for a lot of things. It’s a perect example of what happens when you listen to the tech community tell you. Looking for a Heroku replacement, What I found was shocking! I started looking for something to make my homelab deployments easier at home. Previously I needed to ssh into my server and fuss around with docker compose. This just did not feel right for…

Today I am playing around with tailwind, flexing the css muscle and learning how to build new and different layouts with it.

I created a new post template that mimics a terminal look in css where I could inject the post title, description, and other frontmatter elements.

Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux 🐧 ulauncher.io
Ulauncher — Application launcher for Linux 🐧 Download Ulauncher for Linux, discover extensions and videos, and support the project. ulauncher.io Just discovered this really cool launcher from the DHH distro omakub. github.com/omakub {.hoverlink}. Ulauncher comes out of the box looking good, supports extensions, and shortcuts like I have a lot of mac launchers have. I installed it plus a theme and in no time It was looking good and launching applications. In the past I have leaned in on rofi for task launching, it is good. I just felt it was harder to configure to get right or look good.
basecamp/omakub: Opinionated Ubuntu Setup github.com
GitHub - omacom/omakub: Retired — the story lives at https://omarchy.org/omakub, the thread continues at https://omabuntu.omakasui.org Retired — the story lives at https://omarchy.org/omakub, the thread continues at https://omabuntu.omakasui.org - omacom/omakub GitHub · github.com This is DHH’s linux startup script. Call it a distro if you want, but he doesn’t. It’s made to take a vanilla ubuntu install and configure everything the way he likes it. There’s a number of great nuggets in here to pick up on. No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omakub is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best. Check it out and give it a ⭐ basecamp/omakub {.hoverlink}.
From the Circle to Epicycles (Part 1) - An animated introducti… www.andreinc.net
From the circle to epicycles | Personal Site of Andrei N. Ciobanu This article will be part of an extensive series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphi... andreinc.net This is a really cool animated visual representation of how sine waves work, how they relate to circles, pi, rad, and how to add up a series of waves to make square and sawtooth waves.
How to Force Dark Mode on Every Website in Google Chrome www.howtogeek.com
How to Force Dark Mode on Every Website in Google Chrome Do you like dark mode? Chrome now lets you forcibly enable it for every site on the web. No more blindingly bright websites. How-To Geek · howtogeek.com Sometimes I struggle to get my os to report dark mode to chrome, luckily there is a way to force chrome to always use dark mode. I’ve never really gotten into dark reader and extensions like this. For some reason they all make websites look really weird to me and I don’t really care for it. What I want is websites designed to be in dark/light to always go dark, if the designer didn’t design dark just let it be light.
xxHash - Extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm xxhash.com
xxHash — extremely fast hash algorithm xxHash is an extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm, working at RAM speed limit. Four stable variants: XXH32, XXH64, XXH3-64 and XXH3-128. xxhash.com xxHash is an extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm, working at RAM speed limit. It is proposed in four flavors (XXH32, XXH64, XXH3_64bits and XXH3_128bits). The latest variant, XXH3, offers improved performance across the board, especially on small data.
xxhash · PyPI pypi.org
Client Challenge pypi.org I hit an issue with markata where even though a bunch of articles were cached, the site build was still slow because I was hitting hashlib.sha256 so hard for cache keys. I was shocked when this popped up in my profiler as a significant portion of the time spent. I swapped out for xxhash and that issue completely went away.

Tailscale allows you to ssh into all of your tailscale machines, it busts through firewalls and accross networks without complex setup. If you have used tailscale before this is an obvious no brainer. What is not obvious is that you can configure tailscale to allow ssh connections from devices within your tailnet without even a ssh daemon process running right through the tailscale daemon.

tailscale status
tailscale set --ssh

I picked this up from the tailscale youtube channel.

Tailscale

I just implemented a latest blog post link in Markata by asking for the first post slug from the blog feed. The implementation uses the jinja_md plugin to render jinja against the markdown and a tag to redirect.

My latest blog post is [[ {{ markata.feeds.blog.posts[0].slug }} ]].  Click the
link if you are not automatically redirected.

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url='/{{ markata.feeds.blog.posts[0].slug }}'" />

Setting up the feed #

Feeds are setup in markata.toml configuration. They provide a handy way to create an html feed, rss feed, and quickly reference a filtered set of posts like this.

# you will need to enable the jinja_md plugin along with the defaults
[markata]
hooks = [
    "markata.plugins.jinja_md",
    "default",
    ]

# set up the blog feed
[[markata.feeds]]
slug = 'blog'
template = "feed.html"
filter = "date<=today and templateKey in ['blog-post'] and published"
sort = "date"
reverse = true

For more information on markata check out the full markata post.

Replicate — Run AI with an API replicate.com
Replicate - Run AI with an API Run open-source machine learning models with a cloud API replicate.com This is so easy compared to self hosting stable diffusion yourself. It even has a nice api that you can hit with curl or python. The pricing seems competitive as well. Bookmarking this to try next time I need something like it.
How to Deliver Code Every Day | Jake Worth www.jakeworth.com
How to Deliver Code Every Day I recently calculated that I merge 0.8 pull requests every day into my team repo. Let’s round up and say I merge about one PR every day, delivering one or more features to production. I like this... Jake Worth · jakeworth.com Great set of tips here! No waiting. No “waiting until tomorrow” or “It’s Friday, let’s wait until Monday” to deploy. If your deploys are so slow that deploying an hour before the end of the day is a risk, that’s a separate problem. If you’re afraid of a Friday deploy, your system is too brittle, or you don’t have foolproof rollback procedures, or you don’t have people you trust on call to resolve it. Each of these is a problem that you can fix. This one I find interesting I think there are some industries where customers come in large waves over the weekend, and a weekend bug can not only ruin someones day off, take longer to fix, but also cost a lot of money. Not deploying on Friday is totally what that team should be doing. Most of us are not that team. Most of us work on small teams supporting some sort of product that Should be able to be tested and rolled back. I completely agree with Jake here, if your not willing to deploy…
Be Fast | Jake Worth www.jakeworth.com
You Have to Get Fast to Get Good at Programming Great programmers aren’t fast because they’re great. They’re great because they’re fast. Jake Worth · jakeworth.com Be Fast, Practice, Hone your craft. There’s a lot to be said here about honing your craft for editing text, picking up a few extra WPM, learning vim shortcuts. Also just build shit. The more you build new and different things the more not only your text editing will just roll out, your skills to see patterns in code and architecture will flourish. Read their bios, and the answer is always no. They loved to play, sure. They had some base talent, typically. But they also invested an absurd amount of time into that skill set. This! is actually what turned me on to Post Malone. I remember hearing his story in how he was just known as the guy with a guitar because he was always playing it between class and everything.

Refactoring one line links into wikilinks

Previously I had setup a feature of my website to expand one line links into a card. This was not a standard, even to the point that some formatters wrap the links with, thus breaking my custom plugin. Moving to the wikilink standard will allow my markdown posts to work accross more site builders without custom integrations. Expand One Line Links What is a wikilink # Wikilinks are standard to a lot of wikis written in markdown. markdown-it-wikilinks The wikilink syntax is a slug wrapped in double square brackets. Marksman lsp will even autocomplete these for you, its pretty sweet. Note I recently implemented hover for wikilinks and and am pretty stoked about the result. Check this one out sick wikilink hover. Vim Quickfix # You could use to fill your quickfix list will all of the one line links but I am less familiar with vimgrep and kept missing posts for some reason, I think it was something in my file glob missing some directories. I chose to use to fill my quickfix list using a com…
2 min read
vim

about this site

I registered waylonwalker.com and started making content for it in 2017 after a big industry downturn in 2016 that left me scared for what would happen if I were laid off. The company I was working for at the time did it’s first major downsizing in history sending many really good engineers out to look for new opportunities in a world flooded with many in the same situation. This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024. This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024. See Waylon Walker for more about me. What is this site? # It’s a blog Digital Garden Learn in public TIL portfolio my personal corner of the internet It’s [NOT]{.text-red-500.text-6xl.font-bold} Perfect # There will be mistakes I will learn Grammar will be fine, but never perfect Code will run on my machine, but not guaranteed to be perfect There will be days when the whole site is broken It started as a blog # This site started out as a [big B] It’s a digital garden # Somewhere…
4 min read
meta
⭐ pypeaday eol-dr
Just starred eol-dr by pypeaday. It’s an exciting project with a lot to offer. A crowd-sourced guide to help techs help their non-tech spouses / partners / parents / kids when we are at the end-of-life
Text Decoration - Tailwind CSS tailwindcss.com
text-decoration-line - Typography Utilities for controlling the decoration of text. tailwindcss.com Tailwind calls strikethrough line-through. This caught me off guard and took me a minute to find. Control how text is decorated with the underline, no-underline, and line-through utilities.

sick wikilink hover

Today I set up some sick wikilink hover effects using tailwind see A Case For Tailwindcss. When you hover over them they show an image preview of the link that you are going to. I cant find where I have seen this but it comes from some docs sites. I’ll finish this article later, just excited to see it up.
1 min read
python
We have a right to repair! with Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at… changelog.com
We have a right to repair! with Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit (Changelog Interviews #582) This week Adam went solo — talking to Kyle Wiens, Founder and CEO at iFixit, about all things Right to Repair. They discussed the latest win here in the US with Oregon passing an electronics Righ... Changelog · changelog.com This is one of my favorite changelog episodes of all time. I had no idea all the work that has gone into the right to repair and ifixit. They talk a lot about apple and its trend to be less repairable from unservicable air pods to serialized components within iphone. A lot of legal talk that was far more interesting that I thought it would be. Recently winning the right to repair case against John Deere, and creating repairability scores for devices to be placed in stores like energy guide is.

markata

This post is a work in progress. Markata is the static site generator that I created to build my website about this site. I built it for me and I enjoy using it. I know everying it can do and I can extend it to do more easily. I have set it up for some friends to also use it and am proud that it helps them publish their content. It’s a meme to create your own static site generator to make your website. Yes its funny, I don’t recommend it if your not ready for the level of work that comes with it, but at the end of the day it’s very rewarding and a great way to learn. Static Sites were all the rage # JAMStack was 🔥 Gatsby and Next.js hit the scene as the next generation of static site builders and were getting big around the time I started building my site in 2017. They were based on react. I dove into react and learned it enough to build my website, but I really lacked the depth of knowledge in the js ecosystem to really work on it effectively. For instance when it got slow, it was har…

my linked in work history

My linked in work history is empty. I made up a position about content developer that tracks how long I’ve been blogging. I think i did this because LinkedIn requires it. Either way this is public knowledge and fine sharing. Social Engineering # If you have taken any security class for your job seriously you have already been told not to share your work with most companies to the public, this is private information that only opens you up for social engineering attacks against that company. I care about privacy and security # I care about the security of these companies I work for and their reputation, so I refuse to publically share it. Need to know # If somehow you need to know where I work it’s my choice to tell you. I don’t need to advertise to every social engineering hacker where I work on the platform that they go to get that information from.

Your LinkedIn is Garbage

Your linkedin link sits at the top of your resume, its one of the first things I see when I open your resume, but yet it gives me no more information that the damn resume you sent me. Save that space on your resume for something useful. So you want that /in/me on your resume # Fine if you want it on your resume make it actually useful for someone reading your resume. Actually post something # If I am reading resume’s and I actually take the time to look at your linkedin I want to see you post something. Take a side, make an opinion and post it. Learn something new, make a post about it. If you have a blog and you make a good post share it there. Your work history belongs on your resume # Any security 101 tells you that you should not share your work history on linked in. You should not share photos of you at your workplace that include sensitive information such as your badge. Your work history on LinkedIn is for hackers to steal and use for social engineering. If you took security ser…
⭐ eraser-dev eraser
I recently discovered eraser by eraser-dev, and it’s truly impressive. 🧹 Cleaning up images from Kubernetes nodes
Distrobox distrobox.it
Distrobox Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. distrobox.it distrobox gives you to run commands on the host. This is handy to get access to host level clis that you probably wouldn’t want to run from the container like,,. DESCRIPTION distrobox-host-exec lets one execute command on the host, while inside of a container. Under the hood, distrobox-host-exec uses host-spawn a project that lets us execute commands back on the host. If the tool is not found the user will be prompted to install it.
ublue-os/image-template: Build your own custom Universal Blue … github.com
GitHub - ublue-os/image-template: Build your own custom Universal Blue Image! Build your own custom Universal Blue Image! Contribute to ublue-os/image-template development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com ublue-os makes a github template for making your own git repo with actions that build out your own personal ublue iso.
ublue-os/obs-studio-portable: OCI container image of OBS Studi… github.com
GitHub - ublue-os/obs-studio-portable: OCI container image of OBS Studio that bundles a curated collection of 3rd party plugins OCI container image of OBS Studio that bundles a curated collection of 3rd party plugins - ublue-os/obs-studio-portable GitHub · github.com Distrobox is so interesting and cool, I’ve only recently started realizing how much it can do especially related to hardware and graphics, this is quite an example that runs obs in a distrobox. I had no idea distrobox would let you connect to cameras and gpus so seemlessly, and give you a gui to work from. And with distrobox you can export so that it just looks like an app on your system.
⭐ andydunstall piko
andydunstall has done a fantastic job with piko. Highly recommend taking a look. An open-source alternative to Ngrok, designed to serve production traffic and be simple to host (particularly on Kubernetes)
How Ahrefs Gets a Billion Dollar-Worth Infrastructure With a 9… tech.ahrefs.com
External Link tech.ahrefs.com 2024 has been a wild year for infra with going “back” to on prem being made popular by @dhh. Well it looks like ahrefs saw right through the cloud trends an decided to ride the anti cloud train until it came back around to the station. Being just a bit critical of the article it is impossible to get an apples to apples without actually running something of this scale and spending too much to find out. I cant imagine raw ec2 and ebs being the cheapest route into aws. They used no serverless tech in their article, but I digress, because I like this own your shit and build good product train. What about People?! This follow up does dive into the typical gut reaction that people cost a lot of money, you must account for them. You see when you hire people who are actually good at what they do, and run lean a lot of cost goes away, you have levels of management that disappear, levels of tooling that don’t need to exist, departments of IT don’t need to exist. Colo’s are the new hotness, and will continue to grow! I just notices that they didn’t even account for egress, support and taxes, egress costs would make a difference.
Safer Bash Shebang Recipes - Just Programmer’s Manual just.systems
Safer Bash Shebang Recipes - Just Programmer's Manual just.systems When using justfiles each line is ran separately from the last, unless you specify the file to be ran by something other than just such as bash. If you want variables to persist you need to set a shebang. Also if you are using your script i a way that you want it to exit when it fails you need to set -e and -o pipefail. This is critical if you are thinking about using just for production scripts like ci/cd. I’ve hit too bugs where ci passes, but no artifacts were created issues for this exact reason.
A quote from Tim Paul simonwillison.net
A quote from Tim Paul I’m no developer, but I got the AI part working in about an hour. What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Damn this Tim Paul quote finishes hard and such a good point. None of the stuff around llms just work. Good ui’s, front end, back end, infrastructure, product. All these things still need to exist, and in fact for ai to be good we need to still go hard on them otherwise everything will die in a heaping pile of ai slop I’m no developer, but I got the AI part working in about an hour. What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes and data architecture. It reminded me that, in order to capitalise on the potential of AI technologies, we need to really invest in the other stuff too, especially data infrastructure. It would be ironic, and a huge shame, if AI hype sucked all the investment out of those things. — Tim Paul
PopSQL - Collaborative SQL Editor - Bring Order to SQL Chaos popsql.com
PopSQL - Collaborative SQL Editor - Bring Order to SQL Chaos PopSQL is a unified SQL collaboration workspace that connects everyone in the data analysis process so you can obtain better insights by asking the right questions, together. PopSQL · popsql.com PopSql looks like a very innovative product to bring collaboration to data exploration and visualization in a way you would expect from something like vscode liveshare. This looks far more appealing than a traditional BI data tool.
Pricing | PopSQL popsql.com
Pricing | PopSQL PopSQL is a unified SQL collaboration workspace that connects everyone in the data analysis process so you can obtain better insights by asking the right questions, together. PopSQL · popsql.com interesting pricing model from popsql (pronounces Popsicle). At a glance you pay for data retention, want the abiltiy to recall all the queries you ran within the last year, run at a higher frequency, you jump a pricing tier.
Dax Raad - SST, Build modern full-stack applications on AWS wi… www.youtube.com
such a sick episode with dax. SST’s free tier will be free as long as aws allows a free tier, their free tier literally costs them nothing. They talked about keeping SST small, the limitations that brings, but also the number of problems that just go away when you only have 3 people building. Lots of process disappears, everyone can trust everyone, no one needs to wait for approval, everyone is their own PM and just builds cool shit. They don’t have to worry about big costs and making payroll because they are profitable so much higher than their costs. If they can get through phase one of just being the go platform for a very specific audience of users, and gain marketshare, the ideas of offerings on top of this are endless.
Install Pokemon TCG Live on Steam Deck - Installation Guide - … www.youtube.com
I had no idea that you could just drop an msi installer right in steam. This worked for me, and was much easier to install pokemon tcg live in 05-2024 on ubuntu 22-04. I added the msi to steam from my downloads, hit start, failed right away like he said it would. changed compatability to proton experimental, and it opened right up. Download the official installer from pokemon tcg Add non steam game click show all file types navigate to downloaded msi click gear icon > compatability > proton experimental click play profit