live more & love more Recommended by a friend, I first listened to Cat Burns’ live more & love more on an early morning train. The songs I listen to often were flowing through my headphones; the usual playlist going. The music soothed the transition from tiredness to feeling read … | Continue reading

As I continue to build my blog search engine, I have been asking myself “given my search engine is for my website, what features can I build that would be most helpful to me?” I have been thinking a lot about search filters since I wrote my blog post on how helpful I find Slack’s … | Continue reading

When I woke up this morning and opened the window, it was snowing. This was the first time this year I have seen more than a small flutter of snow fall from the sky. The ground and hills were coated with snow; the imprint of footprints followed the pavements. It was cold. And it … | Continue reading

Toward the top of my notepad, I wrote I miss personal writing. I realised this in a conversation earlier this week where I felt that something was missing from the more technical writing I have been doing lately on this website. As I was singing and dancing while waiting for the … | Continue reading

One of the joys of making something is that you never know the extent to which it can inspire someone. I was just thinking about all the things I have on my bookshelf. The authors will never know that their books touched me in a particular way. Thus is the nature of creativity: w … | Continue reading

My website search engine uses text search to identify documents relevant to a given term. Up until recently, the search engine treated every word in a term independently. For example, consider the query “all too well”. Documents would be found that contain any of the words in the … | Continue reading

In Let’s replace “user experience” with human experience, I posit that we should use “human experience” instead of “user experience,” the former expressing more directly the fact that we design software for people. When I make this website, I like to follow my curiosities. With t … | Continue reading

It was with the sounds of the cicadas, that Sestuna walked through the streets, looking for the rumored cafe with the ability to travel in time. She could hear the sounds of the first fireworks in the background, the children running around the streets. She passed the Obon festiv … | Continue reading

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to organise content on my website. I want you, my readers, to be able to learn about the different types of content to write – from poetry to technical blog posts to stories – and find the posts that may be most interesting to you. Th … | Continue reading

I have been thinking about how musical concepts apply to blogging recently. For example, could you make “playlists” of your content that are curated by theme or the mood of the posts? For example, could I have a list of “Monday morning pick-me-ups” with heartwarming stories I hav … | Continue reading

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post with a friend in real time using Google Docs. We started with a blank page and conversed in the document to develop an idea. Then, we started writing, together. The result was a delightful story. We only spoke in Google Docs; our communication … | Continue reading

The hills on the horizon are becoming clearer, I think to myself. I reflect on the faint haze that remains after the heavy fog that painted the landscape white earlier in the morning. The low sun is shining, illuminating the few remaining colourful leaves on the trees in front of … | Continue reading

In “Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index or How Google Code Search Worked”, Russ Cox describes a system that allows for code search with regular expressions. It has taken me several reads of the article to understand roughly what is going on, and I still don’t have a … | Continue reading

Nestled within the annals of my notes is “The long view of blogs,” followed by my wondering whether a blog could be a magnum opus. I later coalesced these ideas into the “long view” of a blog. I imagine this as thinking about the blog not as any single post, but rather as the col … | Continue reading

Earlier this year, a friend told me that an essential part of learning design is to take note of what you like and don’t like. Once you notice that you like and don’t like, you can ask yourself why. From there begins the potential to analyze and build an eye that you can use to m … | Continue reading

Before you optimize your code, you should run a profiler to understand how your code performs. In Python, you can use cProfile to profile your code. cProfile is part of the Python standard library. With cProfile, you can find out: How long functions take to run in your code, both … | Continue reading

I have noticed a pattern across my work in search and on static site generators: in both cases, the key to offering good performance for users is to precompute as much information as you can. Text search engines rely on “reverse indices,” which map words to the documents they are … | Continue reading

The IndieWeb wiki, like Wikipedia, uses concise, descriptive URL slugs. A “slug” is the part of the URL after the domain name. For example, the following page takes you to the wiki page on coffee. https://indieweb.org/coffee I have recently been thinking about two benefits of co … | Continue reading

When you copy images directly from a Google Document into Ghost, and potentially other rich text editors, URL references to the images in the Document are copied instead of the underlying image. This means that if the document is deleted, the images will be broken. Thus, before y … | Continue reading

Firefox has a feature that lets you map a character or sequence of characters typed in the Firefox address bar to a custom search engine. For example, you can map w to Wikipedia, so the query w coffee would take you to the Wikipedia search page for coffee (which auto-redirects to … | Continue reading

Read this article on James' Coffee Blog | Continue reading

At Homebrew Writing Club yesterday, someone asked “What is the writing equivalent of a duet?” I explore this concept with reference to collaborative writing, then extend the idea further of applying musical metaphors to writing. This led to thinking about the literary equivalent … | Continue reading

This evening, I started to think about what the experience should be on audio notes. Could I offer transcriptions? What would that look like? What design elements should I have on the page? What features could I add to afford greater utility to the transcript, like search? I expl … | Continue reading

I have recently been reflecting on how technical writing goes out of date, and what that means as a technical writer. In the voice note below, I explore how technical documents have relevance far beyond their immediate utility as a reference material. Your browser does not suppor … | Continue reading