infrastructure thaumaturge and "technical" "writer" | @BowtieWorks | very tired all the time | ๐ @tyler@typing.ink
Idaho, USA
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There's a little-known letter from Chaucer that records his tasting flavor-blasted doritos
> [...] mye mouthe wys accosted with sych violence by thee triangle I was laid out upon mye bed f'r three nyghts avvash in a dread sweat that did not abate until my humors weir set aright
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I will never forgive Rust for making me think to myself โI wonder if this is allocatingโ whenever Iโm writing Python now
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I just want a modern, well-maintained programming language that's performant, provides low-level facilities for systems programming, doesn't force me to manage memory, has a strong and expressive type system, and interops with C
Rust reply = blocked
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Even assuming Omarchy had zero bloat, gluing together a system with POSIX shell scripts is like building a house with tools that will randomly break if you hold them at the wrong angle or disappear in your hand if it's Tuesday
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you gotta be careful not to alienate people in the FOSS community like Lunduke and risk losing their copious amounts of well-regarded software projects and technical contributions
I stand behind every word. Lunduke has been a net negative to tech journalism for over a decade. Every single maintainer Iโve talked to absolutely hates this guy.
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weโre ten years away from an hour-long video with Felix yelling about GNU license violations arenโt we
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Been seeing people bemoan the Mastodon setup steps and I'm over here like uh, it took ~30 lines on NixOS and everything was cached so I never saw `bundle install` run
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to grow up is to realize that this malcom in the middle opener is neither good nor evil but just a reflection of the noble battle against household entropy in all its forms
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LMAO
At this point it feels unfair to prey on Lunduke for reasons similar why we donโt publicly mock the elderly and infirm for falling for Microsoft Support scams
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"Linux is glued together with shell scripts"
Yes and that's why we still suffer brittle systems while others are doing the work to replace bash and perl scripts with better alternatives. do not cite the old magic to me
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wHy reWriTe iT in rUsT whEn yOu hAve tO cRoSS aN unSaFe bOunDaRy evEntUalLy
i totally agree. this is why i don't put my children in car seats: if the car explodes, they'll be injured anyway. it's just extra work to put them in the car
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Years ago I was asked during a job interview how an `echo` command would behave when it was given a variable in like 5 different ways, each result was different. You can't build foundations that can be reliably reasoned about on primitives like that
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I think you need to be mired in software engineering for a few years before realizing how much of a miracle it is that I can find a public repository and, because it has a flake.nix file, can run it successfully with a single command from my local machine
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I blogged about systemd because I finally snapped after reading Reddit threads about it one too many times
"systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success" โฌ๏ธ
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I donโt like the same programming languages Prime likes but I identify with this
I try to focus on business problems at work but in my free time I genuinely just enjoy composing functions, making nice abstractions, etc.
this is so real
if I don't make time for ~3-4 hours a day for just programming, I actually get cranky
what have I done to myself
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>scripts don't run things, they just set things up
>shell scripting experience equivalent to python
This is such an insane take that I'm going to assume it's bait
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Even assuming you were correct about mining coal with machinery, you don't understand how the mining industry has operated since the 1940's
Mining with pickaxes is how it has always been done; the difference is just that you perhaps didn't get the black lung 80 years ago
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My reaction upon learning about ongoing Go/Haskell discourse on Twitter is just being entertained. Programmers can navel-gaze about different merits but Haskell is just an objectively better language, thereโs a nothing to prove here
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I didn't notice @FrameworkPuter listed @nixos_org under their community-supported Linux distributions. sick
It's also one of our officially supported distros: frame.work/desktop?tab=linux
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One feature I've missed in @nixos_org is a "pending updates" ability to preview what an upgrade will do. The new `nix store diff-closures` makes this possible! It's extremely cool that "pending changes" in this case is a literal system-level diff:
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If you woke up on Monday thinking "I would love to read 4,500 words about building rust containers to deploy on @flydotio using nix", I have good news! community.fly.io/t/running-rโฆ
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โI like constraints that force me to write boilerplateโ
It is 2025 and I am asking programmers to concede that Good Things are Good and that Bad Things are Bad
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extremely frustrated rn that @HSVSphere was right about quickshell being capable of building application launchers. this shit makes it so easy to build GUIs
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youโve doomed me, an innocent lowbie, to the notification firehose. please grant me clemency Mr. Prime
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I have a lot of love for the @nixos_org maintainers for their responsiveness. Incredibly busy repo but still got my glusterfs patch reviewed and merged in a week or two, a pretty stark contrast to a lot of other projects Iโve contributed to
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After 7(!)-ish years with @elastic I'm stepping away and, at least for now, taking an extended break. I'm not sure what's next! But as much as opportunities abound, no amount of work will regain this time with our son at home and my grandparents in their twilight years
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Me: โwhatโs your desktop look like?โ
Hideo Kojima, visibly sweating: โnormal. my desktop looks normalโ
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lunduke would better benefit society by sitting motionless in an empty room every day rather than stirring up shit to generate views for the sake of """journalism"""
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I donโt even dislike this guy any more, heโs like a modern day tarot card. Heโs an omen or portent but indecipherable to logical reasoning. When he shows up on your feed it just mean energies in your vicinity are in a tempestuous, unstable state of being
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Itโs already bailing out the Python ecosystem and so far has been rewarded with confused redditor comments and snide remarks from the orange site. Alas
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Reminder: you can enjoy all the benefits of containers without using containers. Bonus: your build pipeline will still work 6 months from now. @nixos_org blog.tjll.net/container-scheโฆ
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Thereโs a Rust cabal meetup this weekend at the gym. Weโll be discussing how best to advance our agenda of infiltrating new Linux distributions and also trying to get new deadlift PRs
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he didn't
My apparently very-subtle point is that his clickbait concern trolling is a net drag on OSS and the ecosystem as a whole would benefit from less of him
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One success story I absolutely never saw coming was @codinghorror with @discourse. Like, I think everyone assumed that systems like phpBB were just the incumbents by default, and now Discourse forums show up in places from tiny community to Blizzard's official forums
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I genuinely love that, even in Idaho, I can wear my @elastic jacket around town and evoke impromptu conversations with software engineers who have no other intent other than to offer their compliments to the company and our software. What a nice feeling โจ
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I unironically enjoy writing nix code and am upset that all of my nix stuff works so reliably well that I haven't had to write any new nix code for months now
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Todayโs hot shell tip: hit Ctrl-x-e in any shell to edit long commands in $EDITOR. Been using this for a few years and it kills my brain when I see people edit commands with arrow keys
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I think the sleeping giant of tech industry valuation is @HashiCorp because MOST of their products run the software industry, but itโs hard to grasp unless youโre in the trenches daily. Packer, Terraform, Vault are de facto standards for their respective functions at this point
Packer has always just quietlyโฆ run the entire industry. A couple major clouds have publicly stated their services are built on images built by Packer, Microsoft literally has a service that IS Packer, and weโve never seen a G2000 customer that isnโt using Packer.
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I havenโt tweeted about it in a minute because itโs been profoundly, boringly reliable but niri continues to be 1) the most stable compositor Iโve used 2) the most aesthetically appealing and 3) the most easily extensible via its IPC. What else do you want in a wm
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I know powerful type systems are the True Way because I had to admit their superiority over alternatives despite my pre-existing preferences and no amount of personal opinion could overcome the base reality when I was being honest with myself
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Reasons why itrevolution.com/love-letterโฆ is one of the better technical pieces I've read in the past year or so:
It's focused almost entirely on the positives of the topic. This isn't a diatribe on the detriments of OOP, but about why FP has been such a joy to use (1/n)
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Alright, I'm convinced: @htmx_org is a _very_ good way to add just enough interactivity to a webapp without going overboard with some behemoth js framework. FastAPI/Chalice+htmx let me create a very interactive and easy-to-manage app inside a Lambda function
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how wild is it that @nixos_org flakes are a universal way to build anything in a toolchain-agnostic way _directly from github_ with a singular `nix run ...` and some people are completely unaware of it
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EXCUSE ME, but did you know ssh added the -J flag to natively support jump/bastion hosts without the `ProxyCommand` config directive? AM I THE ONLY ONE EXCITED BY THIS
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Where we're going we don't need containers
Nix for portability and service definition, systemd for cgroups and runtime security sandboxing
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Print this out and post it up outside Cupertino and Redmond to shame them for building less usable desktop interfaces with 1000x the resources
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Use my new distro that pipes output scraped from /g/ directly into your window manager control socket
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imagine configuring a machine imperatively with mouse clicks and manual commands like some kind of brute animal
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oh my god, he topped "I called your tailor" with "I called the FBI on you"
not true. your style has so little to do with classic men's dress that the FBI was able to use your shoes to identify you as one of the jan 6th rioters. i know this bc you once followed me, but then i saw your ugly shoes, blocked you, and alerted the FBI
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I want _so badly_ to write a blog post about a work project that nix has basically been perfect for that has let me been, conservatively, maybe 5x as productive as I might've otherwise been
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Carrie and Lowell by Sufjan Stevens is pretty close
At the risk of being @Aella_Girl, if I were in this situation, I think a single viewing of The Fountain would obliterate me
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As I lay trampled and beaten upon the ground by angry Linux users, let me fire a parting shot with one of my favorite blog posts before I am consigned to oblivion
blog.tjll.net/the-systemd-reโฆ
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My introductory @elastic blog post for my team's open-sourced Haskell tool is up: Real-time monitoring of Fastly metrics with the Elastic Stack and Haskell. It's called Beefheart, and it's a good introductory Haskell project! elastic.co/blog/monitoring-fโฆ
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Thank you, @travisci, for being a genuinely pleasant service to use. Free for open source is a really nice thing to do. <3
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It feels like FastAPI + HTMX is a very solid combination. Added in websockets for added smoothness and itโs, uh, really nice. I havenโt written a line of nodejs/nexts/react/whatever-is-trending
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*whispers* don't let the secret out, but Oracle Cloud's free tier is insane. The following specs are all free _with more free resources_ to spare. Folks have written guides, too blog.korfuri.fr/posts/2022/0โฆ
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the nix/nixos "do not cannibalize your own community members for failing to meet your moral purity standards" challenge (impossible)
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NOOOOO ALL THE REPLIES THINK THE SHITPOST IS SERIOUS AND NOW I'M BURIED IN "USE GO" NOTIFICATIONS KILL MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
IT WAS JUST A FUNNI JOKE BRO
I just want a modern, well-maintained programming language that's performant, provides low-level facilities for systems programming, doesn't force me to manage memory, has a strong and expressive type system, and interops with C
Rust reply = blocked
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@fasterthanlime is a @nixos_org user now, it's all over
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whipped up a new screen capture UI in quickshell + niri + nixos btw (juiced the DPI scaling so it's easier to see here). Does screenshots or videos, optional delay, handles chosen area, window selection, or whole output and opens it with swappy for annotations
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"Why is this iterating this way? Where did this variable come from? Why is this string acting weird?"
POSIX: idk man, fuck you
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Every software engineer signs an immutable agreement to fix bugs in projects they critique. This is law
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Did you know that you can build for a dozen different clouds, create dev environments, package Python/nodejs/Rust apps, and test in qemu VMs all with @nixos_org? Because we totally did
Learn how we build packages with Nix for robust private networks at Bowtie: bowtie.works/blog/baking-imaโฆ
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"Oh, so you don't want your shell scripts to be portable, heathen?"
No. Not if I have to write literal shell slop
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i tried to give you so many opportunities to bail, man
here. one year for every day your account has been active. anymore more felt a little excessive
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Going to a function definition in emacs and it drops you into a C file rather than an elisp file is like a jumpscare
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Secretly pleased as I watch my personal repo gradually lose python files as I gain nushell files
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I don't know if it needs shared libraries to run, what toolchain it uses, what _language_ it's written in, or literally anything else. It ships its complete dependency tree and I just don't have to think about any of it
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It's here! Read about how to leverage @nixos_org to build cloud images (and create dev environments and package rust/node/python projects and cache system updates and create test VMs) bowtie.works/blog/baking-imaโฆ
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I blogged about how you can preview package updates on a @nixos_org system like you can with apt, yum, or pacman: blog.tjll.net/previewing-nixโฆ
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One of my favorite interview questions is to ask the candidate to name a technology they like that theyโre experienced in and then ask them to critique it
Anyway I think honest nixers should be honest about its flaws as well
>Nix fixes this
meanwhile almost the entirety of my professional experience with Nix over the last 10 years is that any spookiness or weird build breakage was Nix's fault
pretty sure @snoyberg would agree too
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Hey @nixos_org folks: anybody want to beta read an engineering post about using NixOS to build network appliances? This is low-pressure/informal (just asking to provide feedback, not heavy-duty paid editing or anything)
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I've crossed the @nixos_org skill threshold where pulling in upstream patches to fix package bugs is now easier than with any other package manager. Feels good man
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Every time I read some pessimistic take or negative dig about @nixos_org I'm going to submit another PR fixing a CI failure
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I graduated college sort of infatuated with Ruby and wrote a lot of Python professionally, but after learning Haskell I knew that was something egregiously wrong with dynamic typing and from then on out those languages lost a lot of their luster
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The ergonomics of something like @caddyserver present a compelling argument for "rewrite the traditional solution as something new". A Let's Encrypted reverse proxy with the config file
my.domain
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8000
Is a compelling reason to drop old cruft
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