jq, a tool for manipulating JSON data, is one of the easiest most powerful ways to work with JSON text values in a terminal. I use it frequently. Mostly, I use it to extract values from HTTP responses. To combine multiple files or program outputs, some extra paramaters are useful.

JSON deserialization is Go seems easy, but there are a lot of tricky parts. Come and see!

I was reading about Phoenix today, looking at guides and documentation. It’s great to see in a guide when it’s easy to quickly set up a project, that makes it fun to get started and explore. The most exciting thing about Phoenix is that “reactivity”, or live updates, are a core part of the system, not an add-on. Nowadays I find any software without reactive updates frustrating and annoying to use.

I love squash merging. I think it’s the simplest way to maintain a legible commit history on main, a shared dev branch, etc. It’s easy for most people to follow, and it doesn’t require you to be too Big Brained about git. GitHub even provides a convenient interface for doing this, right in the pull request UI! But GitHub’s squash merge workflow undermines the biggest benefits of squash merges: clear, simple, atomic commit messages that explain what each commit does.

Every so often I’ll see a meme on Twitter like: and it makes me so mad. For good reason! OSS project repositories that support merge commits to main are usually littered with useless comments like: “Merge change from $USER, $PR”. It makes the commit history on main utterly useless and you get to check the various feature branches in a never ending snake of commits to find out what the hell changed.

TLDR; I learned a bunch about rendering fonts and I thought it would be interesting to read about them from a programmer’s perspective. I gained a ton of empathy for type design and type-setting developers, as they work with a dizzying variety of screen resolutions, font styles, and a wide variety of device speeds to produce type that looks as good as it possibly can under harsh conditions. Background I’ve been working on a project involving a two-color e-ink screen.

I’m a big fan of Zach Gage’s games. He recently released a game called “Sage Solitaire” in which solitaire is played with poker hands. You can make a Full House, Straight, Straight Flush, etc, to clear cards from the board. To choose what hands to make, it’s pretty important to know what cards remain in the deck, much as it can be in poker. I wrote Cardsharp to help me keep track of remaining cards in a Sage Solitaire deck.