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I never see my macOS desktop. It’s always cluttered with way too many open windows. When I spot those fantastic, tidy and clean Desktops on the internet, I envy their owners. I wonder if and how they manage to keep those desktops tidy like that the whole workday. It must feel so good. I try to keep my windows well arranged. The typical setup might be two windows, from two different apps, tiled side by side. Maybe the browser, or Postman, on the right, and my favourite editor on the left. Stuff like that. ...

This is a maintained technical guide that aims to provide introduction to various online tracking techniques, online id verification techniques and guidance to creating and maintaining (truly) anonymous online identities including social media accounts safely and legally. No pre-requisites besides English reading are required. At a glance, I suspect most people will be tempted to dismiss The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Online Anonymity as borderline paranoia. But make no mistake, it is a great resource. Granted, not everyone on the Internet is interested in anonymous identities (I am not) or concerned about NSA or the Mossad hunting them down. People have different threat levels. ...

When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability. All of those things are important. But in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming. Once again, Julia Evans has great sensible advice up on her site. ...

Write libraries instead of services is an interesting article I read a while ago. I cannot get it off my head. In an attempt to clear up my mind, I decided to sit down and write about it. I have been writing libraries for a good part of my life. Most of my earlier dev-work resides on thousands of computers in the form of libraries. More recently, I have been writing and deploying remote services. Libraries versus Services is a topic I care about. ...

If you are a grumpy old geek like me, you are probably a sucker for vintage computer games too. I don’t play games. Not anymore. I still enjoy reading about them, though. I guess it’s mostly nostalgia. I also believe that the mid-80s up to the mid-90s really was the golden age of computer games. In my book, innovation started with Infocom’s text adventures and soft-ended with Origin’s Ultima Online. After that, it’s been a constant evolution. “Harder, better, faster, stronger”, yes, but hardly a revolution. ...

There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four. They are: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most documentation - often immensely. I dig Daniele Procida’s take on writing good software documentation. It just makes sense. The system is simple, comprehensive, and, crucial, universally-applicable. The “four different functions” scheme works equally well if you are writing for a technical-savvy audience or the general public, which is excellent. The users I’m writing for are software developers, in some cases, and desktop or web application users in others. ...

I discovered you can use the “diskpart” tool to compact a VHDX. This allows you to shrink a WSL2 virtual disk file, reclaiming disk space. It appeared to work for me without any data corruption, taking the file size down from 100GB to 15GB. (source) I adore Parallels “reclaim disk space” feature. Just the other day, I got back 70GB off my Windows Guest in a breeze. I’m coming from VirtualBox, where reclaiming disk space is a significant pain. I would expect optimize-vhd to achieve the goal with WSL2, but it’s nice to know there are alternatives, like Stephen’s above ...

The Literary Hub has a great short interview with Ian McEwan. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was living in London at the start of my career in the mid-1970s, I became friends with Philip Roth, who took an avuncular interest in my work. Where many others thought my writing was wild and weird, he thought I wasn’t being wild enough. He once came to my apartment and spread the typescript of my first novel (The Cement Garden) over the floor. He was on his hands and knees, moving the chapters around. What he wanted was for me to be bolder, crazier. He said, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” My parents were alive. I took that advice. ...

I am an application/backend developer who has to quibble with databases more often than desired. I can get my way around Postgres pretty well, but I can always use a hint or two, especially when it comes to fine-tuning and performance. I stumbled upon Cleaning Up Your Postgres Databases. It offers useful advice on spotting performance bottlenecks in your Postgres database. Take the cache and index hit queries, for example. The first thing you’re going to want to look at is your cache hit ratio and index hit ratio. Your cache hit ratio is going to give the percentage of time your data is served from within memory vs. having to go to disk. Generally serving data from memory vs. disk is going to orders of magnitude faster, thus the more you can serve from memory the better. For a typical web application making a lot of short requests I’m going to target > 99% here. ...

The always brilliant Hynek recently posted Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You. Primarily targeted at consumers of SemVer-versioned packages, it is full of insightful advice. From my perspective as an open-source maintainer, I can tell you that versioning is hard. Judging when a new release is going to break backward compatibility is not as simple as it might seem on the surface, and Hynek does a great job explaining why. Sometimes it is also hard for me to tell if a change in a codebase classifies as a new feature, small improvement, or fix—subtle differences. In the context of SemVer, it matters a lot because version numbers have a meaning. Consumers will likely decide whether to upgrade or not based on that meaning. ...