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The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 404 posts.
Recently I’ve been on a small campaign to try to make my personal website more… personal. Little ways to make it obvious it’s mine and personal , not just another piece of the boring corporate dystopia that is most of the web these days. I don’t quite want to fully regress to the Geocities era and fill the screen with…
I’ve been using Obsidian for all my writing lately, and it’s been a game changer. The local-first model means everything lives as plain text on my machine, and with the Minimal theme, the interface stays clean and distraction-free. My vault lives in iCloud (Dropbox or Google Drive work too), so notes sync seamlessly…
I recently shipped a non-trivial Ghostty feature (unobtrusive macOS automatic updates) that was largely developed with AI.
For the last ten years or so of working on Bundler, I’ve had a wish rattling around: I want a better dependency manager. It doesn’t just manage your gems, it manages your ruby versions, too. It doesn’t just manage your ruby versions, it installs pre-compiled rubies so you don’t have to wait for ruby to compile from…
blog - kade killary
I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick…
YAGNI, or, You aren't gonna need it , is a standard piece of advice that warns against over engineering and building too many features too early. I think its great and saves you from wasting time, which can kill a project.
In the spirit of my thermostat and dishwasher controller , I managed to cobble together a decent blinds opener in a short weekend almost entirely from spare parts on hand. This design is very much what I could do quickly with what I had, so probably not worth copying, but perhaps it can be an inspiration.
A quick cli script to tell you if your usb-c cable is bad
Earlier this year I designed a very basic box/organizer for AA and AAA batteries in Autodesk Fusion, making it parameterized so that by changing a few…
Exploring the process of designing and assembling 3D models from paper.
Why Pi-hole, the Raspberry Pi DNS sinkhole, is worth running at home to block trackers, ads, and analytics endpoints across every device on the network.
In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an ...
To redesign infrastructure, you have to allow incremental adoption, while simultaneously moving the whole design space at once.
A technique for deterministic labeling from stochastic models, with benchmarked Golang implementation.
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …
The solution to agentic flows was code all along.
How I went from buying a €200 tracker to building a custom telescope mount with harmonic drives, ESP32, and way more engineering than necessary
I set up my own VPS, documented every step, and ended up with a repeatable deployment pipeline. This is both a checklist for my future self and a guide for a...
I recently found myself needing to change the monitor that a cheap HDMI “dummy plug” pretended to be. It was a random one I had bought on Amazon several years ago that acted as a 4K monitor, and I needed it to be something simpler that didn’t support a 4K resolution. The story behind why is a long one that I’m still…
So! Suppose you’re an intrepid engineer in a nascent Developer Productivity team. Your engineering organization has decided that it wants to move towards a monorepo . You’ve heard the stories told of Google, Meta, Uber - each a large technology company with developer productivity organizations consisting of hundreds…
Finally, Podman has a Docker Compose alternative
Many command line utilities support short form options (-f) and long form options (--force). Short form is for interactive usage. In scripts, use the long form.
Not only did I give internet strangers unrestricted access to send me completely anonymous physical messages, but I also self-hosted the entire site on a Raspberry Pi
We need a vibe shift on dependencies in programming.
This is the story of a commercially unavailable stereo pair of thebi-amped Marshall Uxbridge, with custom-built replacement electronics:active filters feedin...
