Highlights

• I learned a few techniques that make it easier for me to record videos for my course.
• I’ve decided I don’t need to use a Merchant of Record service.
• I’ve integrated htmx into my standard toolkit for making web applications.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Record publishable versions of four lessons from the course

• Result: Recorded most of one lesson
• Grade: D

I forgot how long it takes to record videos! And I underestimated the amount of work I had outside of recording. Most weeks, I didn’t have time to record at all, but now I’m in the swing of recording.

Last week, I was listening to the CoRecursive podcast interview with PowerShell’s lead architect, Jeffrey Snover.

One moment in that interview has been stuck in my head the whole week is when Snover argues that graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are inherently “antisocial”:

I realized that — you know, that the mouse is antisocial. The GUI is antisocial. So what’s that mean? You have a problem to solve, and you solve it with the GUI. What do you have? A problem solved.

I’m looking for someone to take over my old content website, Is It Keto.

I worked on the site on and off between 2019 and 2020, but I no longer have time for it, so it’s just been neglected for the past several years. Still, it consistently earns $1-2k/yr in fully passive revenue.

Highlights

• I’m rebooting my blogging course from 2020.
• htmx is pretty good but not everything I wish it could be.
• I’m looking for a buyer for Is It Keto, my old keto website.

Rebooting Hit the Front Page

In 2020, I created a video course about blogging called “Hit the Front Page of Hacker News.” I was proud of the course material, and I heard positive feedback from students, but I felt like I never gave it the attention it deserved.

I recently read Julia Evans’ latest zine about git, and one of her tips was to configure your terminal shell prompt to show the git status.

Julia’s terminal prompt looks like this:

main is Julia’s current git branch. When she’s in the middle of a git operation like bisect or merge, the terminal changes to this:

It had never occurred to me to customize my shell prompt, but I immediately recognized the value.