Posts

Shell Scripts: Safe Short/Long Option Parsing

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I’ve written a ton of Bash scripts over the years - haven't we all?
To be honest, for a long time I handled command…
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The Tale of Two Teams: How We End Up With Useless Software

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Two equally notorious ways to guarantee failure in any software project:Ship too soonNever shipThis is the story I use …
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GNU Make's Two Personalities: Understanding Simple (:=) vs. Recursive (=) Variables

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There are two major flavours of variables in GNU Make:  "simple" and "recursive".  While si…
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The Tyranny of Choice: My Case for Opinionated Software

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Early in my career, I learned an expensive lesson (fortunately by observation, not by failure) and it has had a profoun…
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The "Zero Incidents" Trap: Why Chasing Perfection Backfires

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I'll confess: for years, I was an adamant believer.
I was convinced that achieving "zero incidents" was ju…
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My awesome Scid setup! 🨀

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Scid Rocks 🚀
Behold! Two screenshot of Scid from my ThinkPad running openSUSE Tumbleweed:On a FHD vertical monitor. The…
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GNU Make - Unconditionally run a target before any other targets

When writing a (GNU) Makefile, there are times when you need a particular target(s) to be run before anything else…
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Firefox profiles: Quickly replicate your settings to any machine

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Have you ever been in a situation where you'd needed to work on different/new machines on a daily basis and wished …
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