Posts

Twelve things wrong, and the one I fixed first

I spent a morning reviewing a low-code automation someone else had built. It worked. Forms came in, notifications went out, the right people got alerted. By the end of the review I had twelve things written down that were wrong with it, and the most useful thing I did that day was not hand over the list of twelve. Working and maintainable are different properties The flow did what it was asked to do, every time. That is not nothing, and it is worth saying out loud before anything else, because a review that opens with a defect list teaches the author that shipping working software counts for nothing.

Thursday, October 16, 2025 | 5 minutes Read

Low-code is not no-logic: expression thinking in Power Automate

Developers tend to dismiss low-code tools, and I understand why: what you see first is boxes connected by arrows, which looks like flowchart software rather than programming. But that visible layer is only half the platform. Underneath every one of those boxes is an expression language, and that is where the actual logic lives. The distinction that made this click for me is the old one between statements and expressions. Statements do things. Expressions evaluate to values. In Power Automate the actions are statements, and their fields accept expressions.

Saturday, October 4, 2025 | 3 minutes Read

Johnny Decimal for the files, Zettelkasten for the thoughts

Every organisation system dies the same death: you stop trusting it, so you stop filing into it, so it rots, which proves you were right not to trust it. Mine has survived a few years now, and the reason is that it is actually two systems with a clear division of labour. Johnny Decimal answers “where does this file go?” and Zettelkasten answers “where does this thought go?”. Neither is asked to do the other’s job.

Monday, August 25, 2025 | 4 minutes Read

Use secrets, not random, and remember the shuffle

Python gives you two ways to pick something at random, and only one of them belongs anywhere near a password. random is a Mersenne Twister. It is fast, it is reproducible, and that second property is exactly the problem: it is a deterministic algorithm driven by internal state. Observe enough of its output and you can recover that state and predict everything it will produce next. For a dice roll or a shuffled playlist, wonderful. For anything that guards access, disqualifying.

Sunday, August 24, 2025 | 4 minutes Read

Parsing Markdown by alternating on odd and even

I worked through boot.dev’s Build a Static Site Generator, a guided project that has you write the thing that turns **bold** into <b>bold</b>. The architecture is the course’s: a TextNode type for chunks of formatted text, an HTMLNode tree to render, and separate passes for block-level and inline parsing. This is a write-up of the piece I found most elegant, not something I invented. The inline parser is a genuinely neat idea, and it took me a while to see why it works, so it seemed worth explaining properly.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 | 4 minutes Read

The particle fade that never faded

Asteroids on boot.dev is a guided build. Its chapters cover Pygame setup, the game loop, the player, and the asteroids: enough for a working game. Everything past that is left to you, and that is where I kept going, adding momentum, a start menu, lives, scoring, and explosions. The explosions were the fun part. Shoot an asteroid and fifteen white particles fly outward and fade to nothing over half a second.

Sunday, January 26, 2025 | 4 minutes Read

Installing Hugo on WSL

If you develop on Windows but want a Linux toolchain, Hugo runs happily under WSL. Here is the quick version, plus the one gotcha worth knowing. The quick way (often out of date) Update your package list and install from apt: sudo apt update sudo apt install hugo This works, but Ubuntu and Debian package a version of Hugo that usually lags well behind the current release. Themes move quickly, and plenty of them need a newer Hugo than apt will give you. If a theme’s build complains about your Hugo version, this is why.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025 | 1 minute Read

Space has no drag, so I added some

The boot.dev Asteroids course gives you a ship that moves while you hold a key and stops when you let go. It works, it is simple, and it feels nothing like being in space. What I wanted was continuous motion: you thrust, and then you keep going, because nothing out there is slowing you down. That is a small change to describe and a surprisingly interesting one to build, because the honest version of it is unplayable.

Sunday, January 19, 2025 | 5 minutes Read