You Didn’t Expect a 3000 Word Post Every Week, Did You?

Freedom!

Alright, I probably shouldn’t be too excited for my makeshift summer break. But today is indeed the first day of my “funemployment”, as the cool kids are calling it. I have a great big list of things to do while off work, most of which relate to my yearly goals or little technical side-projects I haven’t had time to make.

Of course, the first item on that list is to keep working on Psyche & Mnemosyne. I am quietly hoping I’ll have (yet another) draft done by the time I start work again, which is frankly unrealistic, but… I did write my 500 words for the day already 😉

The rest of this newsletter is just a bunch of little updates. What, you didn’t expect a 3,000-word post on the ethics of using Claude Code every week, did you?

I cleaned up the front page of my website, partly inspired by a BlueSky post from Craig Mod:

You, dear reader, probably know me personally, or if not, you’ve probably been reading long enough to have a pretty good sense of who I am — but, alas, the average internet rando stumbling on this page probably does not.

While I was there, I also updated the epigraph at the top so that it picks randomly from a short list every time the page loads. Try refreshing a couple times 😉

Of more far-reaching consequence: I’ve cleaned up the structure of my site, or, as the cool kids call it, the ~ information architecture ~

If you check the sitemap, you’ll now see that there’s only three major categories: evergreen (for “evergreen” lists and notes that I keep up to date), creative writing (for short stories and poetry), and newsletters (for everything else, including essays I didn’t originally send as newsletters).

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but never really had the time — but now I have some time free and a Claude Code that can do all the grunt work of moving the pages around and so on. I think I’ve set up all the redirects correctly, but if you see a broken link, do let me know!

Other site updates:

• I moved the search page into a modal popup powered by the newly-Baseline commandfor attribute — no JavaScript required!. I love that the web platform is actually, y’know, getting better over time?
• I switched the monospace font to Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono, which I’m also now using in my terminal. As the name implies, it’s designed to be hyperlegible, and I feel it achieves that goal while still looking pretty darn nice.

You may recall my breathless excitement for jujutsu version control a few weeks ago. But I completely forgot to mention how I actually learned jujutsu!

Luckily, there’s two fantastic (though incomplete) tutorials which, combined, taught me most everything I need to know about jujutsu in about an hour. First up there’s Steve’s Jujutsu Tutorial (the Steve being Steve Klabnik, aka the Rust book author) and secondly there’s Madeleine Mortensen’s Jujutsu For Busy Devs. Both are highly recommended.

Also, as a great big fan of the (fantastic) fzf fuzzy-finder CLI tool, I was naturally also a great big fan of the same author’s fzf-git.sh to operate on git objects. Alas, there was no equivalent for jj. So I had Claude Code write me one.

I also finally wrote a custom fish prompt, so that I could see my jj status right on the command line without typing jj log all the time 🙃

Tata for now. I’m off to the San Francisco Chocolate Salon where I will, hopefully, have some tasty chocolate.