Today I got an email from the Google Search Console about a page, or pages on dammIT that are "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". That generally means that a website has two (very) similar pages that contain the same content, without having a element in the duplicating pages …

As some of you might know, GitHub with their GitHubNext team recently released their own monospace font, Monaspace in five variants. I was intrigued, because they actually made for an interesting take on the concept, and it was not just one font, but a whole family with each their own …

Are you tired of doing everything by hand, having to remote into a build server to switch to that certain user account, then type in a bunch of commands, looking them up in your shell's history? Or has your CI failed you again? Is the company behind it forcing some …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …

As of about 15 minutes ago, I finally have styled admonitions here at dammIT HQ. If you are unsure about what those are, you might have seen them in the wild but just didn't know their name. Behold: Warning Note that this code is 100% organically grown at home and …

Good piece on how a (hardware) supply chain is something completely different from the software stack what we tend to call a 'software supply chain', but which really is not. The problem is mostly that the providers of the moving parts that people (read: companies) are so dependent on and …

This weekend we did a big migration of our stack at work to a new data centre and I am stoked about how our applications and their virtual machines are set up now. Quite a bunch is already automated and having a decent base image is such a nice thing …

I stumbled upon this post by Vermyndax earlier today and felt the urge to type. His problem is one that I'm familiar with; I don't pretend to have a magic answer, but I learned some tricks to get myself started. First of all: I don't think it's weird to want …

You might be acquainted with the Celery Distributed Task Queue, which is a proven way to process vast amounts of messages. Messages containing tasks for your software stack to eventually finish doing, for example. However, Celery is slightly cumbersome to set up (no rocket surgery, but the RabbitMQ message broker …

If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …

If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another “docs are good, write …

A few full days of searching for private package names belonging to some of the targeted companies revealed that many other names could be found on GitHub, as well as on the major package hosting services — inside internal packages which had been accidentally published — and even within posts on various …

When I made a remark that my commenting system is working again, a reader asked a simple enough question: how does one build a site like this? I realised there is no simple answer to this. Well, there is, but it takes a bunch of knowledge (and skills) one has …

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …

If you are even remotely using the same workflows as me, you will be using vim quite a bunch, and not limited to one machine with a given operating system. You might also have taken a liking to YouCompleteMe to serve as the code/word completion solution of choice. The …

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you …

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

After the bootstrap post of this series, I investigated quite some tools, and started building my initial framework of tools, just to play with the idea. Like mentioned, I used the mdnav vim plugin to make jumping between note files frictionless. I added some more patches to it, so it …

I have been thinking lately about how I organise my thoughts, notes, files, todo's, incoming messages, and much more. This was partly fed by Ryan Rix and his quest for the ultimate way of organising data, be it org-mode or a variant, TiddlyWiki, or something entirely self-built. I have quite …

Some people binge-watch series when taking some time off, some read books, some enjoy comics, some take time off from computers for a bit, and some spend some hours cleaning up their vim configuration file. This holiday, I did all of the above. Yesterday, instead of spending one day gaming …