Devbox, is an interesting, nix-based tool for setting up reproducible development environments. I recently needed to quickly setup a postgres database and load the Chinook dataset to play around with some queries. I could have used Docker, but I am not a fan of its UI or how heavyweight it has become (looking into podman is also on my todo list) and I’ve been using nix a lot lately, which is what led me to the devbox project.As I’ve fallen more down the rabbit hole, empowered by nix making it so easy to install, configure and manage any software, I discovered Alacritty as a fast, configurable terminal emulator. I’ve used and enjoyed iTerm2 for a while but it never hurts to try something new. I have some muscle memory built up for how my use my machine, so my aim was to configure something I could use comfortably in Alacritty, modeling it off of my iTerm setup.I’ve used Hammerspoon as a window manager for almost 10 years. I decided to explore some of the newer tools in window management to see if I could find an alternative approach for what I do with Hammerspoon. Using yabai and skhd, I wrote the following skhdrc file that nearly reproduces the core functionality of my Hammerspoon window management code. I have four general window management use cases:
halves quarters maximize move to another display Here’s how I implemented that with skhd hotkeys mapped to yabai commands:This post is extremely similar to nix flakes and direnv. Here, I repeated my process, but with a little more thought and a little less language model magic.
I setup my new computer to use nix, switching away from Homebrew, which I’ve used to manage and install dependencies on my system for about a decade. My goal was to unify my configuration management with my package management. Thus far, I’ve been quite satisfied.I was following this guide to setup nix-darwin on a new Mac when I ran into an issue following the section about cross-compiling Linux binaries. I put this issue to the side when I first encountered it because I was trying to setup dependency management for my new system and this problem didn’t prevent that. However, I was reminded when I read another article by Jacek, which motivated me to figure out what the problem was.Last year I wrote about nix and direnv as I explored the potential convenience of an isolated, project-specific environment. There were some interesting initial learnings about nix, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. Now, I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ve been doing it for longer. As an example, I’m going to walk through how I set up a flake-driven development environment for this blog with direnv.I just did a fresh clone of my site for the first time in (probably) years. I’ve been using nix on my new system, so I was writing a flake to setup a development environment for the site with Hugo and Python. When I ran hugo serve, I saw all my content show up
| EN -------------------+------ Pages | 528 Paginator pages | 20 Non-page files | 0 Static files | 173 Processed images | 0 Aliases | 53 Sitemaps | 1 Cleaned | 0 but when I went to load the local site at localhost:1313, I saw “Page Not Found”.I tried out Deno for the first time. Deno bills itself as
the most productive, secure, and performant JavaScript runtime for the modern programmer
Given my experience with it so far, I think it may have a case. One thing I immediately appreciated about Deno was how quickly I could go from zero to running code. It’s one of the things I like about Python that has kept me coming back despite a number of other shortcomings.Vercel has a library called ai, that is useful for building language model chat applications. I used it to help build Write Partner The library has two main components:
A backend API that is called by a frontend app that streams language model responses A hook (in React) that provides access to the chat, its messages and an API to fetch completions When designing Write Partner, I started the chat session with the following messagesGoku has a concept called a simlayer. A simlayer allows you to press any single key on the keyboard, then any second key while holding the first and trigger an arbitrary action as a result. I’m going to write a karabiner.edn config that opens Firefox when you press .+f.
{:simlayers {:launch-mode {:key :period}}, :templates {:open-app "open -a \"%s\""}, :main [{:des "launch mode", :rules [:launch-mode [:f [:open-app "Firefox"]]]}]} ❯ goku Done! To start, we define a simlayer for the period key.