I finally got around to redesigning the blog, or rather, simplifying it. I always liked the deliberate simplicity yet legibile beauty of some tech blogs. And this was also what I was striving for from the very beginning for this blog. If you look at this before/after image you may barely notice any differences.

While not much has changed visually, it was a major cleanup nontheless. Here are some of the things that got axed:

Gitea served me well as my private git forge over at https://git.friedl.net for a long time. Today, I moved over to Forgejo. The migration was as smooth as it gets. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement at this stage. But that won’t be the case forever! So if you want to switch too, you better do it soon while it’s still smooth.

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like recently there’s an increasing trend of community and open source projects changing licenses and/or transitioning to a commercial model. A famous case is certainly the license change that Elastic did back in the day. But also CockroachDB and Redis switched to more or less fanfare. There are a lot of reasons for this, and the discussions surrounding them are often emotionally and philosophically charged. While there’s certainly a time and place for delving into these discussion, for now, I simply want to share an observation.

Copilots, Assistants and other AI helpers are popping up all around us. While there is undoubtedly some hype surrounding these tools, they are also just a genuinely useful piece of technology. It’s quite interesting to explore new workflows and integrations using them. One such integration that has proven itself useful to me is an integration in Emacs called chatgpt-shell.

chatgpt-shell is a comint-based buffer with a prompt to enter instructions and displaying the response from ChatGPT. Behind the scenes there is much more going on of course. It creates the API request and parses the result. It handles streaming, errors, syntax highlighting. It provides several user commands, customizations, keyboard shortcuts.

Another year, another blog. I’ve been trying to start this blog for a couple of years now. The main reason is that I’ve learned a lot from other people’s blogs and, well, I like the idea that someone might find this one interesting too.

I had some posts written here in the past, but somehow got writer’s block whenever I saw them. I didn’t quite like their writing style, but also never really got around to fix them. Meanwhile, whenever I wanted to start a new post they bothered me too much to continue. All in all this resulted in this whole blog idea stalling for quite some time.