Almost 8 years ago I privately reached out to BurntSushi asking about his CSV parser and how to get started implementing my own. I never expected an answer, but he replied very thoroughly.

It was August 2022, and I had just spent the previous night sleeping in a crowded campground in Long Island. I had a tent, which was already more equipment than anyone living in an NYC apartment normally has, but I had little else besides my sleeping bag and a blanket to separate me from the hard ground overnight. I didn’t sleep well, and my body ached. That discomfort wasn’t the end of the world, but it planted the idea in my mind that there had to be something better.

Sure I knew the most straighforward thing was to buy some sort of pad to sleep on, but I wanted something different — something that allowed me to do more with less. While researching, I stumbled on the idea of hammock camping. I loved the simplicity of it. You take a few minutes to suspend a piece of fabric between two trees and it magically supports you. Even though I understand how it works, it feels strange when you first sit in the hammock and the straps don’t suddenly ride down the tree, sending you plummeting to the ground.

There’s this stack overflow post with tons of views and upvotes and solutions on how to prevent iOS from zooming into inputs on forms. Unfortunately the advice is terrible. Make my font size 16px??? Preposterous! Disable zoooming completely??? Am I an animal?! If only there was a better way!

I recently discovered that the MacOS keychain has a command-line interface, and I decided that instead of storing my secrets on my personal laptop in plaintext, I could take advantage of the CLI to prevent the secrets from ever being stored on disk unencrypted.

Flow is a static type checker for JavaScript open sourced by Facebook. It helps you deal with many of the pain points of JavaScript and write better, easier to reason about code.

I had some pretty good ideas for this blog a while ago, but now I’ve forgotten them all. The rest of this post will be a markdown demo.