escape code

About this website

joepd, 09 December 2013

Hello world! This is the first post to my site, which will double as the about page. Yet another site dedicated to consoles, shells, and old school interfaces to solved problems? Isn't there enough documentation and experience out there to warrant another site?

As with all good questions, the answer is both yes and no.

Yes. I proudly want to produce new content as a tribute to all the valuable and intricate pieces of information that have been shared before. I have learnt an awful lot from excellent people documenting informally how they overcome smaller and bigger technological hurdles while accomplishing stuff. And I have enjoyed doing so. A second reason for this resounding yes, is the hope that processes of documenting and publishing trivia, intricacies and insights will assist me in the battle against forgetfulness.

But I fancy to think that also that also No is a valid answer: This site will have a distinctive perspective. One thing where I find current informal, online documentation lacking, is in the description of interactive usage of tools. Much of the online documentation is a static description of how tools work, whereas how those tools can be used efficiently in a work flow of analyzing and fixing problems. If this were a blog about cooking, I would try to refrain from showing the ingredients and knives, and rather focus on how to cut and fry an onion to acchieve different results.

I have a fetish for basic tools. Be it a sharp knife in the kitchen, or the precise power tools that the One Thing Well software philosophy has brought about. The process of interactive discovery of the real problem is where the flexibility of the software tool philosophy really shines. In this blog I hope to provide some useful perspectives, approaches and recipes about the intersection of basic tools and work flows.

This site is statically generated with Pelican, and I don't feel the need to take care of comments. I do not want to imply that I do not like feed back, but prefer to get spam in my mail box rather than on the public net that I need to maintain. For now, for praise and bug reports, you can reach me best over email. I am sure you can puzzle my address together from the following bits of information:

user: escape-code host: xs4all tld: nl

Enjoy reading!