So I've set up a blog...

Hello, world!

I'm Duncan, a software nerd from Toronto.

At writing, my work has me primarily developing in React, with some Go when I need to fix our backend.

At home, I use PowerShell everywhere, and it or Go for automating things.

An (incomplete) listing of langauges and technologies I've used, in no particular order:

• Go - for work and for a few hobby projects, including a Discord bot (unmaintained) and a web scraper.

• React - for a couple of jobs, including a strange partial migration from Django templates, and for a hobby project: this site!

• Next.JS - this site!

• Typescript - everything Javascript I've ever done. Ever. Writing in plain JS is just uncomfortable now.

• C/C++ - most of my computer science degree was in C or C++, but I was using it years prior for competitive robotics. We even made it to the world championships my freshman year of high school!

• PostgreSQL - work, school, and this site, where it's the backing datastore for my webmentions reciever implementation.

• Python - for my previous job and for classes that didn't require a certain language. I've got a soft spot for Python. It's so easy to be productive in it, and I do really love that it reads like pseudocode. And now it's got types!

• PowerShell - a few jobs ago, I, the summer intern, somehow was the only person in a team of Windows administrators who knew PowerShell. It didn't take them long to see the merit of learning. Nowadays it's the first thing I reach for for basic scripting at home.

• Haskell - used it for class, liked it, haven't had a reason to use it outside of that. Maybe if I was doing more scientific computing I'd have a use for it, but even then, there's Python.

A list of tools/technologies I want to use, also in no particular order:

• Nix/NixOS - the idea of a deterministic, configuration-defined environment appeals to me. I've played around with Ansible in the past, but it hasn't been super useful since I'm primarily a Windows user. Windows has had Chocolatey for software installs, including a way to provide a list of stuff to be installed, but I haven't had a use for it. Now there's Powershell Desired State Configuration, and that looks interesting, but something about NixOS looks so appealing. Xe Iaso is a good evangelist for it. (Xe is also an inspiration for what I want to do with this blog.)

• Rust - I had to deal with C/C++, and various annoyingly unhelpful compilers for it, for years. I never want to go there again. That means that if I ever do seriously low-level development again, I'm learning Rust. I made it to about chapter 9 of The Rust Book before something distracted me for long enough to put it down and forget to pick it up again, but I've always learned best by just building something and learning as I go. Which, admittedly, is why I haven't used it yet. I haven't had a side project to work on that Rust would be a better fit for than something I already know and can weild faster and more effectively.

For the less technical stuff I'm into, I'm on Tumblr. I've been there since 2014 (oh god, a decade?) and I never left. I'm proud to have cost Verizon $3.

This blog

This is going to be the technical nerdery blog. Things I find interesting, opinions, things I'm proud of, etc, with one common denominator: technology.

Things I'm probably going to write about in the future:

• More details on the construction of this site in particular (now written: basics)

  • Potentially including previous iterations on the idea of "personal profile site"

• How I built an efficient suffix-tree system in Python (do not use string slicing for this)

Other blogs I'm inspired by:

• Xe Iaso's blog

• Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic