Alex Kladov

  1. CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts

    An ersatz CSS tutorial for people who need to style a web page, but aren't web developers. I am a wrong person to write this kind of thing, as I have neither the time, nor experience. I'd much rather read a book about this. Alas, I had to learn all this stuff from trawling MDN, so perhaps it is valuable…

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  2. TIL: Symlinking NixOS Dotfiles

    The standard answer to managing dotfiles on NixOS is home-manager. I've never used it, due to two aesthetic and one practical objection:

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  3. Always Be Blaming

    A few tips on 4D-ing your code comprehension skills.

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  4. Catch Flakes On Main

    A small Mechanical Habit today:

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  5. Learning Software Architecture

    In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:

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  6. Steering Zig Fmt

    Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter.

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  7. Minimal Viable Zig Error Contexts

    Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling --- strongly-typed error codes. Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic solution is to pass a Diagnostics out parameter (sink) to materialize human-readable strings as needed.

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  8. 256 Lines or Less: Test Case Minimization

    Property Based Testing and fuzzing are a deep and science-intensive topic. There are enough advanced techniques there for a couple of PhDs, a PBT daemon, and a client-server architecture. But I have this weird parlor-trick PBT library, implementable in a couple of hundred lines of code in one sitting…

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  9. Consensus Board Game

    I have an early adulthood trauma from struggling to understand consensus amidst a myriad of poor explanations. I am overcompensating for that by adding my own attempts to the fray. Today, I want to draw a series of pictures which could be helpful. You can see this post as a set of missing illustrations…

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  10. JJ LSP Follow Up

    In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I've learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request

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