Notes from January 2026
Happy new year! Here are some of my notes from the first month of 2026.
New job at Ghost!
I started a new job as a Staff Engineer at Ghost this month. According to our homepage, Ghost is “for professional publishers to create, share, and grow a business around their content.” I’m looking forward to building software for independent journalists.
This is also the third time in a row I’ve chosen to work for a nonprofit. It’s a pattern now: nonprofits are my default choice of where to work.
Things I did
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libdeflate does “fast, whole-buffer DEFLATE-based compression and decompression”. I published libdeflate.js, which wraps it up for JavaScript users. Always feels good to use a little WebAssembly.
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I recently set every single option in my Vim configuration, and blogged about it in “I set all 376 Vim options and I’m still a fool”. Even though I learned a lot setting every flag, I still feel far from mastering an editor I’ve used for almost 14 years. There was some good discussion on Lobsters, Reddit, and Hacker News.
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While everyone else is using state-of-the-art chatbots, I’m using an LLM that’s 7500 times stupider.
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I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser and published my notes. Zinsser’s writing isn’t to my taste, but I still learned a lot from this book.
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To approximate the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, double it and add 30. For the reverse, subtract 30 and halve it. For example, if it’s 12ºC, this heuristic would return 54ºF: (12 × 2) + 30 = 54. The actual amount is not far off: 53.6ºF. For more, see “A mental math heuristic to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius”.
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I swear by “Learn X in Y minutes”, a great website that offers quick tours of programming languages. I’m proud to have contributed a page on Rink, a powerful command line calculator I’ve gushed about previously.
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Like every month, I published a few articles over at Zelda Dungeon.
Links and bookmarks
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“The calendar turns, and once again a lively procession of books, images, films, and music leaves copyright behind and steps into the ever-growing public domain!” I celebrated Public Domain Day by reading Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage.
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From “Everything You Need to Know About Email Encryption in 2026”: “You have virtually no email privacy. They’re like postcards, not envelopes.”
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Shoutout to Minneapolis for its strike against the ICE occupation, and shoutout to General Strike US, and the National Shutdown.
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Speaking of ICE, they’re requesting “ad tech” data for surveillance.
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“What has Meta itself observed about the harms tied to its products?” Turns out, a lot.
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I knew about Can I use, an invaluable index of browser support for various web APIs. But this month, I learned about Can I email, a counterpart for email clients.
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“In American cities, for example: though at first the automobile enabled humans to travel further distances, it now demanded that humans travel those distances, and demanded infrastructure be created & maintained to enable it.” From “A website to destroy all websites”.
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“Who owns your data?” argues that it could be useful to think of personal data as property, from a legal perspective.
Hope you had a good January.