Hello readers,
By this time, you've probably forgotten that you have signed up to receive the occasional email from me. Oops, I haven't been writing much at jakemccrary.com and this newsletter mostly exists because folks wanted to get emails when I write new articles over there.
Despite that being the reason for this newsletter to exist, I’ve failed to send out timely updates for the handful of articles I’ve published and haven’t yet announced the site redesign. This email fixes that.
jakemccrary.com redesign
My old setup used an ancient version of Jekyll with Octopress enhancements and broke yet again. Instead of fixing that, which would have taken many fewer hours, I opted to rewrite the site generation using Babashka, a Clojure dialect. This means I can understand every level of the site generation and, mostly, only blame myself when it breaks in the future.
I'm sure the design will continue to evolve, especially the main page. It continues to load much, much faster than most websites out there.
New articles since last email
Bookmarklets on mobile are useful
The archive.is bookmarklet mentioned in this article is something I use almost daily on my mobile device. It is super useful.
Reading in 2022, Reading in 2023, and Reading in 2024
I've continued to read great books. In the last few years I've discovered the author Miranda July and her writing really jives with me.
Scheduling cron tasks in mixed time zones
My team uses boring technology (except for Clojure). From that, it follows that we use cron to schedule stopping and starting hundreds of services throughout our work week.
We also have to deal with a variety of time zones. Figuring out how to have cron work with time zones has drastically cut down on the amount of risk around daylight savings time shifts. Linux experts told me this couldn't be done and the internet wasn't super useful figuring out how to do this. Luckily, there is always the source code.
A couple quality of life improving functions added to emacs
A short post showing off a couple of quality of life improvements I've made to my emacs setup over the last year or so. LLMs drastically lower the bar to writing these types of small, minor annoyance removing functions. If you aren’t experimenting with using LLMs for this and more, I think you are missing out.
End
I expect the time-to-next email not to be measured in years and I’m predicting it will get back to the previous format of highlighting articles I’ve written and what I’ve been reading, both articles and books.
Till next time,
Jake