Developing code
& myself.

Making the complex approachable, and the mundane fascinating. Software, self-hosting, min/maxing everyday life — and the occasional wasabi-based coping strategy.

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17 articles
Software DevBuilding in Public 6 min read

Building in Public: The 'Back to It' VS Code Extension — Part 1

Context switching costs developers 23 minutes per interruption. I'm building a VS Code extension powered by GPT-4 to fix that. Here's how it started.

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Software Dev 2 min read

Time, the Silent Exploit: The Unseen Enemy in Every Codebase

Your wall was built to the best standards of the time. That was the problem. Nothing changed in its construction — but the world around it kept moving.

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Software DevLife 7 min read

The Mindful Coder's Workweek: 5 Themes to Enhance Your Craft and Satisfaction

Five themed days designed to inject creativity, purpose, and mindfulness back into your coding practice — without killing your productivity.

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Software Dev 3 min read

From Dirty Dishes to Clean Code: How Household Chores Mirror Programming Team Dynamics

Why do both partners in a household think they're doing 60% of the chores? The same psychology is running silently inside your dev team.

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Self HostingNetworking 9 min read

You're Closer Than You Think: The Only 6 DNS Concepts You Really Need

There are dozens of DNS record types and concepts. You need to understand 6 of them. Here's the scroll-past-the-scary-table version.

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Life 3 min read

The Wasabi Method: Shocking Your Way Out of Anxiety Attacks

What if fighting anxiety meant adding more discomfort, not less? A personal account of the methods that actually interrupt the spiral.

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Software Dev 3 min read

Free Software: The New Nicotine? Big Tech's Playbook Straight Out of Big Tobacco

That free JetBrains license felt generous. Turns out it was an investment — in you as a future paying customer. Sound familiar?

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Software Dev 4 min read

Your Gut is Smarter Than Your Spreadsheet: The Art of Software Estimation

Ever been in a meeting where everyone's tossing numbers around like they're psychic? Research suggests your gut might be better at this than you think.

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Software Dev 3 min read

The Subtract Day: Why Less Code Can Lead to More Success

One day a week dedicated not to adding features, but to removing the stale, over-engineered, and unnecessary ones. It's oddly satisfying.

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Software Dev 4 min read

ESLint: Why We Actually Bother

Linting always feels like a chore to set up. Here's why it's worth the 20 minutes — and where ESLint ends and Prettier begins.

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Software Dev 5 min read

Understanding Nginx Part 1: The Power of Event-Driven Architecture

Why can Nginx handle tens of thousands of concurrent connections while traditional servers fall over? It's all in how it handles events.

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Life 3 min read

Exercise Snacks: The Secret to All-Day Energy and Productivity

Short bursts of activity sprinkled through your day can transform your energy, focus, and even your relationship with junk food.

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Life 2 min read

How Important Clamping Is For Woodworking

A little story about car-carpentry, the van build that taught me everything, and why clamps are the most underrated tool you'll ever buy.

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Life 4 min read

How to Fix Your Sleep Cycle

You can't force yourself to sleep, but with modern technology you can force yourself awake. Here's the method that actually worked for me.

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Self HostingMin Maxing 3 min read

Min/Maxing WordPress Hosting

I tried to self-host WordPress as cheaply as possible. AWS Lightsail, then EC2, then a VPS. Here's what I learned the hard way.

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Min MaxingNetworking 2 min read

Min/Maxing My Internet Provider

How many ISPs are actually selling you something fundamentally different? In Australia at least, knowing who owns the pipes changes everything.

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Min Maxing 2 min read

Everyone Uses Super Glue Wrong.

That toilet seat you glued back together is going to fall apart again. Here's the right way to use super glue — and why it actually matters.

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About the author

I'm Jonah — a software engineer in Australia who writes about the stuff that doesn't fit in a README. Self-hosting adventures, estimation rants, the gap between how we think code works and how it actually does, and whatever I'm min/maxing this month.

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