https://www.bitquabit.com/ Recent content on bitquabit Lume 2.0 Copyright © 2005-2026 Benjamin Pollack. All rights reserved. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:10:30 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/how-i-do-github-prs/ Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:31:40 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/how-i-do-github-prs/ After a long time spent in management, I found myself switching back to an IC role in February. Since then, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit re-learning how to do all the things I used to do. Or…maybe not re-learning outright, but… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/beating-spelling-bee-with-factor/ Tue, 14 Mar 2023 14:35:00 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/beating-spelling-bee-with-factor/ While I unfortunately haven’t had a lot of time to contribute to Factor for a couple of years, I still love using it for the little random programming tasks I have to deal with day-to-day. Factor’s design makes it perfect for the kind of… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/introducing-hayom/ Thu, 18 Aug 2022 20:22:18 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/introducing-hayom/ For quite some time, I’ve had an appreciation for text-based tooling. Not (necessarily) for terminal-based tooling, mind—there are some meaningful benefits to using a GUI, after all—but for solutions that truly think of plaintext as their source of… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/learning-writing-and-coding-from-a-con-artist/ Wed, 05 Jan 2022 15:03:36 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/learning-writing-and-coding-from-a-con-artist/ The best teacher I ever had on how to write and how to code was a complete charlatan hack who conned his way into Duke’s English department. No wait, hear me out: the prof (let’s call him Matt, because I’m not even entirely sure he gave us his real… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/i-see-deno-in-your-future/ Tue, 23 Nov 2021 01:26:29 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/i-see-deno-in-your-future/ Deno is a re-imagining of Node: still JavaScript for the server and command line, still based on V8, but with a drastically improved build story, simplified (hell, genuinely simple) dependencies, and a vastly improved standard library and web… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/deprecated-nix-api/ Wed, 20 May 2020 19:31:18 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/deprecated-nix-api/ I realized the other day that, while I do almost all of my development “in *nix”, I don’t actually meaningfully program in what I traditionally have thought of as “*nix” anymore. And, if things like Hacker News, Lobsters, and random dotfiles I come… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/hooks-versus-class-components/ Mon, 23 Dec 2019 16:07:00 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/hooks-versus-class-components/ As much as I love exploring and using weird tech for personal projects, I’m actually very conservative when it comes to using new tech in production. Yet I was an immediate, strong proponent of React Hooks the second they came out. Before Hooks,… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-cats/ Wed, 24 Jul 2019 12:43:53 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-cats/ Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Dogs, I thought it would be great to offer you falsehoods programmers believe about mankind’s other best friend. But since I don’t know what that is, here’s instead a version about cats. Cats would… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-death-of-edge/ Sat, 08 Dec 2018 01:16:22 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/the-death-of-edge/ Edge is dead. Yes, its shell will continue, but its rendering engine is dead, which throws Edge into the also-ran pile of WebKit/Blink wrappers. And no, I’m not thrilled. Ignoring anything else, I think EdgeHTML was a solid rendering engine, and I… https://www.bitquabit.com/post/messages-google-chat-and-signal/ Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:46:01 Z https://www.bitquabit.com/post/messages-google-chat-and-signal/ Google is about to try, yet again, to compete with iMessages, this time by supporting RCS (the successor to SMS/MMS) in their native texting app. As in their previous attempts, their solution isn’t end-to-end encrypted—because honestly, with their…