Good Enough To Call It A Zine, Right? (rwblog S6E14)

Hello! I’ve been pretty busy since the last issue, so this is going to be more of a life update newsletter. If that’s boring come back in two weeks please 🙂

I often find myself trying to remember some article I read months ago, so, on a lark, I built a bookmarks site which lets me search the fulltext of my bookmarks (mostly pulled from GoodLinks but also from my Obsidian vault). I still need to polish it a bit — I’m just using the default Pagefind theme, without so much as a <title> tag! — but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I’ll probably write an in-depth article about it at some point; I used a fair amount of ChatGPT to speed myself up.

I also built a little command line app called Linty to check for banned regexes in a codebase (e.g. banning instances of TODO) in a pre-commit hook. This is vaguely based on a framework we use internally at Asana, which has more features but also does this. I don’t expect to see much real-world usage (although I’d love it if you find a use for it!) — I mostly wanted to learn Rust, which is perfect for command-line apps, and build a stupid tool. Even better, I found out about cargo-dist, a plugin that allows you to automate building and releasing a Rust binary. So you can actually install my tool on macOS pretty easily:

brew tap rwblickhan/linty
brew install linty

Again, I’ll probably write a more in-depth article about this at a later point.

Some friends and I (including Ker Lee, who you may remember as a talented newsletterer) threw together an open mic to celebrate the launch of a zine! Yes, we threw together a bunch of short stories and poems and printed it; that’s good enough to call it a zine, right? I’m hoping to throw together a very-90s-aesthetic website to show it off. Maybe there will be another issue in the future? Anyway, the open mic was pretty successful.

And finally, I recently started a second draft of a novel I wrote earlier this year. Maybe this is the one 👀 Wish me luck!