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• Post #4310525

  I cleaned up some disused dotfiles (and worse, code to manage to said dotfiles) and ended up taking some notes on some software I really like: Stow. https://ddbeck.com/notes/stow-and-dotfiles

• Post #4310524

  Serious open source docs work has a cost. I wrote down every way that I know of that gets docs authors and maintainers paid. https://ddbeck.com/where-does-the-money-come-from/ #WriteTheDocs

• Post #4310523

  It's the first of the month and you know what that means: time to document something with a README file https://github.com/ddbeck/readme-checklist #WriteTheDocs

• Post #4310522

  I took some notes on Peter Hilton's prescriptions for solving the team tech blog problem and suggest one of my own https://ddbeck.com/notes/tech-blog-problem-solved

• Post #4310521

  Had to reset the clock for "time since hearing a dick joke made on stage at a tech conference" which was standing at years 🙁

• Post #4310520

  With Git, I sometimes check out a single file, such as a shell script, from another branch. I didn't know how to do this with Jujutsu, so I took notes on how, plus why jj's equivalent confuses me. https://ddbeck.com/notes/jj-copy-file-from-revision

• Post #4310519

  I finally added video of my talk "Stop chopping onions and extend Markdown without tears" to my site. It's my guided tour of a few little-used extension points in Markdown. https://ddbeck.com/fosdem2026/

• Post #4310518

  It's the first of the month, which is a great time to document something you haven't documented before with a README file https://github.com/ddbeck/readme-checklist

• Post #4310517

  Spec fiction or that which was specified but never implemented https://ddbeck.com/notes/spec-fiction

• Post #4310516

  The syntaxes jq uses for extracting an object’s keys, values, and entries are confusingly dissimilar. One of them is not like the others. A brief note with examples. https://ddbeck.com/notes/jq-object-entries-keys-and-values

• Post #4310515

  New note: jaq is "Pandoc for structured data" https://ddbeck.com/notes/jaq-structured-data

• Post #914964

  It's the first of the month and you're no fool. Why not share what you know by writing a README file? https://github.com/ddbeck/readme-checklist

• Post #703440

  A note on @jmac's "assertions documents," Cunningham's Law, and a skill development pattern in tech writing https://ddbeck.com/notes/cunninghams-law-is-a-core-skill/

• Post #703438

  xkcd 2347 is the unofficial logo of FOSDEM

• Post #703437

  If you came to my talk at FOSDEM, "Stop chopping onions and extend Markdown without tears," thank you! My talk page has credits, slides, and further links. (This page works now, if you tried to go to it earlier.) https://ddbeck.com/fosdem2026/

• Post #703436

  A reader recently wrote to me asking about how to organize docs, especially planning and design docs, in a new open source project. I blogged my response. #WriteTheDocs #documentation https://ddbeck.com/where-do-open-source-docs-go/

• Post #703435

  Hey, web specification authors: I dare you to title a spec without a Pascal case "Web" prefix. I bet you can't do it!

• Post #703434

  If you work with many Git remotes or submodules, you can save time on fetches with parallel jobs https://ddbeck.com/notes/git-fetch-parallel-jobs/

• Post #703433

  You might know camelCase or snake_case or kebab-case, but do you know Tall Man? https://ddbeck.com/notes/tall-man-lettering/

• Post #703432

  Notes on pandoc for the people, the pandoc that runs in your web browser https://ddbeck.com/notes/pandoc-for-the-people

• Post #703431

  Today's the first Monday of the month, which is a great time to document the undocumented with a README https://github.com/ddbeck/readme-checklist

• Post #703430

  Why a 10-year-old Tumblr post by @galaxykate is the most important thing I've read about generating text https://ddbeck.com/notes/slops-ancestor/

• Post #703429

  I took some brief notes on contributing to Git for the first time https://ddbeck.com/notes/first-git-commit

• Post #703428

  I recently learned that there's a <q> HTML element. It's the inline counterpart to <blockquote>, except much weirder. https://ddbeck.com/notes/the-q-element