Reilly Wood

I find working on my personal website to be soothing. It’s one of those never-ending projects in a good way, and I work on it in small bursts of energy whenever I have the time and inspiration. I’ve added a handful of new features in recent months and, uh, I’m sorry.

Some of these features are an attempt to revisit the glory that was the Geocities-era web; you might have noticed the glittery cursor trail (based on the excellent cursor-effects), or the animated snowy background that only shows up in December.

I’ve added custom emoji that I can easily use throughout the website (with Hugo shortcodes), here’s a small sample:

I use a lot of custom emoji on Slack and Discord; adding them to my website was the logical next step. I’ve also been toying with the idea of letting readers emoji-react to my blog posts but haven’t quite come up with a design I’m happy with. Speaking of emoji…

Whoa, what’s this?

I also added these, uh, Socratic dialogue bubbles between me and arbitrary emoji heads. These are heavily inspired by “Cool Bear” but with more characters because why not?

Got it. I’m sure everyone will love this and nobody will find it annoying.

These features are pretty dumb and they’d never make it past design review in the real world. In a way, that’s the point. Let’s make websites fun again.

I work on a command-line shell called Nushell (Nu for short) with some internet friends, and I think it’s pretty cool. To convince you that it’s cool (or at least worth a try), here’s a whirlwind tour.

Basic Querying

Let’s start by taking a look around the filesystem. We’ll use ls to take a look at the files in /usr/bin:

If you try to do any kind of analysis of Vancouver’s urban planning, you quickly run into a problem:

Vancouver has a lot of zoning districts. 895 of them, to be exact¹. That works out to roughly 1 zoning district for every 740 residents; I hope you weren’t planning on reading every one.

For a long time, my mental model of urban planning was basically “there are written rules about what you can build, and to build something you just follow the rules.” Unfortunately, this is not an accurate way to think about Vancouver.

I get alerts for new rezoning+development applications (using a small tool I wrote), and this little snippet shows up over and over:

…the application is “conditional” so it may be permitted. However, it requires the decision of the Director of Planning.

You can see this on virtually any type of housing proposed in Vancouver, here’s a selection:

I’ve been tracking rezoning+development applications for about a year and a half, and my data set has 599 items with the words “Director of Planning”.

OK, but… why? Doesn’t the Director of Planning have better things to do than approve individual houses and small apartment buildings?

I’ll defer that question to a senior planner at the City of Vancouver:

Like many other people, I unexpectedly found myself stuck at home without much to do in early 2020. To stay sane, I set about answering a question I’d had for a while: what’s the deal with native GUI frameworks on Windows these days?

It’s rarely obvious which of Microsoft’s several supported technologies is the best choice for a new project, and Windows doesn’t have the same culture of idiomatic+consistent native GUIs as macOS. After months of obsessive escapism focus I emerged with a decent understanding of the problem space; let’s start with an overview of the technologies in use today:

Win32

This is kind of a catch-all term for the old-school way to build a Windows application using arcane, less-than-ergonomic C APIs. This is unpleasant and your application will look ugly, but one big advantage is that the Win32 APIs will live forever and they underpin all the other UI frameworks.

It’s well worth your time to learn a bit of this (read Charles Petzold’s book ), but it’s rare to see people building pure-Win32 GUIs these days.