Posts

In this post, I want to share my current project setup for writing modern Python with static typing and good tooling. The setup is basically: uv for the project and dependency management. mise to install tools (notably uv), auto-activate the virtual environment, and define common tasks. ruff to do formatting and linting. pyrefly to do type checking. Proper setup in a CI pipeline. I’ve spent a lot of time writing Python code during my career. I think the first time I wrote Python may have been around 2007, so almost 20 years now. I always liked it, but with the modern setup, I find I like it even more. The static type checking is something I particularly like, and I think its value has only increased in the modern era of coding agents. ...

In about 10 days from now, on October 1st, I will start working as a consultant for Arktekk. Arktekk is a small company of 8 (soon 9) senior consultants. During job changes like this, I tend to think about a lot of things, and there are plenty of emotions. I want to share some of them — both the thoughts and the emotions1. First, why Arktekk? The main reason is probably that I’ve come to know some of the people in Arktekk, and I thoroughly enjoy working with them. They are highly experienced and skilled, quite a bit nerdy, but they also have a good understanding of the human side of development. That is, how we need well-functioning teams and organizations to be successful. ...

I’ve been a Vim and Neovim user for a long time now. From the very beginning, around 2003-2004, I learned about “sharpening the saw” (see Part 3 from Bram’s “Seven habits of effective text editing”). And I still find it both interesting and fun to continue sharpening the saw. This is evident from my dotnvim, which has seen more than 20 the last couple of months. One of the things I really like about Neovim is that it embraces new ideas and improvements to the editor. When I stay on Neovim nightly and follow the work and progress of the development, I get to test these new features as they arrive. In the early stages, they are experimental and tend to change somewhat until they land in a versioned release. ...

I want to give a brief history of how VimTeX came to be, partly based on an interview I did back in 2016. I’ll also share some thoughts and reflections on VimTeX, what it has meant to me, and on the future. VimTeX is a plugin for Vim and Neovim for writing documents with LaTeX. And for those who might not know, LaTeX is a system for typesetting beautiful documents1. It is very much favored by mathematicians and physicists, in part because it makes equations easy to write. I’ve personally used LaTeX quite a bit, for writing papers, reports, and many other things. ...

My friend Jakob wrote a very interesting and insightful post on competence and learning (Whether you think you can, or think you can’t). In his post, he requested that I share some thoughts. I won’t assume everyone reads his post, even though I recommend it, so here’s a brief summary of his main points: Software engineering is a field where constant learning is more or less a requirement throughout one’s career. As a consequence, software engineers should come to terms with “feeling stupid”. There will always be new challenges with unknowns and situations where you won’t immediately understand what you are doing. He writes about how building competence and skill requires that you embrace the uncomfortable situations where you are in the dark place. Where you don’t know what you are doing. Next, he observes that it may be very useful to be equipped with what he calls intellectual confidence. That is, a confidence that one will be able to understand things even though one is currently in the dark. I believe he correctly points out that this intellectual confidence is a feedback loop; a chicken and egg-problem. He also mentions that there’s another ingredient for building competence and to enhance the before-mentioned feedback loop: discipline. And then he goes on to implore me to write about discipline and on my approach to learning1. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here! But in this post I want to focus on two things: intellectual confidence, and of course, the requested thoughts on discipline and my approach to learning. ...

In this series, I will briefly talk about tools that I love and that I use often. I will keep things brief, as there is already a lot of good content that goes into more depth. There is probably no single tool that I love more than Vim. It is strange to think about how much it has ended up meaning for me. Vim has been a part of my entire career both as a student, researcher, and a developer. Needless to say, it is hard to sum up my thoughts and feelings about Vim in a short blog post. So I’ll allow it to be slightly longer than the average “The tools that I love”-posts. ...

In recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of good culture at work. I’ve thought about it quite a lot, and in this post, I’ll try to digest some of my thoughts. First: what is culture? Let’s run with the following definition: Culture is the shared set of values, beliefs, customs, and creations—both physical and intangible—that a group learns and hands down over time. Clearly, any workplace has a culture. But: ...

In this series, I will briefly talk about tools that I love and that I use often. I will keep things brief, as there is already a lot of good content that goes into more depth. I often have to traverse networks with e.g. SSH to work on something on some server or on a different computer. This could be simply reaching a computer at work from a home computer. To do this, I would traditionally need to use a VPN service or establish a reverse ssh tunnel from my work computer. Or something similar. Since 2022, I’ve been using Tailscale. Tailscale is like a simple VPN service1 that makes it easy to achieve secure connections between computers in my private network. For instance, if I install and configure Tailscale both on a server I host somewhere and on my home computer, then I can immediately ssh myserver from my home computer. It just works, almost like magic2: ...

Upgrading a live PostgreSQL database in a Kubernetes environment can be a daunting task. Earlier this year, I faced this exact challenge: migrating an important PostgreSQL 15 database to version 16. As this was the first time I tackled an upgrade of this nature, I realized I would gain more from the experience by documenting it. Additionally, I hope to share insights that might help others navigate similar upgrades. Fortunately, I collaborated with a knowledgeable colleague who was already well-versed in both PostgreSQL database maintenance and Kubernetes. His support was invaluable—thanks Robin! ...

I recently got access to Claude Code. So, I installed it and decided to test it on one of my hobby projects, VimTeX. Specifically, I wanted to do two things: Have it analyze the project and let me know what it thinks. Have it help me resolve an issue. This is a short writeup of my experience. First, for reference, VimTeX is a Vim and Neovim plugin. It consists mostly of Vimscript, but also a few other things, as is shown in the output of tokei: ...