Josh Bleecher Snyder
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commaok.xyz
Josh Bleecher Snyder
@commaok.xyz
here we go again
8yo: What is puff daddy?

11yo: It’s a rapper.

8yo: Ooh, for what kind of candy?

11yo: No, a rapper is one of those annoying people who says things really fast.
November 5, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Child with chalk…or just SMTP?
October 16, 2025 at 10:27 PM
If were Kondoizing the internet, McMaster-Carr would be one of the dozen or so websites left.
After two failed visits to local hardware stores today, I remembered McMaster-Carr.

If you ever want to buy an exact thing and avoid the Amazon flea market dumpster fire: mcmaster.com

omg I love their website + search. I've probably raved about them before, but here's your regular reminder again.
October 13, 2025 at 1:18 PM
My 8yo: “We’re making a movie! Do you want a ticket?”
Me: “Sure.”

Hands me this and waltzes off giggling…
October 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM
How it started:

Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

How it's going:

Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

sigh
October 4, 2025 at 1:25 AM
Our Calvin and Hobbes books are being loved back into looseleaf. Pages turn up everywhere.
September 24, 2025 at 3:23 PM
How many years until an American teenager meets someone British and is like “whoah you have an AI assistant accent“?
September 22, 2025 at 10:59 PM
I love small town parades. More people marching than watching. And fun either way.
September 20, 2025 at 11:51 PM
When I get into my car, I want my phone call to automatically switch from my AirPods to the car speakerphone, even if I'm still wearing the AirPods.

...said nobody ever.
September 19, 2025 at 10:28 PM
@nickharkaway.com another thing I’ve been wondering about Titans: languages evolve rapidly. Shouldn’t the older ones sound hopelessly archaic? And be befuddled by generations of accumulated unlearned slang? (And that’s not even to mention norms and mores.)
September 5, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Co-worker nicknames new vibe-coding agent Shelley. I get the poet reference...but miss the "shell" joke.

But also: Ozymandias is about vibe coding if it's about anything.
September 3, 2025 at 11:01 PM
github.com/josharian/vi...

Converts a video into an ANSI "text" file that you can `cat` to your terminal to play that video (very pixelated).

Demo: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP0Q...
GitHub - josharian/vidcat: video -> terminal playback
video -> terminal playback. Contribute to josharian/vidcat development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
September 3, 2025 at 2:07 AM
“I keep my car in airplane mode” means something much less exciting in 2025 than I would have imagined two decades ago.
August 27, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Terminal.app is the IE6 of TUIs.
August 5, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Our cat has been leaving notes around the house for us asking for wet food, new catnip plants, etc.

This one reads (with spelling fixed for clarity): “if you will not let me destroy the cat carrier, let me destroy the car. or destroy the vet. -apples”
July 25, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Josh Bleecher Snyder
Thanks @commaok.xyz for hosting @michael.express and I to talk about a fun bug in Go’s new Green Tea GC and the tools we used to investigate.

sigpod.dev/6
Significant Bits | Read/Write/Nil with Michael Knyszek and Michael Pratt
Please read important erratum at end of these notes!Astute listeners will notice that this is the first episode in over a year. I recorded not one but two awesome interviews...and then failed to ed...
sigpod.dev
July 4, 2025 at 5:14 AM
I just watched a nine minute video about a vacuum cleaner product launch and I would do it again. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6J...
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones™ cleaner | Global Premiere
YouTube video by Dyson
www.youtube.com
June 5, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Josh Bleecher Snyder
Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...
Internet Roadtrip
Let's take a streetview roadtrip
neal.fun
May 31, 2025 at 3:27 AM
New short blog post: Backoff-with-retry can be much simpler.

commaok.xyz/post/simple-...

Also, maybe peek at commaok.xyz/post/blog-sc....
Simpler backoff
Exponential backoff with jitter is de rigeur for making service calls. This code, or something like it, probably looks really familiar: func do(ctx context.Context) error { const ( maxAttempts = 10 ba...
commaok.xyz
May 30, 2025 at 10:38 PM
Bay Area Gophers: Come to the Go meetup on May 27!

lu.ma/fn57nlhh?tk=...

(I'll be giving a short talk. But you should come anyway.)
May 21, 2025 at 3:39 AM
Short story brigade: On Hope, by Spencer Holst.

www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/holst_s...
On Hope
www.math.buffalo.edu
May 18, 2025 at 2:54 AM
My 7yo, on the way to school this morning: “Do you use the Oxford comma?”

So grateful for these teachable moments and the opportunity to raise my kids right.
May 12, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Josh Bleecher Snyder
If you are interested in an easy recipe for a merge queue, sans code review, this is my favorite so far: sketch.dev/blog/lightwe...
sketch blog: A Lightweight Merge Queue using GitHub Actions
sketch.dev
May 8, 2025 at 10:01 PM