I wanted to build some workflow automation for various tasks I do often (like coming across a link that I want to share with my work after writing a little introduction message). I knew it would need to be flexible and customizable, so I wanted something I could run myself and control every aspect of.

After doing lots of investigation (primarily via the awesome-workflow-engines list), I settled on Autokitteh. It has all the features I care about:

• Self-hosted (no SaaS)
• Workflows can be defined and managed in plain text (so they can be versioned)
  • This eliminated most of the IFTTT and Zapier clones like Automatisch
• Workflows can be written in Python
  • This eliminated Huginn
• Pre-created integrations for services I use (for this purpose, mainly Slack and Todoist)
  • This eliminated Node-RED and Dagu
• No "open-core" feature paywalls
  • This eliminated n8n, Windmill.dev, and Activepieces

The thing I liked most about it is how the workflow definitions let you set up integrations and provide them to the workflow code, so you can use the integrations in any way you can imagine instead of just the ways that come predefined. It also allows you to trivially mix and match integrations, so I can (for instance) take a Slack message and create a Todoist task from it just by smushing the two APIs together.

Read on to learn how I set everything up.

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I was running into a very strange glitch with terminal Emacs, showing up as all sorts of weird screen tearing and graphical corruption while moving around within and between files.

tl;dr It turns out that I had inadvertently included a Unicode variation selector, which is a zero-width character (so I couldn't see it in the code) but which was throwing Emacs for an absolute loop. Removing that character fixed the problem. Follow along below the fold to learn how I figured it out.

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As of this post, posts on this blog will each be associated with a Bluesky post and display that post and its responses inline.

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I've been experiencing some burnout recently, and one of the best ways for me to fix that is to build something. Couple that with my opinions about the recent US election¹, and I wanted to do something to learn about Bluesky and spark a little discussion if I could.

So I built a bot that posts once an hour about which countries various billionaires could buy.

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I have young children, and keeping track of their friends' contact information is hard for me. Every year I get a list from each kid's teacher of their classmates and the classmates' parents' names and contact information, but translating that into contacts on my phone so I can text another parent to organize a playdate is a gigantic hassle. What I really wanted was something magical, a spreadsheet where I could copy those class rosters and have the contacts just appear on my phone. I looked around a lot, and nothing of the sort exists.

So I built one.

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To commemorate the new blog, I wanted to have a cool logo up in the corner. Since one of my current interests is generative AI, I thought I'd try using it to generate myself a logo. This post explains the process.

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I recently switched to using a Linux desktop from a Mac as my primary work computer. I had grown quite accustomed to iTerm2’s session restoration feature, and I wanted something similar for Linux. Here is how I made it happen.

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I like having a system-wide keyboard shortcut that activates some form of text editor. That allows me to press the shortcut, type whatever I have in mind, navigate away from the editor, and get back to what I was doing. (This is sometimes called “universal capture” or “ubiquitous capture” in GTD-land.)

I’ve used lots of different programs to accomplish this over the years: NotationalVelocity/nvALT, SimpleNote, Obsidian, just to name a few. However, I wanted to combine the quick access of universal capture with the editing power of Emacs. I spent some time recently setting up my Linux laptop to accomplish this.

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Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

I was curious about who was creating the highest number of PRs in a specific git repo, and I couldn’t find a good way to figure it out. So here’s what I did.

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