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Nick Janetakis
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bmsu — An rsync based backup script to gain control over your backups.
rsync script backups
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20 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
19 September
Programmer, writer and musician; author of the Learn Code the Hard Way books and of Mongrel, the Ruby web server.
I crafted a jank powershell script to output random youtube thumbnails for my OpenGL series and this is today's gem: Related
18 September
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
more codemode fun, doing a large mysql operation and the agent wanted to do it 50K rows at a time it writes a single codemode script which runs it in a loop and then you visualize it step by step even though it's code Related
17 September
Standards editor known as Hixie; edited the HTML and WHATWG living standards for many years and worked on Flutter at Google.
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
16 September
Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.
On Golden Gate, you can chat to the built-in foundation model directly with `fm chat`. You can also do things like pipeline it into scripts. E.g., in the second screenshot here it's reading and summarizing a @sixcolors article. The model's context window is quite small, so I had to write a script that chunked the text, so it's sort of serially summarized. Still, it’s nice to have fully-local access to this model in this way. Related
11 September
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
10 September
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
If you sit down at your desk with a messy mind, your productivity is already dead. You need an unthinking pre-work routine that automates your focus before you start the real labor. Here’s an Olympic-level pre-work script you can use before you start any big task: Related
8 September
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
You cannot delete a bad habit, because neurological pathways are permanently carved into your brain's tissue. But you can completely overwrite them. Here is the 4-step execution script to change it: 🧵 Related
5 September
Philosophy professor at UC Berkeley and creator of pandoc, the universal document converter, and of the CommonMark markdown specification.
4 September
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
what's your favourite way to get a progress bar when copying a bunch of files over SSH? (tar/pv? rsync? something else?) Related
3 September
Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
Their words
then setup a script to email 140,000 impacted users with personalized instructions for how to fix the tool they're using all on OpenCode's muse spark free tier
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x.com
20 August
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
19 August
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
i'm contemplating writing something basic about copying files over ssh with rsync but the only thing I can think of is how I can never remember how the trailing slash works and it makes me avoid using rsync whenever possible Related
18 August
Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.
Student Plan Sarah Perez at TechCrunch writes: WordPress.com targets the next generation of web creators with a free student plan. $24/yr, starting with “6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, as well as support f…
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15 August
Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.
11 August
Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.
Here's a quick shell script to use your monitor as a key light which can help with lighting when you have a web cam. It toggles a solid background color using your wallpaper tool of choice. nickjanetakis.com
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10 August
Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.
1 August
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
31 July
Developer, author and YouTuber covering Raspberry Pi, homelab hardware and Ansible automation. Author of Ansible for DevOps.
27 July
Indian software engineer and co-founder of Skcript; builds web apps and writes at varunraj.in.
17 July
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
7 July
Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.
Did you know when you redirect a file with > or use tee, it creates a 0 byte file right away before your command or pipeline runs? If you're not careful this can result in data loss if you're overwriting a file, such as database backups. nickjanetakis.com
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15 June
Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.
Their words
In addition to time machine backups, I also use Backblaze as an offsite backup.
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randallwilk.dev
30 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Fireside chat at Sequoia Ascent 2026 from a ~week ago. Some highlights: The first theme I tried to push on is that LLMs are about a lot more than just speeding up what existed before (e.g. coding). Three examples of new horizons: 1. menugen: an app that can be fully engulfed by LLMs, with no classical code needed: input an image, output an image and an LLM can natively do the thing. 2. install .md skills instead of install .sh scripts. Why create a complex Software 1.0 bash script for e.g. installing a piece of software if you can write the installation out in words and say "just show this to… Quoting @stephzhan @karpathy and I are back! At @sequoia AI Ascent 2026. And a lot has changed. Last year, he coined “vibe coding”. This year, he’s never felt more behind as a programmer. The big shift: vibe coding raised the floor. Agentic engineering raises the ceiling. We talk about what it means to build seriousl… LLMs Related
24 April
Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.
17 April
Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.
Today's bash adventure, I never reach echo in this script: set -e (( X++ )) echo "X=$X" Why? Because (( X++ )) returns 0. And returning 0 from (( is a NON-zero exit code—an error. Because of course, how silly of me. Related
11 April
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
28 March
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
tar: a slop-free alternative to rsync So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but…
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9 February
American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.
2 February
London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.
8 April 2025
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
3 April 2025
Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.
Their words
Hammerspoon: To script macOS with Lua.
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carlosbecker.com
Their words
Synology DS720+ NAS, for backups et al
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carlosbecker.com
31 August 2024
Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.
Their words
Then use free and lovely rsync to synchronize: rsync -av --delete desktop:/home/me /home/
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sive.rs
12 May 2024
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
A bit surprised by how little I've heard about GCP literally fat-finger *deleting a customer account.* Seems like their business was only saved by cross-cloud backups, a practice I previously thought was compliance theater bullshit and will never, ever, ever, question again. Related
2 April 2024
Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.
9 July 2023
Brazilian-American staff software engineer working on platforms, AI and developer productivity. Writes about engineering and his setup at ivansantos.me.
Their words
TerraMaster F4-422 10GbE NAS for backups, plex and homebridge.
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ivansantos.me
3 March 2021
Co-creator of the Go programming language, of UTF-8 and of the Plan 9 operating system; formerly of Bell Labs.
14 November 2019
Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.
22 May 2014
Game designer; lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, founder of Sirlin Games (Yomi, Puzzle Strike) and author of Playing to Win.
Their words
For backups, I use Apple's Time Machine. I have only ever had to actually use Time Machine for recovery about 3 times, but each time I was incredibly relieved that I had it.
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usesthis.com
22 October 2013
Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.
Their words
I use Time Machine + an external HDD for local backups (I've given up trying to use it over wireless), and Arq for remote backups to S3.
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usesthis.com
30 October 2012
Free software developer and longtime Debian developer; author of git-annex, etckeeper, ikiwiki and debhelper. Lives and works off-grid.
Their words
And I should mention that I'm using Obnam for backups lately.
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usesthis.com
20 June 2012
Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.
Their words
I have a script which mails to Instapaper the Hacker News front page twice a day. From there I can just tap on things and read them later, at any time, with Instapaper on my iPad or Windows Phone.
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usesthis.com
26 March 2012
Software engineer and PostgreSQL contributor who ran the Postgres Open conference; later a senior engineering leader at Mozilla and CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Their words
I use Arq for backups, LastPass for passwords, Chrome for my browser and have four users set up inside Chrome to handle business and personal account separation.
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usesthis.com
6 January 2012
Computer scientist and professor; author of The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. and of a long-running blog on programming languages, research and academia.
Their words
Every computer has a large dedicated external hard drive for backups. Currently, I'm partial to the Western Digital Elements series.
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usesthis.com
21 November 2011
Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.
Their words
I use Dropbox for syncing, and it goes to a server in the closet at home for nightly backups. Redundancy is important.
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usesthis.com
6 July 2011
Analyst of the business of technology; writes Asymco on Apple, disruption and, latterly, micromobility.
Their words
I use a Time Capsule as a base station and for backups but I have external drives as well.
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usesthis.com
7 February 2011
Interactive narrative designer and critic; author of interactive fiction including Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey, and a long-time contributor to the Inform development system.
Their words
(I have never forgiven Word for screwing up the encoding of every Greek quotation in my dissertation weeks before the deadline, in such a way that even backups didn't work, and requiring me to set the entire thing from scratch in Pages.
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usesthis.com
27 June 2010
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
Their words
I do backups via Tarsnap, of course.
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usesthis.com
17 May 2010
Writer and web developer; founding editor of Lifehacker, co-creator of ThinkUp and of the todo.txt format.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it