Zed Shaw
Programmer, writer and musician; author of the Learn Code the Hard Way books and of Mongrel, the Ruby web server.
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Recent
Uses G&L Comanche
I then have a G&L Comanche that has stainless steel frets as my main recording guitar.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Uses H4N
Now I record everything into an H4N or DP-008 then do post production later.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Uses Carl Martin Quattro
I've got a Carl Martin Quattro pedal, which is my primary effect chain.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
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Uses awesome
I use awesome for my window manager on Linux since it's mostly keyboard based.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Uses MacVim
For programming I use mostly vim with MacVim on the mac.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Disliked Sphinx
I first used Sphinx but it was too hard to get good PDF typography out of and really only works if you document projects the way the Sphinx authors do.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Loved Dexy
Dexy is also the bomb, since it lets you write "code books" in a literate style without carving your code base into tons of chunks.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Loved G&L ASAT Classic S
My favorite guitar is a G&L ASAT Classic S, but it has single coil pickups so it's hard to record with it.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Loved Boomerang III Looper
That feeds into a Line 6 M5 for extra arbitrary effects. Those then feed into a Boomerang III Looper which is the most awesome looper ever.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Loved REAPER
For post-production though I use REAPER which is seriously the best $60 bucks I ever spent. The REAPER forums alone are worth that much with all the advice they have.
usesthis.com 21 Oct 2011
Where they publish
x.com @lzsthw
Recent
- Ruby and Jalad at Tanagra: 18 Oct 2026
- The Ultimate Programmer Rage Bait: 17 Oct 2026
- * Random username with numbers. * Impostor or obvious AI photo. * 0 followers and only following 5 people. Yep, Russian bot or SE Asian rage grifter. Any time you see this pattern just ignore them _OR_ feed their fake rage to the algorithm's engagement demands. 17 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- The C in C++ Stands For "Cargo Cult": 17 Oct 2026
- You're thinking about online Trolls all wrong. Trolls are little compressed logs of "engagement" you can feed into the algorithm furnace to boost your content. Feed the trolls and they'll feed the algorithm. 17 Oct 2026
- "Do you need data structures and algorithms to do graphics programming?" 16 Oct 2026
- I've decided that my programming style going forward is "Drunken Kung-Fu Master Style." If you watch me code it looks like I'm bumbling around like an idiot then BAM you're teeth are knocked out with 10 lines of brutalist code that replaces 1000 lines of "elegance." 15 Oct 2026
- Me: "If you want to be better at programming stop focusing on efficiency and focus more on your personal process." Comments: "Wrong! Efficiency is what our corporate overlords demand of us. They define what a 'Good Programmer' is!" Me: Exactly, don't be like this guy. 15 Oct 2026
- Do You Want to Be A Better Programmer? Stop Being Efficient: 15 Oct 2026
- If the "Fedora Guy says, 'Leave that trillion dollar company alone!'" meme were a thread, it'd be this one: 11 Oct 2026
- Learning OpenGL in 2026 -- Day 34: Shadow Mapping Pt2 Figuring it out and making it work...almost. The concept isn't hard. It's mostly the illustrator trick of viewing the subject from the light's perspective, but the OpenGL gets in the way. 11 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- Re-animated ASL (Sign Language) Movies is probably the coolest tech flex I've seen in a long time: 11 Oct 2026
- Learning OpenGL Day 33 -- Shadow Mapping This starts a 6 day saga of debugging because of one line of code. Once again, the culprit is framebuffers, easily the weirdest most one-off part of OpenGL so far. 10 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- A Millionaire Programmer at Microsoft Wrote This Crap: 10 Oct 2026
- Learning OpenGL in 2026 -- Day 32: Text Rendering Did a bunch of research into text libraries but ended up just using freetype. It sucks but it's at least documented: 8 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- Learning OpenGL in 2026 -- Day 31: Anti-Aliasing It takes me a bit to get it right, and again a lot of the pain isn't in the shaders or tech but just in OpenGL's gross Spooky State Machine From a Distance data model: 7 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- Hey @IronGate_Studio fire every person who worked on this dogshit UI. A fucking scrollbar on my body container? It doesn't recover my weapons automatically? All items sorted to the end? I can't get my items because it's "too heavy" but I get a corpse run buff AFTER I get them? 7 Oct 2026
- Learning OpenGL in 2026: Day 30 -- Instancing AGAIN. I really think the way OpenGL handles data transfer is mega busted. Instancing kind of demonstrates this very well given how simple it should be vs. how difficult it is. 6 Oct 2026 youtu.be
- Find of the day, Terminal Trove, a directory of various terminal based tools with screenshots. Here's the text editors section, which has a ton I didn't know about: https://t.co/daZ9ON5gAg Full site: 6 Oct 2026 terminaltrove.com
- Report on the under-desk walking pad: 1. Did about 2 hour stream and walked the whole time at 1.1km/h. 2. It seemed to make me concentrate more on what I was doing. That's probably just because of the added balancing processing I need to do, but I'm curious if this is a long term effect. 3. After I get off the treadmill I'm dizzy for a bit, most likely from having to read while walking which requires a different balancing...mode? 4. Actually got me sweating, but that's probably because I'm grossly out of shape. 4 Oct 2026
Link verified 5 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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