Michael McClimon

Posts in programming

Goofy Program Files: fold-headers

August 2, 2023

My friend Chasen sent me a message tonight that he would also like to see more of the goofy program files, and who am I to say no? Today’s entry comes via my last job, where I spent an awful lot of time looking at email. You probably know what email is, but maybe you don’t know what it actually looks like underneath.1 The part of the emails you actually read are the content; email also has a large set of headers that contain metadata about the message and its path to you; they’re very similar to HTTP headers.

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Goofy Program Files: jlink

July 14, 2023

After my last (aka, the inaugural) goofy program entry, I was overwhelmed with feedback1 that people wanted more, and who am I to deny them? Today’s entry is a program I call jlink (for “Jira link”).2 We use Jira at work for task tracking, and the ticket identifiers (like “ABC-1234”) wind up littering everything we do. One day at work I was writing a document that had a long listing of Jira tickets, and I wanted to add links to them.

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Goofy Program Files: git-slog

July 4, 2023

Most of the programs I write are what I generally think of as stupid programs. That is: they do one tiny thing that was annoying me for whatever reason, and usually the thing wasn’t even all that interesting to begin with. A lot of the code I write, especially off the clock, falls into this category, and I feel like this is a category of program that doesn’t get talked about much, so I’m going to start talking about them.

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I've been writing a bunch of Python lately

June 24, 2023

In February, I left Fastmail to join the team at MongoDB.1 Among other things, this means that after nearly six years, I’m no longer paid to write Perl. This is bittersweet: Perl was the first programming language I ever loved; it’s responsible for my leap from academia and accompanying move to Philadelphia, and indirectly responsible for some dear friendships. As a language, though, I think it has no future, and as such I’ve been trying to write my own little programs in other languages.

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Writing Text with Flag Emojis

March 27, 2022

In our Slack at work, we have an #availability channel, where people can post their comings and goings. In the middle of the day, there is often a stack of posts that say simply “lunch” or “back.” Friday, my friend Joe, rather than writing “back”, did this: That is: instead of the word “back” (as I posted), Joe posted “🇧🇦🇨🇰”. If you’re not super into vexillology, those are the flags for Bosnia and Herzegovina (left) and the Cook Islands (right).

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