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Original Post, filter ideas with github issue form.

I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list.

I use this list both to develop ideas and filter them. If you adopt it, be careful about using it as a filter. Remember that in the early stages, good ideas are very easy to kill.

create ideas.yaml in .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE, check docs for more details

A vision for data interchange in Elm

How do you send information between clients and servers? What format should that information be in? What happens when the server changes the format, but the client has not been updated yet? What happens when the server changes the format, but the database cannot be updated?

These are difficult questions. It is not just about picking a format, but rather picking a format that can evolve as your application evolves.

Literature Review

By now there are many approaches to communicating between client and server. These approaches tend to be known within specific companies and language communities, but the techniques do not cross borders. I will outline JSON, ProtoBuf, and GraphQL here so we can learn from them all.

Bitwise Operations for the Average Developer

As a web developer, I haven't thought much about binary and bitwise operations since early school days. I just didn't see a place where shifting or XOR'ing bits would fit in my CRUD apps. That was until I stumbled upon a trick that would save me a lot of headache when dealing with database models.

The following code will be in JavaScript and SQL, but the same concepts will hold in almost any language.

What is binary?

First of all let's see how binary data is written. If you already know how binary works, you can skip to the next section.

Binary Format

Keyboard-only Mac Cheatsheet

Hi, I'm Lorna and I don't use a mouse. I have had RSI issues since a bad workstation setup at work in 2006. I've tried a number of extra hardware modifications but what works best for me is to use the keyboard and only the keyboard, so I'm in a good position and never reaching for anything else (except my coffee cup!). I rather unwisely took a job which required me to use a mac (I've been a linux user until now and also had the ability to choose my tools carefully) so here is my cheatsheet of the apps, tricks and keyboard shortcuts I'm using, mostly for my own reference. Since keyboard-only use is also great for productivity, you may also find some of these ideas useful, in which case at least something good has come of this :)

Apps List

There's more detail on a few of these apps but here is a quick overview of the tools I've installed and found helpful

Tool	Link	Comments

Recon and Attack Vectors from My Logs

This document contains excerpts from my web server logs collected over a period of 7 years that shows various kinds of recon and attack vectors.

There were a total of 37.2 million lines of logs out of which 1.1 million unique HTTP requests (Method + URI) were found.

$ sed 's/^.* - - \[.*\] "\(.*\) HTTP\/.*" .*/\1/' access.log &gt; requests.txt

Notes on Building a Modern Typing Training App: Code Based Training

Introduction

For the last couple of weeks I have been iterating over a typing training app that should feel more modern and help with becoming a better typist. The initial idea was more of an experiment, while I had a couple of days of focus time, to see how such an app could work and feel like. Using it for a couple of months helped to carve out a more specific idea what this training app should and should not do.

You can read about the initial implementation here. The write-up explains the technical setup and reasoning behind the initial prototype. One idea is to make the training useful by using spaced repetition as a learning technique, you can read more about the approach here. The other aspect is to enable to train with actual code examples.

The code part seems trivial a

Full desktop shell in WSL2 using WSLg (XWayland)

Note

If you want to use Wayland in WSLg in a simpler setup, you can try the WSLg (Wayland) tutorial.

In this tutorial, we will setup GUI in WSL2. No additional software outside WSL (like VcXsrv or GWSL) is required. You will find this tutorial very similar to the one that replaces Xorg with Xvnc. Indeed, it's pretty much the same tutorial, with some few changes.

The key component we need to install is the desktop metapackage you want (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Budgie, etc), and after that, replace the default Xorg by a script that calls Xwayland instead.

For this setup, I will use Ubuntu 24.04, and install GNOME Desktop. Unfortunately older versions of Ubuntu lack some fundamental things, so we cannot reproduce it in older versions (at least not fully). Since the key components aren't bound to Ubuntu or GNOME, you can use your favorite distro and GUI. Check the [Sample screenshot

	{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> { } }:

	let
	demo-program = pkgs.writeShellScriptBin "helloWorld" "while sleep 3; do echo Hello World; done";
	demo-service = pkgs.substituteAll {
	name = "demo.service";
	src = ./demo.service.in;
	demoExe = "${demo-program}/bin/helloWorld";
	};
	demo-socket = pkgs.concatText "demo.socket" [ ./demo.socket ];

	$ grep -P "^[ABCDEFabcdefOoIi]{6,6}$" /usr/share/dict/words \| tr 'OoIi' '0011' \| tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' \| awk '{print "#" $0}'
	#ACAD1A
	#B0BB1E
	#DEBB1E
	#AB1DED
	#ACAC1A
	#ACCEDE
	#AC1D1C
	#BAB1ED
	#BA0BAB