I have been a blogger for most of my adult life (a dubious honour) and have, over a decade, used a variety of blogging platforms. My first blog, hosted on BlogSpot and please don't go looking for it, centred around my personal explorations of atheism. When I started blogging about software development in 2011, I had…| Ash Furrow
In 2019, I rewrote this blog with Gatsby . I outlined my reasons in that post, but basically I wanted to use similar technology to build my blog as I used day-to-day at work. Middleman, Bootstrap, and jQuery seemed old and busted. Gatsby, React, and TypeScript seemed so much more fun. When I launched the rewrite…| Ash Furrow
I've been a huge fan of The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells for a few years now, and was very excited to see it adapted to television on Apple TV+. Every adaptation of a story to a new medium has to make creative choices and tradeoffs; it's fun to pick apart the work to identify what's been changed, think…| Ash Furrow
I've been using Cursor for coding tasks lately, trying to explore what kinds of work it performs well and poorly. It's pretty good at most…| Ash Furrow's Blog
Imagine you are a software developer. It's the early 1970's and you make a living writing Basic Assembly Language to build software for the System/360 mainframe. You are great at your job and you enjoy it. You keep hearing about new "high level" programming languages that would allow you to write code in a way that…| Ash Furrow
Recently, I published my first photo blog post since 2018 . (Yes I have a separate photo blog, because of course I do.) So what's up with that? Nothing better than a blog post about another blog post. I haven't really been doing a lot of photography since the pandemic, but I had been increasingly drawn to it over the…| Ash Furrow
My keyboard rabbit hole has inevitably brought me to the world of alternate keyboard layouts. While I briefly used Dvorak in university, I was using too many different computers to make it really stick for me. I had on heard of Colemak from Christian Selig's keyboard video less than a year ago. It sounded great…| Ash Furrow
This week at work, I'm participating in a group event where we share personal timelines of ourselves, to get to know each other better. I thought I'd share my timeline in case anyone was interested.| Ash Furrow
Content warning: this post contains medical discussions. Quickly after I began my career as a full-time software developer, I developed pain in my left wrist. At first, it was only occasional. But it became consistent. Then it started showing up in my right wrist. I wish that I had done something about my wrist pain…| Ash Furrow
Today – Halloween – marks four years since my wife and I returned to live in New Brunswick . I feel compelled to reflect and share. It…| Ash Furrow's Blog
This post comes with a content warning for a medical discussion. In late 2019, I discovered I had a health condition that needed surgery to correct. Not life-threatening, but it was the first major acute physical health issue that I've encountered as an adult. That led to a surgery while I still lived in New York…| Ash Furrow
A few months ago, I came across this amazing video from Christian Selig detailing how he built his own keyboard . And I mean built it. Unknown to me up to that point, there exists both the tools and community such that anyone could design and build, from scratch, their own custom computer keyboard. The printed…| Ash Furrow