Red Bearing

a blog by Philip Jackson

  • The Hardest Job in the World

    I enjoy learning about behind-the-scenes stories from moments in history. That’s what inspired me to read The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency by John Dickerson. It’s well researched and footnoted, and full of the sorts of stories I was hoping for. Dickerson uses those stories to help build a model for understanding the American Presidency…

  • Colours in Neovim, tmux, and Alacritty

    I’ve been playing with vim again. The best and the worst part about vim is getting the config right. When using a combination of Alacritty, tmux, and Neovim you’re going to need these settings. I was alerted to the fact that my Neovim colour scheme might be working fine when run outside of tmux by…

  • Running WordPress CLI commands with Docker

    Sometimes you want to run a WordPress CLI command on your dev machine, and you just know running it with Docker would be easier than installing a PHP environment locally. But you also know that figuring out the correct Docker command line options to run is going to take forever! Never fear, here’s an example…

  • Logging a Stack Trace in PHP

    Here’s a cool trick for logging the state of the stack at any point in PHP: Only uses standard functions too đź‘Ť

  • Trust in Institutions

    Trust in public institutions is something we’ve been banking up over time in New Zealand. Like saving money into a “rainy day” fund, we’ve slowly made deposits over the years into the trustworthyness of our institutions. While other countries have been chipping away at public trust, we’ve spent the last few decades at the top…

  • The quality vs. cost trade-off doesn’t work for software

    https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html The usual trade-off between cost and quality, one that we are used to for most decisions in our life, does not make sense with the internal quality of software. Martin Fowler I really enjoyed this piece by Martin Fowler. He was able to express a lot of the thoughts I often have when trying…