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It’s easy to fall into a trap of using jargon when discussing what you’re working on. Sometimes we need help expressing our thoughts in interesting and meaningful ways—using our own voices, in a way that’s memorable and repeatable. A blog post by Anil Dash helped me rethink my writing. I’ve turned those principles into an AI skill, so you can try it too.

I rarely use git-bisect, but thinking about it has changed how I structure my commits. The principle is simple: don’t break git-bisect. If a change breaks something, the fix should belong in that same change. This mental model helps avoid common anti-patterns like splitting a bug fix into two commits—one with a failing test, one with the fix. Even if you never run bisect, thinking “would this commit work in isolation?” creates a provably linear set of working changes rather than an aspirational attempt at correctness.

On getting a more readable $PATH, installing “is” in GitHub Actions and using $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY to put it all together.

When multiple versions of the same executable exist in your $PATH, the ‘is’ utility provides a clean way to discover all versions and their locations. This post demonstrates how ‘is’ can help identify version conflicts, clean up redundant installations, and streamline executable management with tabular and JSON output formats.

At the Perl Toolchain Summit a few of us shared our favourite command-line tools and terminal configurations. This compilation covers recommendations from Paul Johnson, Shawn Sorichetti, Mickey Nasriachi, Julien Fiegehenn, and Olaf Alders, including GPU-accelerated terminal emulators like WezTerm, file managers like yazi, advanced Neovim plugins, Git utilities, and system monitoring tools. Each tool includes descriptions and links for practical implementation.

The new “is battery” and “is known battery” subcommands can detect battery attributes with a clean, readable syntax. This post walks through practical examples of replacing complex shell commands with these new subcommands, demonstrating how they simplify a SketchyBar configuration on macOS. Learn how to check battery charge levels, charging state, and even conditionally load menu bar items based on whether your device has a battery.