Building the things that nobody is asking for
I'm Olaf Alders. I write software for the web. I'm a White Camel Award winner. Currently building My Mind is Racing — every run, swim, ride and race — all in one calendar.
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Every So Often, Precede Your Output with a Dad Joke
Occasionally I’ll paste some output from Claude to share with someone and they’ll say something like “Claude tells jokes now? What a time to be alive!” That’s because I have the following in my Instructions for Claude: “Every so often, precede your output with a dad joke”.
This Week in Perl Fundraising
This has been a really good week for Perl fundraising. DuckDuckGo donated $25,000 for the third year running. That’s $75,000 in total, which is significant for The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). One thing I’m enjoying about this process is trying to solve the puzzle of each new organization. I’m …
The Perl and Raku Foundation by the Numbers
A chart of The Perl and Raku Foundation’s IRS filings from 2001 to 2025, with a toggle to account for inflation. Let’s keep funding Open Source Software.
What's Idiomatic?
I find that Claude will quite happily come up with solutions to whatever problem I’m trying to solve without necessarily going with the obvious choice. I like to ask “what’s idiomatic?” as a way to reframe the problem and prioritize solutions. I’ve found over the past few months that this …
Logging in to GitHub CLI on a Headless VM
I use gh countless times throughout the day, and occasionally I need to log in or re-authenticate from some VM that doesn’t have a GUI. I run gh auth login and, as part of the flow, I inevitably end up with lynx having been fired up. As much as I love lynx, this is kind of annoying. What I really want is …
Publish-Only
I’ve had code reviews from people who thought it was some sort of a flex to go to great lengths to find any kind of an issue in a pull request. The same types are on social media. Depending on where I’m sharing something, I may treat it as a publish-only space. If communication feels like a fool’s …