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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The Road Less Traveled
On “The Road Not Taken”: I’ve heard Frost quoted many times, often in the context of someone claiming to march to the beat of a different drummer. Advocating for making bold choices, rejecting conformity or just having the courage to try something new.
Time Out for Timeouts
I’ve been working in a private GitHub repo for the CPAN Security Group. The account is a free org account and it has 2,000 minutes of GitHub Actions per month. Late last month we ran out of CI credits, so I took a closer look at the problem.
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 …