I've been told New York is an acquired taste. I can see why they might say that.

Several months ago, I announced the initial version of the Harper WordPress plugin. In the interest of those still using it, I’d like to give y’all an update.

It was my first WordCamp and first conference talk, so I was naturally nervous.

I reflect about the recent books I have read and the things I (and you) can learn from them.

I want you to read that title as literally as possible. Harper is now capable of evolution.

I've given dozens of talks over the years, yet I still feel like I have much to learn about public speaking. Preparing for my upcoming talk at WordCamp US has me stopping to reflect on what I already know.

I've got some exciting new work I'm preparing to discuss later this week (hopefully). In the meantime, I've collected some recent sightings of Harper in the wild.

Grammar checking can be cumbersome, especially when its sloth gets in the way of your thinking. That’s part of why so many prefer Harper over Grammarly or LanguageTool.

I was recently encouraged to submit a talk proposal to the AI track at WordCamp US. I was more than happy to oblige, and to my surprise, I got in.

It's not easy, but I think it's one of the best habits I've ever built.

Expression rules were designed for a certain kind of error. But there are many grammatical or layout rules which hard difficult or downright impossible to define with an expression.

The end result is a portable neural network that achieves ~95% accuracy on grammatically correct text.

In an age where large language models have exceptional context windows, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing a system is simpler than it is.

This article guides contributors on writing a Harper expression-based rule. It covers defining the rule's expression, writing test cases, and implementing the match_to_lint function for user suggestions.

This post explains how to add simple phrase corrections to the grammar checker Harper—a beginner-friendly way to address common, context-independent errors and contribute to its grammar checking capabilities.

This article introduces contributing to the open-source grammar checker Harper by writing grammatical rules, outlining different approaches for various skill levels.

A guide for adding a new programming language to the Harper language server.

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.

Failing to account for this reality can slow down development and dissuade contributors from sticking around.

It has been a slow couple of months for my reading habit. Although, now that I've said that out loud, I realize I say that every time.

There's a great deal of overlap between those who use Harper and those who use Firefox.

You know—that awful (but strangely satisfying) space where the majority of your commits are small pedantic edits that don't change the end-user-experience at all?

The most common type of machine learning out there takes the form of some kind of neural network. Inspired by how our own brains work, these systems act as function approximations. They are great, but they come with a few key pitfalls.

Harper is currently undergoing some pretty radical changes when it comes to its language analysis. These improvements will improve the output of our existing rule engine, in addition to making entirely new corrections possible.

After receiving some feedback related to the suggestion box's visual unpleasantness and difficulty to understand intuitively, I've started making some modifications. Nothing drastic—I don't want to confuse existing users.

SpellBolt is a Firefox extension that delivers Harper's fantastic grammar checking straight into your Firefox browser.

There are a great variety text editors on the web, each used in a different context. That's a beautiful thing, but unfortunately our users expect Harper to work in all of these places seamlessly.

If there is one thing o3 is useful for, it's finding canonical documentation for complex subjects.

When our users install Harper, they should expect it to work anywhere they do.

Spend more time on the introduction than anything else.

Advice you can give your mom (or other nontechnical person) for how to use ChatGPT wisely and effectively.

An update on the long-awaited Harper Chrome extension, its current state, and what to expect next.

Reflecting on the clarity photography brings.

Reflecting on lessons learned from handling English edge cases in developing Harper's Chrome extension.

I was honored to be a guest on Linkarzu's YouTube series.

Four years in Rust + WebAssembly taught me these 3 lethal footguns—don’t learn them the hard way.

Two months does not mean twice as many.

Reach further each day. The minimum effective dose.

Don't believe the clickbait.

A new approach to false-positives.

A boon if you comment your code.

Your code is always welcome.

Of course it's that easy.

🎉

Spoiler: there aren't many.

The mornings are for deep work.

Wisdom from my grandmother.

Bonus: why you need to do it too.

You might not actually need it.

I might be starting to sound like a broken record.

Chronically underrated, chronically over-prescribed

Where did Harper come from?

How I preview my Markdown quickly and reliably.

It's easier than you think.

How I intend to live better.

It almost feels wrong. Maybe it is.

Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.

How I built a software render engine from scratch, and you can too.

It saved me enough time, I had some to share about it.

It didn't work for me, and if you reading this, it probably won't work for you either.

An experiment on how to live in a seemingly hopeless world.

A proposal.

Or: why doing things at the last minute actually saves time. I talk about the importance of shockingly fast iteration cycles and lean manufacturing.

We look at several interesting ways computers generate random numbers. It may fascinate you to know that some methods are not truly random, but only an approximate.

I built a Wordle solver in Rust to beat my grandma. Follow the journey of how I did, and how I failed.

We go through step-by-step how to build a Discord bot using the Rust Serenity Framework.

A key part of Rust is far better than what JavaScript has to offer.

In which I go through the process of designing, building, and testing a vector graphic pen plotter.