<h1>My Writing Environment As a Software Engineer</h1>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>TL;DR: <em>Get a good text editor, and get good at using it.
Keep a notepad by your side.
Find a quiet place to write.</em></strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Writing is one of life's greater joys.
It's a mental workout that often brings me a level of clarity that is hard to find elsewhere.
I have never sat down to write for an extended period of time without coming away with a greater understanding of myself and the universe.</p>
<p>I imagine that sounds pretty cheesy.</p>
<p>I just want to impress upon you the importance writing has had in my life.
As with anything this important, I have an instinctual urge to optimize it.
As software engineers, isn't that part of our modus operandi?
To spend an unnecessary amount of time optimizing things?</p>
<p>Well, that's exactly what I've done.
Over the years, I've spend a unruly amount of time tweaking and changing the tools I use to write.
I'd love to talk about 'em.</p>
<h2>Neovim</h2>
<p>In the past few years, Neovim has the talk of the town.
Its ancestor, <code>vi</code> was borne from the observation that most writing is re-writing, and thus it includes a vast array of specific tools for editing text, rather than writing it.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/"><code>r/neovim</code></a> has swelled to more than 110 thousand weekly visitors and thousands of plugins and LSPs to choose from.</p>
<p>Unless you choose a pre-built distro like <a href="https://www.lazyvim.org/">LazyVim</a>, Neovim does very little out of the box.
It is through relentless customization that it becomes something truly powerful.
Beside the various keybindings in my config, the important plugins and tools that I use are:</p>
<h3><a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a></h3>
<p>As I'm the chief maintainer, this one should be of no surprise.
Don't worry, I won't give you the marketing spiel.
I'll simply say that Harper is a grammar checker that happens to work exceptionally well in Neovim.</p>
<h3><a href="https://github.com/folke/zen-mode.nvim">Zen Mode</a></h3>
<img src="/images/zen_mode.png" alt="Zen Mode: Activated">
<p>Plain Neovim organizes each file to cover the maximum amount of space on-screen.
Practically, this means most of my text ends up on the left side, which can hurt my neck.
Zen mode restricts the width of the file and centers it on the screen.</p>
<h3><a href="./the_simplest_neovim_markdown_setup">Tatum</a></h3>
<img src="/images/tatum_screenshot.webp" alt="A screenshot of Tatum at work">
<p>Tatum is a small tool I wrote in a few hours that lets me live-preview my Markdown as HTML.
I won't repeat myself.
If you're curious about Tatum, check out my <a href="./the_simplest_neovim_markdown_setup">previous blog post.</a></p>
<h3>More Details</h3>
<p>If you're thirsty for <em>all</em> the details of my Neovim setup, take a quick look at the configuration code on <a href="https://github.com/elijah-potter/dots/tree/master/nvim">GitHub</a>.</p>
<h2>ReMarkable 2</h2>
<p>A few years ago, while I was still in school, I splurged and purchased a used Remarkable 2.
Even now, there is rarely a day that goes by where I don't use it.
Sure, everything it does could be easily approximated by paper.
On the other hand, the thin device saves my back whenever I have to travel and there's a certain joy that comes from using an e-ink device like this.</p>
<img src="/images/remarkable.jpeg" alt="A Recent Brainstorming Session on the ReMarkable">
<p>I mostly use it to read digital books and blog posts, but it's also come in handy for getting around writer's block.
Being forced to slow down and use my hand to write, rather than a keyboard, is quite helpful in some inexplicable way.</p>
<h2>A Quiet Space</h2>
<p>More important than any text editor, at least for me, is a quiet space.</p>
<p>As I said before, writing can take real cognitive effort.
A space with distracting noise can make it unnecessarily hard to get words on paper.
I've found local libraries or co-working spaces to be great places for quiet authorship.</p>
<p>Whatever you do, do not listen to music with words in it.
Even if it <em>feels</em> more productive, I retroactively find that it makes me less so.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>There's probably some more important points I'm leaving out, but I definitely believe I've hit the big three.
For me, the most important parts of a good writing environment, as a software engineer, are my text editor, a notepad, and a quiet space.</p>

Writing is one of life's greater joys. It's a mental workout that often brings me a level of clarity that is hard to find elsewhere.

<p>Writing is one of life's greater joys. It's a mental workout that often brings me a level of clarity that is hard to find elsewhere.</p>

My Writing Environment As a Software Engineer

Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.

<p>Back in my day, we used math for autocomplete.</p>

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

<h1>Local-First Software is Easier to Scale</h1>
<img src="/images/flatirons.webp" alt="The Flatirons">
<p>The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all.</p>
<p><a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a> recently received a massive increase in both traffic and user count.
How?
By making it to the front page of Hacker News.
If you couldn't tell by the extent to which I talk about this, I'm thrilled.
This amounted to a tremendous amount of free advertising, if nothing else.</p>
<p>I've been thinking a lot about the wondrous benefits of working at the edge.
That's just one term of many that people use to describe Harper: "edge-first".
Others include "local-first" or simply "on-device".
They are all just jargon for a simple idea: We run all the relevant grammar checking code as physically close to the users as possible.
That way, we can serve up suggestions faster than anyone else.
To achieve our goal, we make sure that everything is well-optimized and lean.
Harper barely uses any CPU or memory at all.</p>
<p>What does all this mean in the context of the recent uptick in user acquisition? Imagine, for a moment, we are LanguageTool.
Our software is written in Java, with questionable attendance to the efficiency of our code.
Since our software requires a big server to run, we have a certain number of servers on standby to handle a certain amount of expected load.</p>
<p>If suddenly the number of requests we received were to double (as it did for the Chrome extension), we would be big trouble.
To avoid increasing the latency on requests (or dropping requests all together), we would need to scale up the number of running servers.
This not only takes hiring an expert in cloud architecture, but also additional funding to pay the AWS (or whatever) bill at the end of the month.</p>
<p>Because Harper runs at the edge (no server required), we don't have to worry about that.
In fact, I only noticed that our user count had spiked after I visited Hacker News the morning after.
No hiccups at all.</p>
<p>Lots of cloud providers like to brag about being able to scale with their users. I like to brag about not having to scale at all.</p>

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

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

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

<h1>Someone Remixed Tatum</h1>
<p>A while back, I wrote a small tool, dubbed "Tatum", for rendering Markdown to HTML for use alongside Neovim.
I've continued to use it to this day, with a few tweaks here and there.</p>
<p>It looks like someone has taken advantage of Tatum's open-source license and remixed it into something even more capable.
I highly suggest you check out <a href="https://github.com/vihu/penview.nvim/"><code>penview.nvim</code></a></p>

Elijah Potter

Someone Remixed Tatum

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Other Stuff

My Writing Environment As a Software Engineer

Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale