https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tags/reflection/ Recent content in Reflection on Under the Anvil Hugo en-us Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:33:46 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:33:46 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ Perl is in an interesting position today. It is no longer the language that every system administrator or text-processing enthusiast is expected to know, yet many of the ideas we take for granted today—powerful regular expressions, concise text transformations, one-liners, and “glue” programming—owe a great deal to Perl. Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox? https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/programming-as-composition/ Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:35:01 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/programming-as-composition/ Most programming books begin with variables, loops, and functions. A textsmith, however, encounters programming from the opposite direction: composition. Before writing a single if statement, they are already composing grep, sort, awk, sed, pandoc, and dozens of other tools into something larger. By the time they sit down to learn a programming language, they have already been programming—they simply didn’t call it that. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tools-of-the-trade/why-vs-code-took-the-programming-world-by-storm/ Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:42:44 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tools-of-the-trade/why-vs-code-took-the-programming-world-by-storm/ Before Visual Studio Code arrived, the programming world was already crowded with editors. There was Vim for those who loved the keyboard, Emacs for those who wanted an editor that could become an operating system, Sublime Text for speed, Atom for hackability, Notepad++ on Windows, and countless IDEs for specific languages. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-best-programming-language-is-the-one-that-solves-your-annoyance/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:45:06 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-best-programming-language-is-the-one-that-solves-your-annoyance/ How does one become a programmer? Based on my own experience, this is all about agency—the moment you stop waiting for software to exist and start creating software that fits your own way of working. The key is discovering that if configuration isn’t enough, you can write the missing tool yourself. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/my-personal-reflection-on-editor-wars/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:45:30 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/my-personal-reflection-on-editor-wars/ For a long time, it semed to be a taboo to talk positively about emacs and vim in the same sentence. In this post, I am going to show why I love and use both of these traditional Unix text editors on a daily basis. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/why-plain-text-scales-better-than-you-think/ Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:21:30 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/why-plain-text-scales-better-than-you-think/ Why does plain text fits the bill when it comes to backing up information for long-term? The answer lies in its format: it does well as source, and asn end-product in data. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/mathematics-without-a-mouse/ Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:52:05 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/mathematics-without-a-mouse/ This article seeks to answer the question of whether it is possible to do math using plain text, and without the use of a mouse. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tools-of-the-trade/old-tools-new-ideas/ Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:15:43 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/tools-of-the-trade/old-tools-new-ideas/ Perhaps nowhere is the impact of Rust felt more than in sysadmin: its speed and expressiveness means that some old tools are being modernized. Whether this is good of bad depends on the user’s perspective. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-joy-of-dotfiles/ Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:08:30 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-joy-of-dotfiles/ Dotfiles make it possible to backup your customizations without necessarily starting all over: find the true joy of working with these powerful files https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-appeal-of-configuration-files/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:52:10 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/the-workshop/the-appeal-of-configuration-files/ It was the ini file that started my journey as a textsmith: understanding how these text files, rather than the registry, can change the application behavior made me appreciate the beauty of simple configurations. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/the-heat-of-the-campfire/ Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:13:15 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/text-processing/the-heat-of-the-campfire/ The value of treasuring one’s tools is not in the venom one spits against those who do not use them, rather it is in the satisfaction one gets and the productivity he reaps from them. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/markdown-didn-t-just-win-the-internet-now-it-s-coming-for-the-office-suite/ Mon, 06 Jul 2026 10:10:08 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/alternative-ways/markdown-didn-t-just-win-the-internet-now-it-s-coming-for-the-office-suite/ Technologies that change the world do not always get glossy press statements. Instead, they do so quietly and with the power of the community: this is the story of Markdown. https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/the-necessity-of-reading-today/ Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:20:51 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/bookshelf/the-necessity-of-reading-today/ Is the art of reading books and manuals still fashionable in the 21st century? Find out in this article.