Summary

While leaving “private comments” on a repo can be incredibly useful, it can get you into trouble if the wrong person sees them and disagrees with what they see. This post goes into the problems, consequences, and things that tools that provide this functionality need to do to protect their users from accidental harm.

Some Context

A while ago I wrote a tool called “Private Comments”, which allows you to leave “private comments” on a codebase that aren’t actually in the codebase. Imagine leaving little “breadcrumbs” for the future you that are actually attached to the relevant lines of code, and go away when that code changes, but reappear if you need to look at the relevant past version of it. It can be used for you, or shared with your team.

This post describes how to make high quality recordings of terminal sessions that can be replayed in the terminal, or shared on the web. I’m defining high quality as recordings with zero typos, and relatively controlled timing between commands.

to see an example of the type of output I’m talking about.

Why? Videos and gifs take up a lot of disk space, don’t age well as display technology improves, and are problematic for folks low vision requirements.

A quick post to help future Raku geeks understand a couple of confusing error messages:

expected Positional[Array] but got Array

and

expected Associative[Hash] but got Hash

These are conceptually the same problem. If you’ve received one of these errors it means you’ve double-specified your parameter by using the @ or % and Array or Hash.

A parameter of Hash %foo says “I would like to be passed something that implements Associative and has a Hash in it.” (a Hash of Hashes). Likewise Array @foo says “I would like to be passed something that implements Positional and has an Array in it”. Yes, that sounds backwards. No, I can’t explain why.