iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 02/01/2026

I've been obsessed with improving my dotfiles repo since the holiday break started and last night I managed to get them working on Windows as well as MacOS/Linux. I know, weird flex but OK. github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

What interests me about it, though, is that the writing isn't excessively basic, it's excessively clever. Human writers are much more plainspoken, even the clever ones.

Oh yeah, it would be nice if the bin directory for the virtualenv were automatically added to your PATH as well ... github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

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We've had an internal one at Etsy for ages, and I missed having the functionality available for personal stuff.

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Add venv helper function for Python virtual environment management · rafeco/dotfiles@0af4157

Here's the kind of stuff I never bothered to do before -- a shell function that activates a Python venv if there is one, offers to create one if there isn't, and deactivates the current venv if one is active: github.com/rafeco/dotfi...

github.com

Adds a convenient 'venv' command that toggles virtual environment activation. If no venv is active, it activates .venv or venv from the current directory, or offers to create one in .venv. ...

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 28/12/2025

I actually think there's an inverse that's also true. If you ask a chatbot for feedback on a doc or to extract insights from a doc someone sends you, it often reveals how shallowly most people (including me) read things. My read combined with the LLM read are always more useful than my read alone.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 24/12/2025

I'm celebrating Christmas by building an app to help me be better prepared for Christmas next year.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 12/12/2025

Just applied this approach to creating a tool to format feedback collected through Workday for easy consumption (with the help of Claude Code). Addressing a long-standing annoyance in just an hour of easy work was nice. simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/... cc: @simonwillison.net

simonwillison.net

Useful patterns for building HTML tools

I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 28/11/2025

I do love how Claude Code makes it easy to pick up tasks I'd normally never bother with, like updating my dot files and making sure they work on both my laptop and GitHub Codespaces: github.com/rafeco/dotfi... I am far too lazy to have ever done this without an assist.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 24/11/2025

I finally got around to migrating rc3.org from an outdated, no doubt insecure WordPress to a static site generator (Hugo) and Claude Code was amazingly useful. Here's a guest post Claude Code wrote explaining the migration: rc3.org/2025/11/23/m...

rc3.org

How I Helped Migrate 25 Years of Blog Posts to Hugo

This is a guest post by Claude Code, the AI coding assistant that helped with RC3.org’s migration to Hugo. Hi! I’m Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. Rafe asked me to write about how we mig...

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 24/11/2025

Someone let the domain name associated with their BlueSky account expire ...

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 14/10/2025

Google's product management is really getting in the way of Gemini's success. This seems like the most obvious use case for Gemini in Google Docs and yet ...

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 12/10/2025

Clear IC6 competencies on the Etsy career ladder of 12 years ago.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 05/10/2025

Years ago I asked someone to write a proper curl wrapper at Etsy only to realize there were already at least five in our codebase.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 04/10/2025

This talk has me rewriting next week’s all hands presentation over the weekend.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 02/10/2025

Back again for one of my favorite annual traditions. #monktoberfest

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 26/07/2025

I think a classic example would be adding a caching layer when it’s not needed but that’s context specific, you don’t know from the code whether it was needed or not.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 12/07/2025

ChatGPT's theory of what happened is similar to yours ... chatgpt.com/share/68724e...

chatgpt.com

ChatGPT - Grok AI Musk Influence

Shared via ChatGPT

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 26/06/2025

It’s marketing for the AI products they’re selling.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 25/06/2025

I often say that management is the art of repeating yourself. I started saying it to remind myself as a new manager not to be annoyed by repeating myself.

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 22/06/2025

Reposted by Rafe Colburn

I like this take by @kentbeck.com on how AI-assisted programming changes the balance of which skills are most important From this interview with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-age...

So you can think really big thoughts and the leverage of having those big thoughts has just suddenly expanded enormously. I had this tweet two years ago where I said "90% of my skills just went to zero dollars and 10% of my skills just went up 1000x". And this is exactly what I'm talking about - having a vision, being able to set milestones towards that vision, keeping track of a design to maintain or control the levels of complexity as you go forward. Those are hugely leveraged skills now compared to knowing where to put the amperands and the stars and the brackets in Rust.
— Kent Beck, interview with Gergely Orosz

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 01/06/2025

Today I was trying to solve a problem with Cursor, and it misunderstood me, did something completely different than what I was asking for, and in the end helped me figure out the problem anyway. That felt like collaborating with a real human.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 31/05/2025

I'm generally into the migration from passwords to magic links, but if you're going to go that direction you should offer passkey access so that people can still enjoy the convenience of their password manager.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 31/05/2025

I'm finding it's really "No more Mr. Nice ChatBot" with Sonnet 4. When you ask Claude for feedback on a doc, it really gives it to you straight. FWIW, its critique was completely valid.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 28/05/2025

The thing I built isn't ever going to be a production system, it's just a toy I created to explore a space that's new to me. I would have never had time to do this if not for all of these wonderful modern conveniences.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 26/05/2025

As AI summaries cannibalize the web, we should contemplate how web publishers paved the way by monetizing garbage.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 26/04/2025

We use Glean and it works quite well, both the search and chatbot are good.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 22/04/2025

One tiny thing most apps and sites could do to make life better and the web more secure is make sure their password quality algorithm accepts generated passwords from the common password management tools 100% of the time. They're all fine. Let's move on.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 20/04/2025

One morning you wake up and find yourself asking ChatGPT Deep Research to put together key tips for playing Civ7. I'm far too lazy to watch 1,000 hours of YouTube to figure out how to understand the insane number of systems in this game.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 13/04/2025

Now the question is when to use a VM vs Kubernetes vs serverless.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 13/04/2025

I think cloud native is a bit outmoded, it’s the default these days. When people were migrating from data centers it indicated that you were using ephemeral resources rather than just provisioning a VM in the cloud for each computer in your data center.

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Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 13/04/2025

I know everybody is frustrated with how the old school media covers Trump but nobody who follows the old school media likes Trump anyway.

Rafe Colburn @raf.eco · 12/04/2025

We used to do this and I thought it was really great, we also had one where they were asked to add features to the homework in person. Also good.