Chris J Wallace

@standard.dev

167 Followers 69 Following

Post-dadcore he/him. Makes h̷̶̷̶ͪi̷̶̷̶ͥg̷̶h̷̶̷̶ͪ q̷̶u̷̶̷̶ͧa̷̶̷̶ͣl̷̶i̷̶̷̶ͥᴛ̷̶̷̶ⷮy̷̶ s̷̶͛o̷̶̷̶ͦf̷̶ᴛ̷̶̷̶ⷮw̷̶a̷̶̷̶ͣr̷̶̷̶ͬe̷̶̷̶ͤ things with computers. https://standard.dev

Spam email from some sort of nebulous “digital services agency” that has clearly scraped the pretentious artsy byline on my website. It reads: Hi Chris, Spotted your business recently online and was impressed by your innovative arcane interface designs. We believe our outsourced…
Two gull feathers, next to a plastic crystal ball, and the traditional means of communing with the dead (labelled spirograph jr.)
A stone, a black leaf, and a twig impaling a second, bone coloured leaf, on the corner of a dining table. No detect magic spell necessary, you dare not disturb these artefacts.
The Slack theme picker, with a subheading "Celebrate the music of Miles Davis" and such themes as "Kind of Blue" and "Sunglasses Inside".
A screenshot of a submarine internet cable map, with the EXA North and South cable highlighted, connecting the UK to the US.
A sign for a pub called THE COUNTY, but with conspicuously missing O, U, and Y letters. One may speculate about the order and circumstances of the removal of those letters.
A pretty shaky rendition of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas recorded with a lav mic dangling in front of a 5W tube amp. The musician is playing a telecaster, and backlit by a whiteboard ringed in fairy lights. He still had hair, at the time.
A screenshot from a music app showing that Chris' recently played music includes Ottawan's D.I.S.C.O. right after "When No Birds Sang", a collab between abrasive grindcore band Full of Hell and shogaze band Nothing.
A box of Dark Arts Cat Nip coffee, with a faux screen printed image of a cat dangling from a branch and the text “hang in there”, like the old motivational posters.
Skeal II The Skequel (A clearly mocked up banner image for the fictional sequel to hit game Skeal).
A screenshot of Spotify, with contradictory recommendations. Under “picked for you” is a playlist called “Calming Instrumental Covers”, and right below it, under “new releases for you” are Prisoner of Flesh by Lorna Shore, and Hang Them In Your Head by Conjurer. Both of those are very heavy metal bands.
A blurry photo of river after sunset. Crane lights bokeh into the background, and the dashboard light is reflected over the image.
Cairn Player’s and Warden’s guides, second edition.
Mörk Börg core rulebook, in all its luminous doom glory, still in cellophane.
A code snippet highlighted in a bunch of colours. It's like, _ok_, but not _great_. The text isn't important. Post is here: https://standard.dev/posts/default-object-parameters-in-typescript/
The "before" version of the standard.dev homepage in black and off-white. It's pretty boring. Text reads: Standard Development Limited is an esoteric technology R&D facility, arcane interface design studio, <s>distributed swarm intelligence</s> and the software consulting company of Chris J Wallace.
A pink man with a disappointing beard and a cap to disguise the disappointingly thin hair in running gear making the sign of the horns and gurning in front of a picturesque sunset sky. The man is clearly mid run and extremely not comfortable.
A broken mug on a wooden kitchen workbench. The bottom of the mug is ringed with Recurse Center computer logos.
A python function with an entirely serious docstring. def guard_against_forbidden_name (name: str | None) -> str | None: """ I have forbidden the names that were in the FORBIDDEN_CHARACTER_NAME_WORDS and which you were probably saving for characters Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so forbidden """ if name: for word in FORBIDDEN_CHARACTER_NAME_WORDS: if word in name. lower(): return None return name
Process, a novel by Matthew Seiji Burns on a desk, still wrapped in plastic. Techy peripherals frame it: a split keyboard with mint keys, an ableton push controller, the feet of a monitor stand and edge of a mousemat.
A command line invocation of git, reading: git commit -m "Add missing period, details matter" [main df49499] Add missing period, details matter 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
The left half of a ZSA Voyager keyboard with a cursed Dvorak layout featuring Tai-Hao Thin keycaps in mint green. The Esc key is a Tai-Hao logo key.
Books stacked on a desk, from top to bottom: - A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout - A notebook - On Tyranny, Snyder and Krug - Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook (2024 alternate cover) - A larger notebook - The Advancing Guitarist, Mick Goodrick
The cover of Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, illustrated by Nora Krug.
Lesson 14 from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, illustrated by Nora Krug. There is a picture of a man hanging laundry in a treehouse. The text reads: Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.
A website lighthouse score screenshot, with 100 across the board for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO, and the metrics: First Contentful Paint: 0.4 s Largest Contentful Paint: 0.4 s Total Blocking Time: 0 ms Cumulative Layout Shift: 0 Speed Index: 0.4 s
A totally awesome looking website evoking cosmic bureaucratic horror and manilla envelopes (it is a blog page with very minimal styling, but a noteable pulp scifi novel title font). The text of the post is not the focus but it reads as follows: published April 9, 2023 updated May 17, 2023 Now is a great time to become a programmer The secret is that programming is a design discipline. It feels like every day I see allusions to some job being made obsolete by technology. Recently, programmers, by GPT. And designers, by GPT. And CEOs, by GPT. I don’t think it will play out like that. I can’t speak to the experiences of CEOs, except in the sense that I own and operate a one-employee company, where the employee is me (so I guess I am a CEO? Huh. Neat), but I do not fear for my livelihood in software. At least, not on account of technical advances.
A Tonie figure faces away from the camera on a carpeted floor, with a single pop-up pirate sword embedded upright beside it. The head of a pop up pirate, and many of the swords, are scattered in the foreground.
A sprig of mistletoe hung above the doorway from the hall to the kitchen in a loosely modern-Victorian style domestic residence.
The current state of the blog on a post called "Making things is deep magic". It is an off-white background with dark text, and a subtle grain overlay over the whole thing. The body text is monospaced (technically, iA duospaced), and the title is in a dot matrix/thermal printer style. The content reads: published Sep 15, 2022 updated Feb 27, 2023 Making things is deep magick You know what rocks? Making things. From a sort of “spiritual fulfilment” perspective, I think the thing is probably less important than the making. Making things converts the raw resources of life — time, energy, thus food, water, the heat of the Sun, fresh tears in your very muscle fibres — into a manifestation of your will. Heady stuff.
A `getStaticPaths()` function in an astro file. It maps over `posts`, but the `post.data` property is typed as `any`, where I'd expect the schema defined in `content.config.ts`
An astro ImageNotFound error in a terminal, poining to the name of the file that exists.
A large airport sign indicating departure gate 404. A small screen next to it says Gate 404 with some flight details.
The astro.build terminal output after starting a new project, which reads: Houston: Good luck out there, astronaut! 🚀
A lone kettlebell on a wooden floor.
A slide that reads as follows: You are riding a horse through a forest and someone tries to sell you on AI to automate the human parts out of creativity. CHOOSE VIOLENCE (in a big drippy scifi blood font) hiddendoor.co standard.dev
The alternate cover edition of the new Dungeon Masters’s Guide, but at an angle so the light catches the shiny gold highlighting in Lolth’s hair.
The alternate cover art version of the new Dungeon Masters’s Guide, featuring Lolth, the Demon Queen of Spiders.
Two pumpkins with carved faces.
A zsa voyager keyboard with caps removed and some red pro switches replaced by ambient twilights.
Half a ZSA voyager keyboard with stock key caps
A ZSA voyager keyboard with mint green Tai-Hao thins key caps.
A set of mint green Tai-Hao thins keycaps.
A dialogue between a person and a LLM: Would you like me to show how we could refactor with this insight? You: The insight I’ve been yelling about for the past five minutes, sure, help me understand it ;) Assistant: *face palm* YES! now I truly get it! …