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This week I received a lot of submissions to airportpianos.org, the index of pianos in airports that I maintain. Submissions come through a Google Form. The form is intentionally brief 1, asking for two pieces of information: the airport name and the location of the piano. When I receive a submissio...

“Notebooks” are a programming environment where you can run code in the same file as you see the output. You can edit your code and run the edited code again as many times as you want. Notebooks are made of cells. A cell can either be code, non-executable text – for example, markdown – or the output...

When I write blog posts, I sometimes send them to friends, either for feedback or validation that a post is worth publishing [^1]. My workflow used to be pasting the contents into a Google Document. With that said, this was not ideal. I wanted to have a draft link on my website that I could send to ...

What do coffee, Seinfeld, and Google all have in common? They are the topics of this blog post! I was on a call yesterday where the topic of coffee in sitcoms came up. I was curious: what television show spoke about coffee the most? We noted the lack of coffee mentions in Seinfeld. Seinfeld didn’t d...

When I want to create a Google Document, I usually type docs.new into the address bar of Firefox. This redirects me to a blank Google Document that I can edit and share. I love the convenience of this feature. There are several .new domains with similar effects for different services, from gist.new ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post with a friend in real time using Google Docs. We started with a blank page and conversed in the document to develop an idea. Then, we started writing, together. The result was a delightful story. We only spoke in Google Docs; our communication was limited to text...

In “Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index or How Google Code Search Worked”, Russ Cox describes a system that allows for code search with regular expressions. It has taken me several reads of the article to understand roughly what is going on, and I still don’t have a full understanding. ...

Search engines help us find information. Over the years, web search engines such as Google have experimented extensively with how that value proposition translates into a user experience. At first, search engines helped you find web pages that addressed queries. Google famously showed “10 blue links...

When you copy images directly from a Google Document into Ghost, and potentially other rich text editors, URL references to the images in the Document are copied instead of the underlying image. This means that if the document is deleted, the images will be broken. Thus, before you use images in a G...

Google, among other search engines, supports advanced operators for writing refined search queries. For example, you can use the site: search operator to constrain your search to a website, like: site:reddit.com aeropress coffee recipe In my How to build a query language in Python blog post, I walk...

Professionally, I write in Google Docs and then paste my words into another tool: Ghost, for example, or whatever the documentation tool is with which I am working. I do this because Google Docs is an excellent writing tool, with all the features I need to write the words I need to write. I can leav...

I have been taking note of design patterns I like. I write these notes in my notebook as a reminder of things I have seen that have inspired me. One that I noted down recently was the pattern of having a rotating set of tips or facts that appear while you are waiting for a page to load. The Chrome i...