Notes
Technical write-ups and stray thoughts from the Pearachute team.
Two SSH keys, not one, and everything else a one-script VPS install actually needs
What it takes for `install.sh` to go from a bare VPS to a running HTTPS site in a single non-interactive pass, on a shared box, for a private repo — not any single hard problem, but seven small ones that don't announce themselves until you actually try to automate them.
Where to start a project
Architecture school teaches a design process built on cheap, fast iteration long before anything looks finished. Software keeps reinventing the same lesson.
The microtargeting pitch, and why more data about your users usually isn't the unlock
A pitch I've heard in a dozen forms over the years, personalization startups selling on how much they know about your users. The part that never quite adds up.
Your SPA is invisible, and Googlebot is the only crawler that doesn't notice
How to serve correct per-route titles, descriptions, and Open Graph cards from a Tornado backend in front of a client-rendered Svelte SPA, without a full prerendering setup.
Querying a CSV file directly with SQLite, no import step
A one-liner for running a real SQL query against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility, no database setup required.
Debugging a data pipeline one line at a time, straight in the browser console
A chart needed one number aggregated three different ways. Rather than writing it blind, we built it up interactively in the console, the way you'd work out a query at a SQL prompt.