Posts on @jdx

Dotfiles That Save Themselves

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

mise bootstrap already supported two common ways of managing dotfiles: keep them in a repository and symlink them into place, as GNU Stow does, or generate the live files from stored sources and templates, as chezmoi normally does.

I wanted to add a third model: automatic bidirectional syncing of the files I already edit, without symlinks. Change .zshrc on my laptop and mise saves it, shares it, and applies it on my desktop. Edit it on the desktop and the change flows back. The live files stay where they are, and I don’t have to remember to copy edits back into a source directory or run a sync command after each change.

Introducing mr-boxington: fix target/

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m introducing mr-boxington, a build cache for Rust that shares compilations across your machine and cleans up after itself. The command is mbx. Set it up once and keep running cargo build, cargo test, and cargo clippy as usual.

The pitch is fix target/.

If you work on several Rust projects, you probably have a lot of disk space tied up in build outputs. Add git worktrees and you get another copy of those outputs for every branch you’re working on. Delete them to reclaim space, and the next build spends time recreating much of the same work.

Introducing packslip

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m introducing packslip, a signed manifest vendors publish alongside their releases. It tells package managers which binaries to download, how to verify and install them, and where to find matching shell completions and agent skills.

mise supports packslip as a tier 1 backend, preferred over the github and aqua backends for new tools. Completions follow the tool version active in your project, and you can opt in to making that version’s skills available to your coding agent.

Going Full Time on Open Source

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the last several years, I’ve been building and maintaining developer tools in my spare time, chiefly mise.

What started as a simple rewrite of asdf in Rust has become an incredibly successful local dev manager. mise now has 27k+ stars on GitHub and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula. In fact, roughly 1% of users typing brew install are running brew install mise.

I’ve also watched mise show up in places I never expected, including OpenAI Codex Universal and NVIDIA OpenShell.

Top 10 Features in Mise You're Not Using

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Task `sources` and `outputs` #

Any task can declare input/output globs. If all outputs are newer than all sources, the task is skipped entirely:

[tasks.build]
run = "cargo build"
sources = ["Cargo.toml", "src/**/*.rs"]
outputs = ["target/debug/myapp"]

Don’t want to enumerate outputs? Set outputs = { auto = true } (which is actually the default when sources is defined) — mise tracks a hash internally and skips the task if sources haven’t changed.

Shims: How they work in mise-en-place

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 01:00:00 +0000

Assuming you’ve setup mise and have it configured in a couple of projects to switch between different versions of node, that will happen automatically when entering the project directories:

$ cd ~/src/proj1
$ node -v
20.0.0
$ cd ~/src/proj2
$ node -v
18.0.0

The way that mise is able to switch this version depends on whether you’ve activated mise with shims or not. In this article, I’ll explain how these methods work under the hood and the pros and cons of using them.

Shims: Build a version manager

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last decade of my career in the developer productivity space. In that time I’ve helped countless developers setup their dev environments. Something I see time and time again are developers struggling with version managers for their programming languages.

These tools are generally fine, but developers often don’t understand how they work which leads to frustration trying to get it to do what they want. In this article, we’ll build our own mini-version manager from scratch and along the way you’ll get an idea of how they work under the hood.

10 features in rtx you may have missed

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Goal #1 with rtx was to be a drop-in replacement for asdf. We quickly achieved parity with asdf and now thousands of people have moved to rtx and are loving how much faster and easier to use it is. Since then, though, we haven’t stopped and a lot more features have been added you might not have seen.

1. Arbitrary env vars #

You can now set arbitrary environment variables in your .rtx.toml files so now you can use rtx as a replacement for dotenv and common uses of direnv:

Beginner's Guide to rtx

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

https://dev.to/jdxcode/beginners-guide-to-rtx-ac4

Introducing chim

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had a 3-day weekend and decided to learn Rust while also putting together an idea I’ve had for a few years now: chim.

Background #

The problem I’ve wanted to solve is bootstrapping projects for local dev and CI/CD. Essentially, how tool versions are defined and installed—tools being things like programming language runtimes, package managers, and linters. For example, a project might require node-v18.8.0, jq-v1.6, and shellcheck-v0.8.0. Other versions of these tools may not be compatible.

10 Tips for Ramping Up as a Senior Engineer

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve learned the hard way that starting a job on a large engineering team as a senior engineer is more than simply writing good code. You have to drive initiatives at a social level and not simply because you know more about the codebase.

For a new hire this is especially a challenge. You need to learn the system that your colleagues already understand. You might be a higher level but you’ll be a worse engineer for the first few months while you ramp up.

Async JavaScript Patterns for 2020

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a ton of different patterns I use when working with async code in JS. This article is a collection of them.

I’ve split them into 3 parts: Promises, Async/Await and Async Iterables.

I see this as more of a ctrl-f reference for tasks like “how do I timeout a promise”. Though I’ve also tried to keep it in rough order from beginner-advanced so if you want a comprehensive read of understanding async it should work well for that too.

Practical Guide to Closures

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Closures are fairly common in JS but are also sometimes used in Go and Python and many other languages. This post is going to use JS but the concept is the same in all languages supporting closures.

I found closures incredibly confusing for a long time—well after college and me working in the industry for years in fact. I found the concept confusing even when I was writing them all the time.

Pithy Guide to Kubernetes Part 2: Golang

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t done Part 1 you’ll need to start there.

In Part 1 we setup Minikube and added an Ingress, Service, and Deployment to the k8s cluster. Now we’ll finish that work by giving the Deployment an image to load.

The full example code is available on GitHub.

Build the Go API #

First initialize this directory as a Go module: [optional, but recommended]

$ go mod init

Now create a simple Go JSON API:

Pithy Guide to Kubernetes Part 2: Node.JS

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you haven’t done Part 1 you’ll need to start there.

In Part 1 we setup Minikube and added an Ingress, Service, and Deployment to the k8s cluster. Now we’ll finish that work by giving the Deployment an image to load.

The full example code is available on GitHub.

Build the Node API #

First create a package.json file for our dependencies and add express to the app:

Pithy Guide to Kubernetes Part 1

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a concise, opinionated guide to Kubernetes. I’m assuming you already know how to build software and are just looking to get started with Kubernetes. This is a 2-parter: the first is language-agnostic and the second is for a particular language. I have Go and Node right now.

Assume we want to build a JSON web server managed by Kubernetes. At the end of this guide, we will be able to do this:

[video] oclifconf: The Future of oclif

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TKh2YBxRMY

Golang Function Driven Tests

Thu, 09 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dave Cheney had a fantastic post on improving test structure in Go code with table-driven tests. I want to expand on it just a tiny bit to show how table-driven tests can be made more concise with functions.

If you haven’t read his article, read that before continuing.

The end result of Dave’s post is the following example:

func TestSplit(t *testing.T) {
 tests := map[string]struct {
 input string
 sep string
 want []string
 }{
 "simple": {input: "a/b/c", sep: "/", want: []string{"a", "b", "c"}},
 "wrong sep": {input: "a/b/c", sep: ",", want: []string{"a/b/c"}},
 "no sep": {input: "abc", sep: "/", want: []string{"abc"}},
 "trailing sep": {input: "a/b/c/", sep: "/", want: []string{"a", "b", "c"}},
 }

 for name, tc := range tests {
 got := Split(tc.input, tc.sep)
 if !reflect.DeepEqual(tc.want, got) {
 t.Fatalf("%s: expected: %v, got: %v", name, tc.want, got)
 }
 }
}

This is a nice way to reduce code duplication, but closing over a new function we can go one step further:

[podcast] codeish: oclif: An Open Source CLI Framework

Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.heroku.com/podcasts/codeish/13-oclif-an-open-source-cli-framework

[video] NodeConf: Building Great CLI Experiences in Node.js

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izx3-KSuaM8

12 Factor CLI Apps

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://medium.com/@jdxcode/12-factor-cli-apps-dd3c227a0e46

[video] DevRelCon: Designing a delightful command line interface

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izx3-KSuaM8

For the love of god, don’t use .npmignore

Fri, 25 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://medium.com/@jdxcode/for-the-love-of-god-dont-use-npmignore-f93c08909d8d

Salesforce Blog: Open Sourcing oclif, the CLI Framework that Powers Our CLIs

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

https://engineering.salesforce.com/open-sourcing-oclif-the-cli-framework-that-powers-our-clis-21fbda99d33a

Heroku Blog: Evolution of the Heroku CLI: 2008-2017

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

https://blog.heroku.com/evolution-of-heroku-cli-2008-2017

How to Pair Program

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

https://medium.com/@jdxcode/how-to-pair-program-d6741077e513

[book] Write Modern Web Apps with the MEAN Stack

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Modern-Apps-MEAN-Stack/dp/0133930157

Best Practices for Building Angular.JS Apps

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

https://medium.com/@jdxcode/best-practices-for-building-angular-js-apps-266c1a4a6917

Older Posts

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

You can view my older posts on medium: https://medium.com/@jdxcode