Newsletter August 2026: Interface Design (again)

This month started off with some more C programming in rlworkbench. I started implementing a piece tree and made some internal changes to try out different solutions in C. I also concluded that loops in C feel different than loops in Python.

I also manged to write the follow up post to A Minimalist Approach to Managing Servers which is A Minimalist Approach to Monitoring Servers. The minimalist monitoring approach is that I get a daily monitoring email report that I can act on.

Otherwise the main focus this month has been on interface design. I started reading a book on the subject to learn more. I feel that interface design is sometimes a neglected topic in the sense that it is difficult to prioritize. Once you have implemented your feature, it's done, it works. Interface design feels like polish. So one thing I'm interested to learn is how to quantify interface design problems. Because I think bad interface design can be almost as problematic as a missing feature.

Another topic that feels neglected in the same way is performance. I feel that it's common to not care about performance until it's too slow. And by that time, it might be too late to do something about it.

By learning more about these topics, I hope I can incorporate them into my work.

TODO

Here are the things that I'm currently most interested in working on next:

• rlworkbench

  • Continue making it a worthy replacement for Vim

  • Continue practice interface design

• My blog

  • Migrate all blog posts to it

  • Make different post types render nicely (bookmarks, runs, notes, posts)

• Computer, Enhance!

  • Continue course and do more homework