Tooling - Tag - vo.rs

Taskfile: A Modern Task Runner That Replaces Make Without the Pain

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I have a long and complicated relationship with make. It is everywhere, it is reliable, and it has been quietly running the world’s builds for nearly fifty years. It also punishes you with significant whitespace, a recipe language that is really shell-inside-make-inside-shell with three layers of escaping, and the eternal indignity of Makefile:12: *** missing separator. Stop. because you typed spaces where a literal tab was required. For most of what people actually use Make for these days — not building C, but running a handful of project commands — Taskfile is the replacement I wish I’d switched to years ago.

Neovim in 2026: A Practical Setup for People Who Also Have Work to Do

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Neovim has a reputation, and not entirely an unfair one: the editor you spend a weekend configuring instead of using. I’ve lost those weekends. I’ve also come out the other side with an editor I genuinely prefer to anything else, and the good news is that in 2026 you don’t need to lose the weekend any more. The ecosystem has matured into a handful of plugins that do the heavy lifting, and a sensible config is a few hundred lines of readable Lua. This is the setup I’d give someone who wants a capable editor and also, crucially, has actual work to do.

MCP Servers: Giving Language Models Hands and Eyes

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

A language model on its own is a brain in a jar. It can reason, summarise and write you a sonnet about your firewall rules, but it cannot read a file, query a database, or check whether your website is up. It only knows what was in its training data and whatever you paste into the chat. That gap — between knowing things and doing things — is the most interesting problem in applied AI right now, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the most sensible attempt I’ve seen at closing it.

Just and Task: Modern Alternatives to Make That Don't Make You Cry

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Almost every project I touch accumulates a pile of little commands: build the thing, run the tests, regenerate the assets, deploy to staging. For decades the reflex answer was a Makefile, and for decades a Makefile has been quietly torturing everyone who isn’t compiling C. Tab-versus-space errors that print nothing useful. Recipes that fail silently because each line runs in its own shell. Variable expansion that fights you because Make has its own $ and the shell has another. Make is a brilliant build tool wearing a task-runner costume, and the costume doesn’t fit. This article is about two tools — just and Task — that fit much better.

Writing CLI Tools in Go: From Zero to Useful in an Afternoon

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

I write a lot of little command-line tools. Glue that wires two APIs together, a thing that munges a CSV the way I actually need it, a daemon that watches a directory and pokes something when a file lands. For years my reflex was a Bash script that grew tentacles, or a Python file that worked fine on my machine and nowhere else. These days I reach for Go, and I keep reaching for it because the gap between “idea” and “a binary I can hand to someone” is genuinely about an afternoon. Here’s why, and how.