Posts - chiply.dev

The annotated contents of this blog: every post grouped by theme, with a note on what each one is about. For a date-ordered listing see the chronology; to look posts up by topic, use the index.

1. Posts about Making this Blog

Feature Demo: Building a Blog with Emacs Org and SvelteKit: A demo of building a blog using Emacs Org mode and SvelteKit.
Design Decisions: Building a Modern Technical Blog: Exploring the design choices behind creating a modern technical blog with Emacs Org and SvelteKit.

2. The Importance of Data Modelling

Testing Data Models: A Systematic Approach to Finding Edge Cases: How to systematically test data models to find edge cases and ensure robustness.
The Schema Language Question: Avro, JSON Schema, Protobuf, and the Quest for a Single Source of Truth: Models are everywhere. This post asks the antecedent question: how do we express those models in a portable, standard format?
Schema Diagrams: Bidirectional Visualization for the Schema Languages That Need It Most: What if we could get diagrams-as-code AND code-as-diagrams for Avro schemas?

3. Enterprise Integration Patterns and Tools

CN Diagrams: Architecture Diagrams That Scale With Your System: What if we could get diagrams-as-code AND code-as-diagrams for software architecture?
The Interest Rate on Your Codebase: A Financial Framework for Technical Debt: A comprehensive form of Ward Cunningham's original analogy, extended with precise mappings to financial instruments
Pattern Inheritance: A Fork-Based Strategy for Scaling Service Standards: A fork-based strategy for helping your service implementation patterns propogate gracefully throughout your organization, remaining compatible with improvements to upstream forks.

4. Dotfiles

My Dotfiles: macOS Bootstrap and an Emacs Distribution: An entry point to my two public dotfiles repos — a macOS bootstrap (.files) and a reproducible Emacs distribution (.zetta.d).

5. My emacs packages

space-tree: Workspace Management Trees in Emacs: A small Emacs package that organizes workspaces into a tree of arbitrary depth, built on the built-in window-state-get / window-state-put primitives.
brushup: Theme-Aware Dynamic Color Palette for Emacs: A dynamic color palette that generates gradient colors from your current theme, so face customizations work consistently across any theme.
spot: A Spotify Client Built on Consult, Embark, and Marginalia: A Spotify client built entirely on the modern completion ecosystem, with multi-source search, embark actions, and marginalia annotations.
repeatable-lite: Make Any Prefix Command Repeatable: A lightweight package that makes prefix key commands repeatable with automatic which-key integration.
touchtype: A Progressive Touch Typing Trainer for Emacs: A progressive touch typing trainer with 13 training modes, confidence-based key unlocking, and detailed statistics.
magneto: Composable Window Management for Emacs: A composable window management system where source, destination, cursor, and buffer actions combine through a small keyboard grammar.
svg-line: Better Status Bars for Emacs: A small engine that renders the mode-line, header-line, tab-bar, and tab-line as single SVG images — multi-row bars, per-row alignment, inline icons, and clickable segments, uniformly across all four.
svg-margin: Better Gutters for Emacs: A small engine that renders the window margins as a composable gutter — independent "providers" pack colour shapes, icon glyphs, and clickable markers side by side on one line, with the margin auto-sizing to fit and no provider knowing about the others.

6. Emacs observations

Completion is a Substrate, not a UI: The opening of a short series on incremental completing read — a ubiquitous interaction pattern, a structural shift in cognitive cost, and a uniquely Emacs-shaped opportunity.
VOMPECCC: A Modular Completion Framework for Emacs: Eight independent packages that compose through standard Emacs APIs to form a complete, Unix-philosophy-aligned completion system.
A VOMPECCC Case Study: Spotify as Pure ICR in Emacs: Building a Spotify client with zero custom UI by feeding candidates into Consult, Marginalia, and Embark — 493 lines of shim on top of the completion substrate.
VOMPECCC from Scratch: Picking Produce with ICR in Emacs: A from-scratch walkthrough that layers Vertico, Orderless, Marginalia, Consult, Embark, and Prescient on top of stock completing-read to build a ~90-line produce picker.
Emacs Completion Showcase with VOMPECCC: Over a dozen high-impact workflows: multi-file refactor, two-stage ripgrep, M-x by docstring, batch action, mid-prompt pivot, session resume, complex-command replay, and more!
Incremental Suggesting Read: When the Match Isn't in the Characters: ISR is ICR with the candidate source swapped from a corpus to a model — candidates surface by meaning (semantic retrieval) or are generated whole (generative synthesis), all on the same Consult, Marginalia, and Embark substrate.
May I recommend… understanding Emacs's patterns: My entry for the May 2026 Emacs Carnival — a botanical case for why Emacs is an "Effortless Bloom", tracing the fan-in/fan-out patterns (universal buffers, ICR, recognize-dispatch via Embark, language servers) that compose to make computer use effortless.
Annotate-in-Place Notes with Emacs and org-remark: A note-taking pattern where you mark passages in place — webpages, ebooks, RSS, code, anywhere text lives in Emacs — implemented in org-remark. Highlights persist on revisit, and daily review reduces to a grep for today's date link.
Emacs SVG Benchmark Reveals Gaming-Caliber Frame Rates: An empirical benchmark in bare emacs -Q answering the skeptics — rendering a status bar as SVG is several times heavier than the native text engine, yet still holds ~77 fps even on a fully-repainted ultrawide bar (and 200–750 fps for a live inline animation), far above the 60 fps games target. Cost scales with pixel area, not with what's drawn.
Juneau Something? Emacs Teaches You How to Fish!: My entry for June's Emacs Carnival on underappreciated built-ins — a tour of Emacs's self-documenting machinery (the C-h help family, apropos, Info, xref, describe- and friends) organized around the questions a curious beginner asks, culminating in fishing a built-in game out of Emacs and reading its source with those very tools.
Emacs Teaches Emacs: The Missing README: The short version of the Emacs Carnival post — just two keys (M-x and C-h) and a handful of auto-discovery prefixes (describe-, find-, xref-, Info-, apropos-, customize-), plus the 'prefix trick' that lets you enumerate every command in a family with TAB instead of memorizing any of them.
HyWiki: Zero Markup Hypertext: A tour of HyWiki, a truly unique second brain system from Hyperbole. HyWiki is unique for it's zero markup wiki links, and it's subsequent propagation of wiki words throughout your entire Emacs. In many ways, it provides an "omniscient" second brain.
A Tree and a Server Walk Into a Core…: My entry for July's Emacs Carnival on programming — how two language-agnostic technologies, tree-sitter for syntax and LSP for semantics, turned the M×N editor-support problem into M+N and made it into Emacs 29.1's core. Features interactive visualizations of real tree-sitter parse trees, a grid of Combobulate demos, and Eglot expressing LSP through decades-old built-ins.
The Search for Knowledge: Emacs Carnival August 2026: I'm hosting August's Emacs Carnival! The theme is "The Search for Knowledge" — information retrieval and knowledge management in Emacs, from knowledge graphs to a humble grep. Prompts to spark ideas, details on how to take part, and a running list of submissions inside.
Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse: The second post in my Hyperbole series, on implicit buttons — the pattern recognizers that turn the file paths, URLs, commit hashes, and stack traces already in your text into markup-free hyperlinks, all activated by a single Action Key. Covers the built-in recognizers, C-h A introspection, the priority cascade, and crafting your own button types with defal, defil, and defib.
Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros: A love letter to Elisp macros through Hofstadter's strange loops and ten Escher prints — what "homoiconic" actually means, why defun (and some 1,700 other things in your session) is secretly a macro, how to roll your own defining forms, and the tooling (macroexpand, emacs-lisp-macroexpand, macrostep) that lets you watch the language take itself apart and put itself back together.
Hyperbole HyRolo: Records Are Trees, Not Lines: The third post in my Hyperbole series, on HyRolo — a full-text retrieval tool that returns the whole hierarchical record around each match instead of a bare line. Point hyrolo-file-list at the Org, Markdown, Koutline, and outline files you already have and search them in place; the *HyRolo* buffer becomes an on-the-fly backlinks view with the surrounding prose — the edge type — left intact.

7. Literary Criticism

Gödel, Escher, Bach, Wallace: the "o's, d's and p's" in Infinite Jest: A typographic close-reading of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest that reads the darkened 'o's, d's, p's' of a single Subject's note as Wallace's Hofstadterian signature of Orin Incandenza's hidden trauma.
Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket: Reading Infinite Jest through the two ways to construct a Sierpinski Gasket — Wallace built the gasket top-down by placing three institutional vertices (ETA, Ennet, AFR) around the lethal absent center; readers fill in the same Gasket bottom-up by playing a chaos game on each reread.

8. Experiments in Visualizing Publicly Available Healthcare Data

Five Years of COVID-19 Data: Variants, Hospitalizations, Vaccines, and What Wastewater Tells Us Now: Tracking the full arc of COVID-19 through CDC's public data APIs, from emergence through endemicity.
The GLP-1 Revolution: How a Diabetes Drug Became the Fastest-Growing Drug Category in Medicare History: How Medicare Part D spending on GLP-1 drugs grew from $2.3 billion to roughly $27 billion in five years.
HAI Scoreboard: Hospital-Acquired Infection Rates: Visualizing hospital-acquired infection data reported by ~4,789 US hospitals to CMS.
America's Mental Health Crisis, By ZIP Code: Mapping how the burden of mental distress varies dramatically across the country at ZIP code level.
Drug Pricing Transparency: What Medicare Pays Per Day: Exploring how Medicare Part D spent $276 billion on prescription drugs in 2023 and where that money went.
The Geography of Medicare Spending: How Medicare spending per beneficiary varies by more than 2.5x between states, with higher spending predicting neither better outcomes nor lower readmissions.
Your Neighborhood's Health Profile: The CDC measures 40+ health indicators at ZIP code level – exploring how health outcomes are hyperlocal.
The Telehealth Revolution: How COVID-19 forced a telehealth experiment, taking Medicare from essentially zero to 47% adoption in a single quarter.
Hospital Quality Scatter Explorer: Exploring how every Medicare-participating hospital is evaluated on the same quality metrics.
What Medicare Pays for Your Surgery: How hospitals bill Medicare 3-7x what Medicare actually pays, with billed charges varying 10x between hospitals for the same surgery.
Healthcare Deserts: Where America Can't See a Doctor: Roughly 100 million Americans live in federally designated health professional shortage areas.
The Three Waves: Visualizing America's Opioid Epidemic with CDC Data: Visualizing the three distinct waves of the U.S. opioid epidemic from prescription painkillers to heroin to synthetic fentanyl.