Posts

I maintain a Go library for the Perplexity API (perplexity-go). Once it existed, it was almost a sin not to wrap it in a CLI. So pplx is what I reach for when I want a cited, web-aware answer from the shell — and now also a Model Context Protocol server I plug into Claude Code.

There’s a category of bash one-liners I keep rewriting: “run this thing, and if it fails, try again a few times with a delay.” curl against a service that’s still booting. A kubectl rollout status that flickers. A flaky integration test. A docker pull from a registry having a bad five seconds.

You can write the loop yourself in five lines of bash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. But I always forget the exit code handling, the sleep arithmetic, the cap on retries. So I wrote retry — a single binary that does exactly this, with proper exponential backoff if you want it.

I have a recurring problem: I want to give someone (sometimes future-me) a button to push that runs a specific shell command on a server. A backup, a deployment dry-run, a cache flush, a database snapshot. Cron isn’t quite right because the trigger isn’t time-based. SSH is fine but assumes the person has SSH and remembers the exact command. A bespoke Flask app is too much yak-shaving.

RunRun is my attempt at the smallest reasonable thing that fills that gap: a Go web app where you declare tasks in YAML, log in, click “run”, and watch the output stream live in your browser.

The AWS console is great until you want to give someone a read-only link to a single bucket. Then it’s terrible: you have to mint an IAM user or a federated role, walk them through the console, scope it down, deal with their MFA, and so on. All they wanted was to browse a folder.

s3xplorer started as a weekend POC to play with the AWS Go SDK v2 and the minio client, and turned into the tool I now use to expose a bucket to humans without giving them AWS credentials.

shred is the tool everyone reaches for, but it’s far from the only one — and on modern SSDs and journaling filesystems, it’s often the wrong one. This post covers the alternatives: secure-delete, wipe, blkdiscard, hdparm, nvme-cli, and the macOS equivalents — plus why full-disk encryption is now the recommended approach for serious data hygiene.