Today I Learned

Short snippets of knowledge that my future self will find useful. Borrowed from Simon Willison’s TIL concept. Check out the blog for longer form writing.

Teaching agents to use CalcMark til — — I wrote an agent skill so Claude Code can use CalcMark for calculations. Then I asked Claude what was hard, and it taught me a few things about building tools for agents.

calcmark agents skills

Caddy File Server til — — Using Caddy as a web server for a local file system.

utility webserver

httpie for JSON data til — — Using a slightly nicer curl

json shell

Keep Github Actions Simple til — — A reminder to keep Github Actions simple and as free of logic as possible.

github actions ci

MCP and NumPy til — — I spun up a couple of projects to explore two separate topics: how to implement a basic MCP server; how to use NumPy for numerical computations.

mcp numpy python redis

Shrinking output from Go WebAssembly til — — Cross-compiling Go code to WebAssembly (WASM) is really powerful. It also produces massive files to download. So how can we shrink this down?

go wasm tinygo crosscompilation optimization compression

Git worktrees for local development til — — Using git worktrees for the first time in local development requires some new muscle memory.

git

Audaciously deciding to write a new language til — — I really wanted a tiny little version of Jupyter notebooks but for personal calculations that can also have Markdown in them. So I started chatting with my buddy, Claude, who gave me an inflated sense …

language parsers lexers calculations

uv and Jupyter Best Friends til —

python jupyter uv

In which Claude Makes a Map til — — I decided to vibe code, truly putting Anthropic’s Claude CLI in the driver’s seat. It was instructive!

claude llm vibecoding maps agents

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