Mat Jones Development Blog

Mat Jones Development Blog

Introducing Yaclt (Yet Another ChangeLog Tool)

Aug 8, 20213 min read

The Problem Several months ago, I set out to solve a pain point I was running into at work — manually writing release notes by copy and pasting entries from Merge Request descriptions. I couldn't find an existing tool that quite worked the way we wan...

Introducing Yaclt (Yet Another ChangeLog Tool)

Storing Dotfiles in a Git Repo

May 22, 20213 min read

Everyone has seen those dotfiles repositories on GitHub. There's lots of different ways to manage them, but the method I use now requires no extra tooling (other than git and a command line shell of your choice), no symbolic links to get files into t...

Storing Dotfiles in a Git Repo

Code Comments are Stupid

Mar 19, 20216 min read

Code comments are lame. Code comments once served a critical purpose; adding context or explanation to a snippet of code. But this was back when programming languages were mostly esoteric, and the barrier to entry for writing code was extremely high....

Code Comments are Stupid

Strongly Typed Error Handling in TypeScript

Jan 23, 20218 min read

TypeScript is a great language. TypeScript takes JavaScript and makes it actually good. If there’s one glaring weakness, it’s the inability to use strongly typed catch blocks. However, this is mostly due to a design flaw in the JavaScript language; i...

Strongly Typed Error Handling in TypeScript

Protecting Your Privacy Online

Dec 29, 20209 min read

Do you know who’s tracking you? If you’re like most people, you use Google Chrome as your default browser, you use Google as your default search engine, and you don’t often think about online privacy much further than that. Why should huge tech compa...

Protecting Your Privacy Online