Alexandru Nedelcu writes about programming, mainly Scala, functional programming, and asynchronous code, plus AI's effect on programming and macOS tips.
HN links it for book recommendations on learning design, Scala and functional programming topics, and a macOS screenshot OCR indexing setup.
I deploy my websites on my own VPS at DigitalOcean, but with a simpler setup then the TFA.
I simply have a Travis-ci.org setup that does an "rsync" after "jekyll build". And in case I'm not in the mood for waiting on Travis, I simply "rsync" from my localhost after build.
Having an automated build system has advantages though - if you get a PR on your website repository with typos and so on, you just have to merge it and the content will get published, so you can do it over your phone. And yes, I had PRs, since I publish 2 project documentation websites this way.
Also folks, you don't need a CDN or Cloudflare, or any of that — you just need a healthy Nginx setup hosted at a decent VPS provider. I've had my websites withstand Reddit and HN level traffic just fine, paying $5 per month for hosting about 4 static websites, plus other stuff.
I also hate Medium, Blogger, Wordpress and any of that crap, I hate their bloat and trackers and I do think having your own website published in a Git repository is worth it. Yes, there is a cost in maintaining my websites, but I do so willingly, because they are mine.
PS: shameless plug — https://alexn.org
Scala 2's syntax is mostly Java/C-style with a few peculiarities.
Scala 3's optionally allows indentation based, brace-less syntax. Much closer to the ML family or Python, depending on how you look at it. It does indeed look better, but brings its share of issues.[1] Worse, a lot of people in the community, whether they like it or not, think this was an unnecessary distraction on top of the challenges for the entire ecosystem (libraries, tooling, ...) after Scala 3.0 was released.
- [1] https://alexn.org/blog/2025/10/26/scala-3-no-indent/
I finally figured out how to use the Tesseract CLI utility on macOS today (installed from Homebrew). It's really neat - you can use it to turn a PNG into a PDF with embedded text, which you can then copy-and-paste: https://til.simonwillison.net/tesseract/tesseract-cli
I learned about it from this post: https://alexn.org/blog/2020/11/11/organize-index-screenshots-ocr-macos.html
Here's a great shortlist: http://alexn.org/blog/2011/11/25/4-books-for-learning-to-design-the-hard-way.html
And CSS tricks will prove very useful (mine the backlog!): http://css-tricks.com/
If you can code, then you're way ahead when it comes to translating visuals into functional elements on a screen, in my opinion. Rock!