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Janet for Mortals (2023)

I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if you have read the book. This blog post is a thinly-veiled promotion for my book to slip into my newsletter and RSS feed, with just enough additional content to pad it out to the length of a real post.

I had originally estimated twelve weeks, which turned out to be a really good guess for how long I spent writing the book, but I didn’t account for how much time I would spend working on book-adjacent coding side quests. So I knew that I’d have to roll my own syntax highlighter of some kind, and I ended up just writing a simple static site generator in redo, which was not a very good fit, but… well, least bad choice that I know of. The most interesting part of the repl is probably the(report) function, which takes a string and POSTs it to a simple web server that sticks it into a SQLite database for me to peruse later.

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