if you don’t like the process of writing then don’t be a fucking writer, it’s not that complicated

I swear to god if anything AI related tries to pull an April fools joke tomorrow I’m going to kick off digital Ragnarök

Kids don’t try this at home

This is the key though. Use AI tools on domains you understand well so you can guide them.

They accelerate your work. They don’t replace expertise.

Another good one. Nicely done

Issue 48 of my newsletter ships later today. It includes a markdownlint tutorial. Subscribe at https://newsletter.bphogan.com/ to get the latest issue in your inbox.

Just pushed publish on my 4-song Christmas EP. Traditional songs in my style. If you celebrate, give a listen. https://soundcloud.com/bphogan/sets/december

I'm a subscriber, and I can vouch for the fact that it's good. And free, as he said :⁠-⁠)

You are most kind, sir.

Code, Content, and Career with Brian Hogan A monthly newsletter with opinions and advice about software, technical content creation, and career development.

I have published my newsletter for 47 months straight.

Are you subscribed? It’s free. Once a month.

newsletter.bphogan.com

thevalebook.com

You know I just wrote a book on Vale, right?

The Minnesota Wild plays at the Grand Casino Arena and airs games on FanDuel Sports Network, and we are supposed to be surprised there’s a current sports betting scandal in another sport?

‪The Wild need all the goals they can get. ‬

HOW DARE YOU, MR. HOCKEY PLAYER!

HOW DARE YOU USE YOUR HOCKEY STICK TO PUT A PUCK IN THE NET!

NO GOAL FOR YOU!

I can only be friends with people who are old enough to remember the annoyance of suddenly having to use area codes even for local domestic calls

we used to only have to remember seven digits!

Yessss I love AsciiDoc, everyone should use it! It renders natively on GitHub too, by using the .adoc file suffix, so you can even use it for your readmes and the like

It bites you when you decide to move to a different platform or try to syndicate content.

Ask me how I know.

Seriously. Asciidoc is probably a good fit. I’ve done docbook and it’s…a lot. But it’s very cool too.

The thing that sparked all this is I keep running into everyone making these incompatible markdown preprocessors and MDX. The need is there. But it’s all nonstandard when other options exist.

Yesterday I published Issue 45 of my monthly newsletter, and it's about why Markdown might not be the best way to implement content.

Read it and subscribe to be the first to read next month's issue.

newsletter.bphogan.com/archive/issue-45-markdow...

You don’t say?

www.psypost.org/frequent-ai-chatbot-use-...

Everyone wants corporate sponsorship of OSS until they find out that sponsorship means control. Do what we want or the money you depend on goes poof.

No free lunch. Disappointing.

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

"Let's all band together to get consumer protections rolled back, and we'll say it will increase competition" is a hell of a sales pitch.

https://tinyurl.com/2s44zc9j

Do you remember…
The 21st night of September…

I recommend it.

Vale is my go-to tool to catch style errors and enforce consistency in content, and after implementing it in multiple jobs and projects, it was time to create a guide anyone can follow. Now in beta.

pragprog.com/titles/bhvale/write-bett...

Hyphen: -
Underscore: _
Em-dash: —
En-dash: –

So many dashes…..

You “log in” with your login.

Your users “sign up” for your service and you track “signups.”

Go check your buttons.

Today, I used ChatGPT o3 to research two articles for my newsletter.

Every article it found was current and relevant.

Every fact it cited was made-up. The statistics did not appear in the article cited.

Content without curation will be painful.

Some things I learned while using Claude Code on some personal projects over the last two weeks. bphogan.com/2025/06/19/2025-06-19-cl...