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Tips & Tricks

Articles and publications tagged Tips & Tricks across the Atmosphere.

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Articles

Publications

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleSep 10, 2026

How to use custom UI with Jetpack’s newsletter signup

You can replace Jetpack’s newsletter signup UI — the Subscribe block or the popup — with your own form, and keep driving the exact same WordPress.com subscription backend. This post explains how the integration works. Transparency note: this post was written by GLM 5.3 Flash working in the pi coding agent. There may be inaccuracies...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJul 23, 2026

The Two-Model UX Review: Stop UI From Sucking (on a Budget)

I’m building a side project — an offline-first PWA called Starchive where teams track appreciation with stars and hearts. Stars are admin-given points (gold, cashable). Hearts are anyone-to-anyone permanent thank-yous (pink, never cashed out). I’m doing this with opencode and opencode-go, using DeepSeek V4 Flash as my main model. It’s fast and cheap — ideal...

Coding with AITips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJun 11, 2026

Watch out for Hades

According to Reddit, horrible people have made a nasty supply-chain attack called Hades: [Link] Looks like it’s marked at this time by: If you find any of these things, you’ll want to disable your network connection immediately, clean them up fully, and then rotate any and all credentials your computer had on-disk. Looking for trouble...

SecurityTips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 20, 2026

prquicktest: Run Your PR’s Testing Instructions

We’ve been sneakily improving our manual verification process for server PRs over the past few weeks. Sneakily, because it hasn’t been planned, just experiments snuck into the gaps here and there. One of those experiments happened today. Here’s how it works: These two things together are a huge win over the old: And today, I...

Pull Requeststesting

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 14, 2026

Handling Increases in Test Code

Code written with AI agents gets substantially more robust when the agent has a feedback loop, like a good test suite. And agents like Claude Code are very good at writing big.. long… super long… test suites. I find myself not only generating more application code than I’ve ever written in my life, but many...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 12, 2026

Freeing Up Flow With Claude Code & Linear MCP

I’ve been experimenting with using Claude Code to create Linear issues instead of filling them out by hand, and it’s been a bigger workflow upgrade than I’d expected it to be. Too often I’ve made or come across Linear issues that are just a line or two, jotted down from someone’s memory and now turned...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 10, 2026

Claude Code Hooks for Fun and Focus

My attention wanders. A lot. I’ll kick off a Claude Code session, switch to check on something else, and 20 minutes later realize I’ve got a forlorn Claude tab that’s been waiting for approval for …19 minutes. A notification beep doesn’t help much—it starts a quick game of “which tab was that?”. Not a huge...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleApr 8, 2025

Persuasive Resumes

Writing a resume after years of work can be tough, but don’t dismay! Get feedback, write convincingly, focus on specifics, and consider using AI to improve. Keep at it!

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleMar 11, 2025

AI’s Not Trustworthy, But It Is Testworthy

Today as I hammered away on a code refactor with Cursor AI to migrate some Express endpoints to Next.js, I was met with the sad truth that, though I’d like to imagine the LLM capable of digesting the fine meaning of an entire source code file instantly, and spitting out a logically equivalent rewrite, we’re...

AI CodingCursor AI

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleNov 1, 2024

Debugging Flaky Tests

Oh no, the tests are failing. Wait, now they aren’t. Wait, only when I re-run the test it works. Wait, I just ran it from scratch and it worked this time! Uuugh, every time I run the failing test in isolation it works. EVERY time. But when I run it in context it sometimes fails....

Debug with MeTips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleOct 18, 2024

Are they the same object?

While debugging I needed to know if two references in two separate parts of my codebase were pointing to the same object in memory. According to my searching, there isn’t a way to print out memory addresses of data in Javascript (without using special V8 debugging expressions). But there’s a way to find the answer...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleNov 6, 2023

GitHub Projects “OR” in filter

GitHub sure doesn’t make it obvious, but you can filter issues in the the new Projects with an “or” operator in between conditions by joining terms with a comma: In this screen shot I’m specifying that issues with the milestone “2023.23” OR “2023.24” should be shown by joining the term with a comma, like this...

tipsTips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleOct 11, 2022

GitHub CoPilot is Good at SQL

I’m reminded how quickly life can change when I check my blog and see that the last posts were about spending all of my time in Jetbrains products. I’m not using them much now. All my time is spent in VS Code, because I changed teams at https://automattic.com from working on Android to working on...

Indie JournalTips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJun 15, 2022

I’ve been doing a rapid build of a tool for creating team roadmaps at Automattic. We’ve got our plans spread out across P2s, and keeping track of what’s actually doing on is difficult, so naturally I yak-shaved by building a tool to help us build our tools faster. Speed of development has been key to...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleMay 4, 2021

Deploying Elixir to Render.com

I’ve deployed a few different Elixir services to the hosting platform https://render.com and found their provided documentation to be lacking for real-world Phoenix apps. Especially if you’re using Live View. Here’s an augmentation to their guide with the extra steps you might be missing. Initial Setup Follow the official guide: https://render.com/docs/deploy-phoenix but don’t deploy your...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleMay 3, 2021

Authenticated Live View Tests

I’ve been running through Pragmatic Studio’s Live View course, which I highly recommend, and wanted to make a specific note of how to authenticate users when writing Live View tests after adding phx_gen_auth to a Phoenix project. Happily, this is a very short post, because phx_gen_auth does all the work for you. When you’ve run...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleMay 1, 2021

Phoenix (1.5) project Guide

What follows is an extremely concise list of steps I’m keeping around for reference when setting up a new Elixir / Phoenix project with Tailwind, Alpine, and user auth. NOTE: Pretending the name of the app is “love_notes” Generate it mix phx.new love\_notes --live Use UUIDs in config/config.exs Setup Tailwind from https://pragmaticstudio.com/tutorials/adding-tailwind-css-to-phoenix Install Postcss In...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleFeb 4, 2021

Elixir and the Wall of Tests

Here’s an experience I tend to have over and over: Generate a new Elixir / Phoenix project Use the super cool Phoenix generators to make a new model Change the model substantially Realize that the tests generated with the model are now super broken When I get into this situation running mix text produces a...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 30, 2021

UUIDs for User IDs

Integers By Default ???? Phoenix’s generators save a ton of time writing boilerplate code. Pow is an Elixir package and Phoenix extension that offers a great way to get user authentication up and running in very little time. But by default Phoenix’s generators use auto-incrementing integers for user IDs. What’s Wrong with Integer IDs ?????...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleJan 25, 2021

Don’t Make Me Tap Twice

I’ve started rough work on a new app for digital “morning baskets“. While I just used Expo when starting Storytime (another app I have in-progress), I decided to give the famous Ignite boilerplate from Infinite Red a chance. In short, it’s fantastic. In just a few days of side-work time I’ve almost completed a fully-functioning...

Debug with MeTips & Tricks

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleDec 11, 2020

Debugging tricky parameterized types

Parameterized functions are fantastic. I’m talking about the functions that operate around some abstract piece of data, without doing anything that would require specific knowledge about that data. Take, for example, the following fictional function: Example The code above is designed to take an option of something, save it somewhere if the option contains data,...

Murphy Randle

Murphy RandleDec 9, 2020

On File Switching in Rescript

I use Rescript at work, and find that I often want to switch between interface and implementation files. Less often, I also want to inspect the compiled source of a file. This can be a small pain to do by hand, and small pains repeated often become big pains. So here are some VS Code...

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