Published

trailmakers pioneers second run - Its A Trap

2026-03-17T20:22:07Z

Its A Trap

Its A Trap, abmush with Adiral Leadhead, During my second trailmakers pioneers run.

trailmakers pioneers second run - Collection Party Balloon

2026-03-17T20:21:30Z

Collection Party Balloon

Collecting Party Balloon, During my second trailmakers pioneers run.

trailmakers pioneers second run - Collection L Bracket

2026-03-17T20:20:14Z

Collection L Bracket

Collecting the L Bracket, During my second trailmakers pioneers run.

trailmakers pioneers second run - Wyatt Hits The Gap

2026-03-17T20:19:24Z

Wyatt Hits The Gap

Wyatt Hits The Gap, During my second trailmakers pioneers run.

Dummy13 On A Skateboard

2026-03-16T20:53:56Z

Tonight Wyatt gave me a dummy13 that he printed, assembled, and posed all on his own. He’s printed quite a few of these in the past, and none came to this level of completion. I’m so proud of him. This one was a near flawless build with only a few mistakes, that I’d argue were poor design, small vertical pins. More importantly he was able to problem solve and use resin to fix these mistakes.

Waylon Walker

2026-02-28T00:00:00Z

Latest Shots #

Its A Trap

Collection Party Balloon

Collection L Bracket

Wyatt Hits The Gap

Tonight Wyatt gave me a dummy13 that he printed, assembled, and posed all on his own. He's printed quite a few of these in the past, and none came to this level of completion. I'm so proud of him. This one was a near flawless build with only a few mistakes, that I'd argue were poor design, small vertical pins. More importantly he was able to problem solve and use resin to fix these mistakes.

The gradient keycaps turned out pretty good, but I'm not sure what I did wrong with the interface between the raft and the caps, that came out ** rough, but the effect works.

Camp Rock Sign all put together, by the fabulous Rhiannon, the letters came out great, her work on the built is amazing, cant wait to see it lit up.

Trobio Full

See all shots →

Latest Blog Posts #

/verify #

Inspired by @mollywhite’s verify slashpage. This page serves as the system of record for my online identity. The best places to follow me are:

/top4 #

Definitive ranked lists of my top 3 favorites plus an honorable mention.

Honorable mention: ipython

Honorable mention: typer - fast cli apps

...

/yep #

Inspired by @fyrio’s yep slashpage, a list of S tier things I enjoy, use, recommend, want to know more about, or seek out in no particular order, updated as I think about it.

/nope #

Inspired by @baty’s nope slashpage, a list of F tier things I don’t like, don’t care, avoid, overhyped, or won’t do in no particular order, updated as I think about it.

Ai #

Last updated Jan 2026.

Ai is a tool I use a lot for code generation, research, image generation, and debugging. The words I publish on this site are my own unless explicitly stated from the top. There’s only one or two posts in this category.

The core of what this blog is, is my thoughts ideas, sharing experiences. The words are the important part. They are not perfect, I often do not spell or grammer check, and what is here is from a flow state of writing and very often not refactored.

...

See all blog posts →

Recent TIL #

Vim-gq

Vim has a handy feature to format text with gq. You can use it in visual mode, give it a motion, or if you give it gqq it will format the current line. I use this quite often while writing in markdown, I do not use softwraps in vim, so gqq quickly formats my current line into a paragraph. Once I have done this for a single line one time I typically switch to the motion for around paragraph gqap to format the whole paragraph and not just the current line.

Am I vulnerable to the xz backdoor?

The main system that I am concerned about is my arch BTW machine. I found a great article from the official archlinux site covering it.

For my machine I am concerned with this line.

The xz packages prior to version 5.6.1-2 (specifically 5.6.0-1 and 5.6.1-1) contain this backdoor.

I checked my xz package with paru, and I am good.

get the version of any python package | python api

A common meta thing that I need in python is to find the version of a package. Most of the time I reach for package_name.__version__, but that does not always work.

In searching the internet for an answer nearly every one of them pointed me to __version__. This works for most projects, but is simply a convention, its not required. Not all projects implement a __version__, but most do. I’ve never seen it lie to me, but there is nothing stopping someone from shipping mismatched versions.

I appreciate it

While its not required its super handy and easy for anyone to remember off the top of their head. It makes it easy to start debugging differences between what you have vs what you see somewhere else. You can do this by dropping a __version__ variable inside your __init__.py file.

...

See all TIL posts →

/verify

2026-02-24T10:36:57Z

Inspired by @mollywhite’s verify slashpage. This page serves as the system of record for my online identity. The best places to follow me are:

My Website: waylonwalker.com
YouTube: Waylon Walker
YouTube Gaming: Waylon Walker Gaming
Twitch: Waylon Walker
Twitter: @_WaylonWalker
LinkedIn: Waylon Walker
GitHub: WaylonWalker
Dev.to: Waylon Walker
Bluesky: @waylonwalker.com

/top4

2026-02-11T14:00:00Z

Definitive ranked lists of my top 3 favorites plus an honorable mention.

Terminal Tools #

neovim - modal editing changed how I think about text
tmux - terminal sessions that survive disconnects and allow me to hop between projects at the speed of thought.
k9s - S tier tui interface that all tuis should strive for

Honorable mention: ipython

Python Tools #

pandas - This is what got me out of corporate spreadsheets and back into code/software.
kedro - data pipelines with opinions I agree with
fastapi - my favorite python web framework

Honorable mention: typer - fast cli apps

Games to Play with Kids #

multiplayer

Minecraft - infinite creativity, modding potential
Wobbly Life - Open World Co-op
Stardew Valley - cozy, collaborative farming

Honorable mention: Terraria - 2d world builder

Games to Play Alone #

singleplayer

Hollow Knight/Hollow Knight Silksong - S tier 2d platformer with adventure, mystery, lore, boss fights.
Session Skate Sim - The best skate sim
Animal Well - epic 2d platformer with the most incredible graphics at 320p ever created and the deepest puzzles Ive seen

Honorable mention: Portal

Inspired by topfour.net and slashpages.net

/yep

2026-02-11T12:00:00Z

Inspired by @fyrio’s yep slashpage, a list of S tier things I enjoy, use, recommend, want to know more about, or seek out in no particular order, updated as I think about it.

Seealso

/nope

Inspired by @baty's nope slashpage, a list of ** things I don't like, don't care, avoid, overhyped, or won't do in no particular order, updated as I think...

Feb 11, 2026

/yep #

coffee
small web 1.0
RSS
minecraft
Hollow Knight
Silksong
terminals
python
vim keybindings
self-hosting
open source
running kubernetes in my basement
mechanical keyboards
markdown
data engineering
Woodworking
Fingerboarding
Darts
Skateboarding
Biking
Trampoline
3d printing

/nope

2026-02-11T12:00:00Z

Inspired by @baty’s nope slashpage, a list of F tier things I don’t like, don’t care, avoid, overhyped, or won’t do in no particular order, updated as I think about it.

Seealso

/yep

Inspired by @fyrio's yep slashpage, a list of ** things I enjoy, use, recommend, want to know more about, or seek out in no particular order, updated as I...

Feb 11, 2026

/nope #

roblox
mobile games
telemetry
Windows
VSCode
allow notifications
subscription hell
ads
social media
clickbait
WYSIWYG editors particularly ones that use proprietary non text formats
politics
short form video

Gradient Keycap Results

2026-02-07T19:55:55Z

The gradient keycaps turned out pretty good, but I’m not sure what I did wrong with the interface between the raft and the caps, that came out very rough, but the effect works.

Camp Rock Sign

2026-02-07T19:51:35Z

Camp Rock Sign all put together, by the fabulous Rhiannon, the letters came out great, her work on the built is amazing, cant wait to see it lit up.

Trobio Full

2026-01-15T19:10:33Z

Trobio Full

Trobio Full

Ai

2026-01-11T13:48:43Z

Last updated Jan 2026.

Seealso

Looking for all posts tagged with ai see [[ tag/ai ]]

Words are mine #

No AI unless explicitly stated

code gen #

Up till around 2023 all of the code to create the site was hand written by me. I have my own site generator that I maintain [[ markata ]].

From 2023 through 2025 snippets of code, sometimes entire plugins or modules were created in chat apps like chatgpt. There was no agentic coding, windsurf, cursor, claude code, opencode, none of it. It was all integrated into the site by hand.

Starting around Dec 2025 I was finding freely available agents through tools like opencode to be more and more useful, making less mistakes, doing better at getting context and making changes. The flow is relying on heavy planning and issue reporting.

image gen #

I really got into stable diffusion as it came out. I thought it was fascinating to generate different kinds of images of things that I would otherwise have no ability to create, for a long time I was generating images for every post. I’ve moved on from doing it for every post, but still do it occasionally.

I’m not an artist, sometimes I like to include art that I would not otherwise be able to. Most of the art you see on a post is AI generated, and may not be called out.

[[ Techbrophobic ]] #

I feel this term strongly. I find ai tooling useful, but the industry and hype bros bring a bad taste.

The tools do not not do everything right, you still have to think, watch its output. You have to put the work in to do proper software engineering. Its not a magic pill, but it has the ability to implement ideas, plans, very quickly.

Also the whole industry creeps me out. The theft that happened to get here was wrong. AI shovoled into everything as slop sucks. The stock market pump is sus.

fast changing dev server today

2025-12-10T13:45:49Z

The dev server is cooking today, I’ve dropped markata builds from 2m40s (hot cache) in prod to 15s (hot cache) in dev. Currently building 2745 posts and 274 feeds.

git worktrees are needed

2025-12-06T09:58:06Z

git worktrees are goated, and must be leaned on moving forward.

gpus are awesome

2025-12-03T20:21:14Z

GPU’s are awesome. I just added gpu support to my bambu-studio distrobox and its flying! On my wayland based system the native package has never worked, (arch or bazzite), but running in a distrobox does. Outside of distrobox the 3d rendering canvas is black, no output. It used to work fine without gpu support, was snappy enough, complex models were a bit sluggish, but fine. Lately something happened and simple models bring it to its knees. It got unusable!

The print I happen to be working on is some custom designed gumdrops for a theater set. The ui is working and not lagging 30s between clicks causing clicks to happen on the wrong ui element.

analytics

2025-01-22T08:36:27Z

I’ve been posting on this site since 2016, when the company I worked for went through a large round of layoffs. I was worried about being laid off, so I started looking at what I needed to do to build my resume. A personal blog and side projects were at the top of the list, so off I went. This site is built on [[ markata ]]. You can read more about that in the /colophon.

Total Posts over time #

Post Contributions in 2025 #

Post Contributions in 2024 #

Post Contributions in 2023 #

2023 was a very busy year, and I started slowing down. About halfway through the year, I felt like I had a lot I wanted to get out, but not enough time to turn every idea into a full blog post. I added [[ thoughts ]] on 7/22/2023, starting with this first thought.

Notice the huge uptick that starts right after I added [[ thoughts ]].

Post Contributions in 2022 #

Post Contributions in 2021 #

At the end of 2021, I started posting [[ til ]]s daily for a few months. This is the point when I really started lowering the barrier to entry for publishing. A post did not need to be a long essay. It could be the size of a tweet.

Post Contributions in 2020 #

Post Contributions in 2019 #

2019 was a huge learning year for me. I was busy leading a migration to the cloud, working on containerized data pipeline orchestration, and setting up new projects and templates with [[ kedro ]].

Post Contributions in 2018 #

This was the year I really started reaching for the terminal, kicking off the year with [[vim-notes]] and rounding it out with [[bash]]. I had been watching Luke Smith for a while, and I started managing my first Linux server at work. I was stuck with Windows at the time, but WSL was new and let me run Linux in the terminal.

Post Contributions in 2017 #

2017 was the year of getting started. I was coming up on five years in my career, and layoffs were hitting hard. I remember first landing the job five years earlier and being told that, in the company’s long history, they had never laid off engineers. It felt like a very safe place to be. This was a wake up call that things could turn around and I might take nothing with me. Blogging became my way to document what I was learning. It made me better at communicating and gave me a reason to take a deeper dive into interesting topics.

Post Contributions in 2016 #

2016 was the year I created my GitHub account and got serious about switching from mechanical engineering to software engineering. All of my 2016 posts are backdated GitHub stars.

/now

2025-01-12T21:07:12Z

This page is meant to be simple view into what is happening in my life right now. Inspired by @NowNowNow. and Derek Sivers.

Last Update 2026-04-04

markata-go
something else

Last Update 2025-10-29

Silksong has my attention, it’s great
Working on new features for dropper
- Vibe coding sucks
- Images will soon be able to be resized and be more efficient over the network.
Trying to branch out and add more than software to the blog. Things like design and 3d printing.

Last Update 2025-05-22 14:27:47

Working on [[ninesui]]
Working on [[krayt]]
learning observability with grafana
Fairly happy with [[markata]], at the moment, less focus and some small fixes
The blog is fully k8s, love the experience
replacing Google apps with self hosted apps [[replacing-google-search-apps-with-self-hosted-web-apps]]
Doing a second run through [[hollow-knight-home-row-layout]]
Also second run of animal well
put a pause on the thps gap project [[thps-gaps]]
working on a split version of my keyboard

Last update Fri Jan 31 08:43:10 PM CST 2025

Heavy Focus in on [[markata]], upcoming [[ markata-search ]] and [[ markata-didyoumean ]]
Moving from Arch to Bazzite, I’m fully here but making everything just that much smoother in a container based world.
kubernetes - trying to get better
k8s in the homelab - All of my services I run in my homelab are currently k8s, trying to make it all smooth and consistent
k8s in the blog, I’m building this static site in k8s and its never been better.
learning agentic workflows - I’m trying to build out a few side projects minimally touching the code and only instructing windsurf
mostly-one-shot-apps - I just built [[ nvim-manager ]] as a mostly one-shot-app (i.e. the app was nearly v1 out of the first prompt)
markata plugins with chatgpt project using rag - analytics - tag aggregator
Family focus - [[ we-beat-trailmakers ]] [[ a-night-of-rounds ]]

/start

2025-01-03T10:49:47Z

Welcome to waylonwalker.com, my small corner of the internet. I currently have 59 posts published, here are some links to help you get started around here.

Feeds #

I have quite a few different feeds that you can browse or subscribe to in your rss reader, you can find them on my feeds page.

Slash posts #

[[ slashes ]]

Slash pages are some evergreen pages that I will do my best to keep up to date, they are typically not targeted to a specific moment in time, but designed to be ever living.

Waylon Walker - 👋 Hi, I am Waylon Walker. Husband, Father of two, and creator things on the web, learning, and teaching others. I play lots of Minecraft, make art, and…
Ai - Last updated Jan 2026.
analytics - I've been posting on this site since 2016, when the company I worked for went through a large round of layoffs. I was worried about being laid off, so I…
/colophon - Colophon a page that describes how the site > is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies
feeds - I have several feeds that you can consume my content with. Many posts will cross between them, so if you would like to follow a certain stream of content in…
/nope - Inspired by @baty's nope slashpage, a list of ** things I don't like, don't care, avoid, overhyped, or won't do in no particular order, updated as I think…
/now - This page is meant to be simple view into what is happening in my life right now. Inspired by @NowNowNow. and Derek Sivers.
/start - Welcome to waylonwalker.com, my small corner of the internet. I currently have posts published, here are some links to help you get started around here.
/top4 - Definitive ranked lists of my top 3 favorites plus an honorable mention.
/verify - Inspired by @mollywhite's verify slashpage. This page serves as the system of record for my online identity. The best places to follow me are:
/yep - Inspired by @fyrio's yep slashpage, a list of ** things I enjoy, use, recommend, want to know more about, or seek out in no particular order, updated as I…