Stavros' Stuff Latest Posts

Switch to Jujutsu already: a tutorial

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 21:13:48 +0000

If you don't like Jujutsu, you're wrong

As all developers, I’ve been using git since the dawn of time, since its commands were an inscrutable jumble of ill-fitting incantations, and it has remained this way until today. Needless to say, I just don’t get git. I never got it, even though I’ve read a bunch of stuff on how it represents things internally. I’ve been using it for years knowing what a few commands do, and whenever it gets into a weird state because I fat-fingered something, I have my trusty alias, fuckgit, that deletes the .git directory, clones the repo again into a temp folder, and moves the .git directory from that into my directory, and I’ve managed to eke out a living for my family this way.

Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing people rave about Jujutsu, and I always wanted to try it, but it never seemed worth the trouble, even though I hate how hard git makes some things. I idly read a few tutorials, trying to understand how it works, but in the end I decided it wasn’t for me.

One day I randomly decided to try again, but this time I asked Claude how to do with Jujutsu whatever operation I wanted to do with git. That’s when the mental model of jj clicked for me, and I finally understood everything, including how git works. I never thought a VCS would spark joy in me, but here we are, and I figured maybe I can write something that will make jj click for you as well.

It also doesn’t hurt that Jujutsu is completely interoperable with git (and thus with providers like GitHub), and I can have all the power of Jujutsu locally on my git repos, without anyone knowing I’m not actually using git.

The problem

The problem I had with the other tutorials, without realizing it, was that

I made a really small LED panel

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:13:27 +0000

It's small

I bought a really small 8x8 LED panel a while ago because I have a problem. I just can’t resist a nice WS2812 LED panel, much like I can’t resist an e-ink display. These days I manage to stay sober, but once in a while I’ll see a nice cheap LED panel and fall off the wagon. It has now been thirteen minutes that I have gone without buying LED panels, and this is

I couldn't wait for a TRMNL device, so I made my own

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 02:50:39 +0000

My obsession with e-ink displays continues

Some time ago, my friend George linked me to TRMNL, a new battery-powered e-ink display with an associated service that generates the images that the display will actually show. It looks really well-made, and I have an irrational attraction to e-ink displays, so naturally I had to pre-orde

Why is everything so scalable?

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 03:13:47 +0000

Everyone is a FAANG engineer

I’m entirely convinced that basically every developer alive today heard the adage “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and figured that, since they always wear jeans and a t-shirt anyway, they might as well apply it to their systems’ architecture. This explains why the stack of every single company I’ve seen is invariably AWS/GCP with at least thirty microservices (how else will you keep the code tidy?), a distributed datastore

Making the Strofara

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 16:14:27 +0000

I made yet another silly thing

This is going to be pretty specific to a Greek audience, as it’s all based on a Greek meme video, but I’ll try to explain. Watch the video first so you know what I’m talking about while I describe it:

Two guys are driving on a road near a remote village