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Profile for sacha

Header for sacha: Part of a sketch of rocks in a lake
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Display name
Sacha Chua
Username
@sacha@social.sachachua.com
Role
admin

About sacha

Bio

Interests include: #Emacs, #OrgMode, #elisp, #nodejs, #python, #sketchnotes, #parenting, #cooking, #gardening, #knitting, #sewing, #lego, #captioning. Originally from Manila, now in Toronto. Married to a Vim guy, raising a 10-year old (editor preference unknown).

Blog: https://sachachua.com (mostly Emacs News these days), sketches: https://sketches.sachachua.com. I also maintain planet.emacslife.com and subed.el

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Recent posts

Tiny tweak: I added speaker name colours to the transcript at https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-14-sacha-prot-and-philip-kaludercic-talk-emacs-newcomer-experience/#ID-ye29-transcript . I think it might be interesting for getting a sense of the back-and-forth of a conversation. I hope it's not too distracting / angry-fruit-salad-y! Thoughts?

Monochrome vs colour screenshots:
https://sachachua.com/topic/design/#things-i-m-considering-change-transcript-speaker-name-colour-based-on-speaker

#design

I love the way #Emacs can be a haven for power users and tinkerers. Let's figure out how we can get even better at helping people learn how to make their own tools. :)

From https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

"The YouTube tutorial is the perfect emblem of this rot. Tutorials are not documentation. A tutorial teaches you to perform a specific sequence of steps to achieve a specific outcome. The steps are usually correct for the specific scenario the tutorial covers. If your scenario differs — if something’s changed, if you get an error the tutorial didn’t anticipate, if you’re using a different version — the tutorial has given you no tools to respond. Documentation teaches you to understand a system: what its components are, how they interact, what the configuration options mean and why they exist, what the error messages indicate. One produces people who can follow instructions. The other produces people who understand what they’re doing. The industry has enthusiastically replaced the latter with the former and called it democratization."

"Close off the tinkering and you close off the pipeline. What you get instead is a generation of developers who’ve only ever worked within platform constraints, who’ve never pushed against the edges of the abstractions they’ve been given, who treat framework behavior as ground truth rather than implementation detail. They build more constrained platforms, because the constraints are all they know, for the next generation to be hemmed in by. The technical capability of the field decays, quietly, generation by generation, because the informal education pathway — break things, fix them, understand them — has been systematically closed by platforms that have every financial incentive to keep it closed."

Found via https://johnjohnston.info/blog/liked-the-slow-death-of-the-power-user-fireborn/

My transcripts are getting fancier and fancier. :) Here's the one from my chat with Prot yesterday. Chapters are now in an accent colour, and speaker names are on the left.
https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/04/yay-emacs-sacha-and-prot-talk-emacs-newbies-starter-kits/

The chapter list, the transcript, and the screenshots are all generated from the transcript using Emacs Lisp. :)

Things to consider:

  • all the phrases in the transcript are clickable. Useful or annoying?
  • should I add times to each paragraph in addition to the times for each chapter?