Richard Blechinger (pretzelhands)
Professional pretzel. I enjoy building small, useful tools and working on beautiful e-commerce systems. One of those weirdos who actually enjoy working with PHP. Also JavaScript.
Not looking for new client projects
2021
Build a Telegram bot in PHP
21st January 2021
| Series: Chat bots with Telegram
Learn how to set up your own Telegram bot, respond to commands and handle arguments. A quick tour of the Telegram Bot API!
Restarting the blog
12th January 2021
Returning to proper blogging after two years of it laying dormant. What could possibly go wrong?
2020
Au Revoir: The End of Notebag
27th October 2020
Giving insights and reasons as to why I put Notebag to rest and what is coming from here on out
Scratching my own itch: Building Notebag
2nd May 2020
The story of my annoyance with other note taking tools and finally pulling the trigger to scratch my own itch.
2019
Managing WordPress from your terminal
29th January 2019
A quick tour of WP CLI to make WordPress management fun!
Live streaming as productivity multiplier
20th January 2019
A short tale about how live streaming helps me get more done in less time
Breaking the rules to keep programming fun and experimental
15th January 2019
A dive into how I sometimes deliberately ignore coding standards just to enjoy myself.
Building responsive email with MJML
14th January 2019
| Series: Dealing with email
A short introduction to the state of HTML email and how to build one easily
My approach to mentoring junior team members
12th January 2019
Thoughts and musings on mentoring others and always trying to do my best
How I got into freelancing
9th January 2019
The story how I got into freelancing and managed to get to the point I'm at today.
Releasing jinx - a magical wrapper around nginx
7th January 2019
Find out about this new streamlined tool to help you get your nginx workflows done more quickly.
Bringing your entire infrastructure down using Caddy
5th January 2019
Read my cautionary tale about accidentally crashing my entire server using Let's Encrypt and Caddy.
Parsing command-line arguments and flags
4th January 2019
| Series: Shell scripting
Learn how to parse flags in your command-line script in a beautiful way.
Non-obvious behaviors of shell syntax
3rd January 2019
| Series: Shell scripting
Learn about the pitfalls and tricks behind some of the unusual shell syntax.
Coloring text in your terminal
2nd January 2019
| Series: Shell scripting
Learn how to color your output with native shell scripts to give better feedback to your users.