Hi, I'm Blake Williams

I’m a Principal Engineer at GitHub based in Boston building Ruby, Go, and React apps at scale. I care deeply about simplicity, multiplying the impact of others, and building the right thing.

Custom macOS Directory Icons

August 22nd, 2021

This weekend I’ve been updating my dotfiles and noticed that my Code and go directories in my home directory were missing icons. This isn’t a huge deal but I enjoy consistency and nice designs so I thought I’d spend 10 minutes and see if I could find some nice icons for them.

Using ts-node with Global Types

September 7th, 2020

Like many TypeScript projects, I’m using mocha to run tests via ts-node. Everything was working great until the project needed to introduce a global variable requiring a global.d.ts type declaration file. Compiling the project worked, but ts-node seemingly couldn’t find the type declaration.

Handling macOS URL schemes with Go

August 18th, 2019

For a while I’ve had this idea of a custom browser handler in macOS that would have configurable rules for determining which browser a URL should open. I finally got around to building it which led to a lot of learning of what to-do and what not to-do when it comes to Cocoa apps and Go interop. If that sounds interesting you can find the code on GitHub, otherwise this post goes over how the core functionality of the application, macOS http/https URL scheme handling was written.

Using Pronto to Introduce Style to Your Rails App

May 9th, 2018

I believe most developers know that code style matters. It helps the code base feel clean and consistent. I’ve worked on a number of projects where teams are working without a style guide due to all of the style debt that’s been accrued. Thanks to Pronto, style guides can be adopted without forcing you to pay off that debt immediately.

Jekyll, Markdown, and Tachyons

August 16th, 2017

I’ve been hearing about Tachyons a lot lately and yesterday decided to try it out by migrating this blog from Bourbon, Neat and custom SASS to Tachyons. I made a lot of great progress but I ran into a problem. How do I style the generated markdown?