Maxwell Beck

Hacking VS Code for On-the-Fly Environment Switching

March 27, 2022 - 6 minute read

Note: This technique no longer works as of VS Code 1.66, presumably due to the upgrade to Electron 17! I intend to find a new solution, but it is not planned any time soon.

In my day-to-day development workflows, I make heavy use of Nix Flakes; particularly, the development shell feature where I can make a special, reproducable development environment for each of my projects. To enter a flake environment, you use the nix develop command, which interacts great with terminal editors like Vim. However, I have recently switched over to using VS Code for my heavy-duty programming, and launching it from a terminal after running nix develop is not the smoothest workflow. In order to comfortably use VS Code every day, I had to find a better solution.

BS-1: Breadboard Synthesizer

September 3, 2021 - 9 minute read

While I mainly focus on the software side of computers, I have always had an interest in electrical engineering too. So, after getting burnt out over some programming projects, I decided to try out something a bit different and build some sort of electronic circuit. I took inspiration from all the breadboard computers people have built, mostly inspired by Ben Eater, but I decided to take a different approach and built an analog synthesizer on breadboards instead.