The very first thing I do when working on a programming task is to set up a feedback loop. The idea of the feedback loop is to be able answer the question "am I done?" as quickly as possible. The shorter this loop is, the quicker you can iterate.

I have been making quite a few changes to this website to allow for a quicker feedback loop. The first was to only bake the contents into the binary in production mode. In development mode, the files should be reloaded from the files on disk every time. The second change was to have the browser reload automatically every time either the contents or the server had changed.

This allowed me to speed up my feedback loop from thirty seconds to half a second.

This is the fourth year that I am writing one of these. I was really not looking forward to it this year.