Fatih Arslan
arslan.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2014
Fatih Arslan, a software developer known for Go tools, writes about programming, hardware, his homelab, and personal life.
What HN saysHN commenters say they love his writing and subscribe by RSS, praising pieces like his book list and his homelab setup post.
50HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
95stories submitted
5.1Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Taking an indefinite sabbatical from my projects8 people · 20 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 2The ultimate guide to writing a Go tool6 people · 38 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3iPad Pro as Development Machine4 people · 148 points · first shared 2019 · 147 comments on HN
- 4How to write idempotent Bash scripts3 people · 986 points · first shared 2019 · 189 comments on HN
- 5Useful Techniques in Go3 people · 180 points · first shared 2014 · 45 comments on HN
- 6Review of the MoErgo Glove80 Keyboard3 people · 17 points · first shared 2024 · 5 comments on HN
- 7Plotter Notebook System3 people · 11 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 8I was wrong about AI Coding3 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · 4 comments on HN
- 9Use a Go Module Proxy3 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10Alacritty integration with Tmux3 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 11Automatic dark mode for terminal applications3 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12Visiting the annual Braun collectors fair2 people · 242 points · first shared 2024 · 84 comments on HN
- 13Calendar types in watches2 people · 180 points · first shared 2024 · 72 comments on HN
- 14My Homelab Setup2 people · 170 points · first shared 2024 · 78 comments on HN
- 15Review of the Kinesis Advantage360 Professional2 people · 113 points · first shared 2022 · 110 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
throwaway2037 · 2026-05-24
Yeah, I love this part too: https://arslan.io/2025/12/26/books-i-read-in-2025/
> If I’m reading a book, once the kids are asleep, I have 3–4 hours each evening, and I also have free time on the weekends. So it’s possible to read a lot of books as a father of two kids. I could probably read even more if I stopped spending time on other things, like writing for my blog, learning piano, or doing industrial design.
I thought: "Oh, I see, so you don't parent much."
Brajeshwar · 2024-09-11
Stumbled on his other article[1] on HN recently and I forgot to subscribe (RSS). I love the writings. Reading this article (Homelab Setup), I was thinking, that this is way overdone. Then, I quickly browsed around and love this guy’s life — Fatih has good taste. I'm inspired by the Homelab setup.
1. https://arslan.io/2024/05/05/braun-borse-2024/
sodapopcan · 2022-12-11
Oh my—I actually just mentioned Kitty for diplomatic reasons as some folks feel it's a friendlier alternative to Alacritty. I've personally never used it myself. Alacritty has recommended using tmux from the beginning (originally it planned to never even implementing scrollback and recommended tmux instead, but they caved and now there is native scrollback).
I believe I used this article when I switched over from iTerm to Alacritty: https://arslan.io/2018/02/05/gpu-accelerated-terminal-alacritty/
Otherwise, here's my alacritty config: https://github.com/sodapopcan/dotfiles/blob/f9eba86bf292aa3ba05f4d7991… Line 57 is where the keybindings start (They are annoying to read since they use escape sequences). I make my tmux prefix `ctrl-space` (because `ctrl-b` is useful), then in Alacritty pressing `cmd` sends `ctrl-space` to tmux.
firstbreath · 2019-01-23
I'll add another attribute: popularity. I maintained a fork of a script that was rather complex, but had close to no feature requests and a handful of minor bugs. On the other hand, there is a ton of great research on burnout due to its prevalence.
One of the maintainers of some great projects wrote about taking an "indefinite sabbatical" - https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-from-my-p… He gets at the commitment in more detail.
The most complete resource I've found, on the good and bad, is @nayafia's Awesome Maintainers: https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-maintainers
farslan · 2018-08-14
I love exiftool. I wrote a more practical blog post on how to use it to manage thousands of photos and update the EXIF data easily with it. You can update the EXIF data based on the file modification time, based on an EXIF field, file name, etc.. there is so many things you can do. Here is the blog post if anyone is interested: https://arslan.io/2018/04/18/tips-tricks-to-batch-edit-exif-metadata-o…
miguelmota · 2019-08-29
The problems with this 'funding experiment':
- If he does advertising, everyone will eventually start doing it. Then everyone will start using adblockers, defeating the purpose originally planned for. It's a classic case of the Tragedy of the Commons situation [0]. This experiment would have never worked in the long term and only benefits those who do it in the beginning momentarily.
- He created a github issue thread asking for feedback from everyone [1], but then closed the issue thread. Later one he went on saying that he doesn't care what people say unless they're contributors to the library [2]. He could have just limited the thread to contributors only but he prefers pushing the goal post.
- If you can no longer support OSS, then hand it over to an organization open to the community, or archive the project. As an example, Fatih archived projects he could no longer support and the community had no issues at all [3]. People who can contribute will fork the project and continue with it.
- The core-js maintainer started doing ads like that first, promoting his own job advertisement [4]. It got to the point where he started deleting comments and blocking people on github which he disagreed with. Keep in mind that this is a package with million of weekly installs and used by babel libraries so people's output logs looked like this [5]. I believe it was violating NPM's terms of service too.
- Authors can do whatever they want with their own packages including spamming…
ludwigvan · 2017-11-05
See https://arslan.io for his bag reviews.
dudul · 2026-05-25
The guy is obviously passionate about his fountain pens: https://arslan.io/2025/12/19/a-look-at-my-fountain-pens/
thadk · 2026-05-23
His Studio Display 3D printable model MacBook holder: https://arslan.io/macbook-holder-for-apple-studio-display/
999900000999 · 2026-03-04
It was definitely the Fuji X Half review.
https://arslan.io/2025/06/14/fujifilm-x-half-is-it-the-perfect-family-…
And I must make a correction, he doesn't explicitly mention trusting his kids with a 5k Leica. He's using a 10k M11 as a family camera and he lets his wife use it.
Still, I'd imagine a family with this type of money would have no issue giving the kids 500$ MacBook.
I should of brought up the thread where someone felt they needed to buy each daughters a Tesla...
piyuv · 2024-09-23
Thanks.
On an unrelated note, what happened to significantly decreasing your contributions to X?
https://arslan.io/2024/04/07/my-feelings-about-x-formerly-twitter/
dizhn · 2023-06-21
https://arslan.io/2019/07/03/how-to-write-idempotent-bash-scripts/
I am not sure how autoritative this is but I immediately thought of this post. (It's the vim-go guy)
closeparen · 2020-02-23
That's why the module system is designed to facilitate corporate artifact caches. [0]
[0] https://arslan.io/2019/08/02/why-you-should-use-a-go-module-proxy/
geoah · 2021-01-28
Question for the OP (farslan). I do apologise in advance if this is something you wouldn't want to discuss, but do you think a notice such as this would have prevented you from burning out in regards to your open source projects?
You have contributed immensely to the go community and I expect the decision to take a step back from open source contributions was hard and that you probably have revisited it often. I wonder if you have thought of things that might improve the process for other maintainers. Would the ability for example to disable pull requests help? Maybe a way to ask/find people to help moderate the issues or PRs before they reach you?
Thank you both (Fatih and Ben) for all the hard work you've put into open source.
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ps. For people who might not know what I'm talking about, this might help. https://arslan.io/2018/10/09/taking-an-indefinite-sabbatical-from-my-p…