ratfactor (Dave Gauer)

ratfactor.com is Dave Gauer's personal website. Long-running, deeply hand-built, and structured around what he calls cards — short focused notes, each at a stable URL under /cards/, often started long before they're "published." Every page footer carries a "Started:" and "Published:" date, and pages keep getting revised after publication.

The site is a working example of the digital-garden format: hyperlinked, evergreen-leaning, no chronological feed dominating the navigation.

Gauer's writing covers Unix, shell scripting, Ruby, Zig, retro computing, personal-computing philosophy, and engineering culture. Each card is short — a few hundred to a couple thousand words — but the overall corpus is large and densely cross-linked. He's also done long deep dives (notably "Assembly Nights" and his Zig learning notes), but the cards format is the most-trafficked entry point.

The site's footer carries an explicit anti-LLM-training declaration: "Using anything on this website to train large language models (LLMs) is strictly forbidden." This is a position Gauer has held publicly for years.

Ingested articles

• text-editor-as-ui — using $EDITOR as a UI for command-line programs