Ergo Letter Bag

[last revised/updated 2020_09_27] Foreword This series of posts is for novice to intermediate blacksmiths and attempts to be succinct and useful. If you find it useful, drop me a note in the comments. Blacksmith: Where and what steel to buy When you are just getting started, visits to farm, estate, and garage sales or a local junkyard can provide easy (and cheap) access to the mild, medium, and high carbon steel alloys you need to learn and make your first tools and projects. Because it has already been hardened, used tool steel requires the extra step of annealing before forging. For tool steel, the spark test will give you an idea how much carbon is in it. But you can never be quite sure what steel alloy you're working with. Some alloys can be normalized. Others cannot. Each alloy will anneal, harden, and temper at different temperature ranges to different levels of hardness. Because you rarely find an unlimited supply of said mystery metal, by the time you figure out how bes...

[last revised/updated 2020_10_03] Foreword This series of posts on Raku programming attempts to be succinct and useful for folks interested in contributing to Raku. If you find it useful, drop me a note in the comments. -Ofun Posts in the Series Try Raku! (work in progress) Setting up Raku (for Contributors) [this post] Wading into the Raku community (planned) Setting up Raku (for Contributors) When you use Raku and interact with others, your interactions affect the community. Raku is a welcoming community. You are welcome. Pull up a chair and get comfy. These instructions will help you get up and running Raku in a configuration that enables you to contribute back when you are ready. To enable contributing, we will setup hosted copies ('forks') of the Rakudo, NQP, and MoarVM git repositories on Github. Your changes (when you are ready to make them) will go into your repositories. You will submit requests which allow others to pull your changes upstream i...