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Learning Rust

For the second year in a row, for my birthday, I took some time off work to learn some new things. This year it was Rust. (Last year it was the DHT Kademlia) I enjoyed spending two days with Rust. I didn't get very far (about 80% of "the book") but I did get far enough to learn a number of things and come up with a short list for further research. I'm looking forward to getting back to it.

I kept most of my notes on twitter/mastodon;

How To Make Your Website Truly Serverless

As of today you can read this website without a web server by visiting dat://roborooter.com. If that link doesn't work for you, you'll need a DAT capable browser like Beaker Browser. And in early 2020 you probably don't have a DAT capable browser yet, so go get that. While I've been working in the serverless world a while, this is actually without servers and much more deserving of that name.

The difference between the DAT version of this site an…

How To Stay Technical While In Management

I wrote this for a 5 minute lightening talk at a local tech leadership meetup.

I code. At my previous jobs I coded 30-50% of my time. I would take non mission critical (usually pluming or maintenance) tasks and features. These days I have too many direct reports and way to many stakeholders to code regularly. I do linter changes mostly, lots of code reviews. I stay technical 3 ways;

Change logs / Twitter

I read and attempt to understand new relea…

😃 Vats

Love and pain and war, all things I missed. Since the vats became standard in all low income housing I haven’t needed any of them. We’re all fed, we’re all healthy and we’re all kept separated so there’s no war, at least not like there used to be. I haven’t been punched in almost 15 years and frankly I’ve deserved it. I don’t think I’ve left my vat in almost 7 years.

The deal was an easy one. Get everything provided to you and all you have to do …

Serial Mice Protocols

I remembered there was such a thing as a serial mouse and I wondered how they worked. A bit of googling found me this link (which as of this posting has an SSL error). I'm going to reproduce it below but I wanted to write some notes about it first.

  • The Microsoft Serial Mouse was the most popular mouse as of 1997, supported by and probably copied by all.
  • The "resolution" was around 400-1000 CPI (counts per inch) compared to a gaming mouse today o…

Serialport Spring Update

Serialport turns 9 this year. Back when it started NodeJS was a different environment than it is now. JavaScript was a different programming language than it is today. Since then I've pushed some major changes over the years to keep us modern. I made the (then) painful decision to drop old versions of node even though some devices would never see the updates to newer runtimes. Sticking to supporting only the LTS (Long Term Support) versions of No…

Kademlia: A study

This week I'm at the Recurse Center as part of the "Mini 2 Batch". I'll be spending my time researching and implementing the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table. DHT's are a building block of decentralized systems. They allow "efficient" storage and access of data that is both produced by many untrusted computers and stored by many untrusted computers. I use quotes around "efficient" because while it's absolutely more efficient than previous systems …

8 Bit Firmata

The Firmata protocol is used for a variety of uses, from home automation to robots. Any time a computer needs to control a low-power device you might find it being used. It's built upon MIDI, which is a very old protocol used mostly for music. Because of MIDI's simplicity, microcontrollers (like the Arduino) can parse it without much overhead. Even though it was standardized in 1983 it's still in use today in the music, theater controls, and robo…

MANIAC

There's so much about this tv show that I enjoyed. The 1980s futurism, the fact they didn't force a love interest, how every device talks or has music, even the fact that they added a bus terminal to the Brooklyn Public Library. I enjoyed it all. The visual style however blows me away.

Screen caps from Netflix's Maniac Screen caps from Netflix's Maniac

And all of it brings me back to this photo of an IBM datacenter (probably a sales related installation) in Toronto.

Screen caps from Netflix's Maniac Via The Computer History Museum IBM 1401 Dem…

Why are you hosting your own Redis?

Someone asked me on a mailing list if I worry about reaching my team's limit in our ability to manage Redis. I wrote a bit about why I think our architecture helps mitigate that risk. I'm not sure I really expressed that I think flexibility through simplicity vs adapters and abstractions is the goal, but I like what I wrote. I think it might be helpful if you're asking yourself, "Should I buy or should I build?" when it comes to lower level servi…

Async Generators

I started streaming-iterables a few months ago to learn how to use async-generators and it was hard. The concepts all sound very similar but there wasn't a great resource that spelled it all out, even MDN left me wanting more. In this post, I will layout the terminologies and show how they work, and then I'll follow up in another post with some examples using streaming-iterables to taking advantage of how of it helps manage workflows.

Before I ge…

We live in Memory

(This is part of a talk I gave at ManhattanJS of the same name which you can find at github.)

Oh happy day! I'm getting read! My day had come! So many times the Redis had passed me by. I never knew why I wasn't chosen. It would come to my region, look me up and down, check my ID and without a word, just move on. All I could do was sit in RAM and wonder why it hadn't taken me to see the readers.

This time is different, I could feel Redis pulling m…

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