This year I took some time around the holidays to do some learning. Like last year I dove into rust but I didn't go into it cold this time. I was gifted a "live book" called Rust In Motion which has audio, slides and text all mixed together. It was fun and covered the basics in a very approachable way. So I had that base which I had been building up over a few weeks, and my SerialPort co-maintainer Nick Hehr sent me a text about NAPI.rs. I don't …
My Product Manager Skylar asked me today to recap how our product team righted themselves after a year of hardship and they’ve been so good for so long I had forgotten where we came from. It feels really good when things work without friction.
It was a few things we put into practice.
We stripped back our commitments, which was pretty easy because we weren’t delivering well and we had reasonable s…
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;
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…
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;
I read and attempt to understand new relea…
I decided to build a toy for my son. Buttons lights, the works. I’m far from done.
I spent a few weeks making an old Serial Mouse work. I've been tweeting a log of what I've done so far and I already wrote a piece on the serial mouse protocols.
You can use an old microsoft mouse by running npx serial-mouse-parser and find the source on github.
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 …
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.
I asked people on the internet for help choosing a linux laptop. People had opinions.
The laptops people suggested;
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…
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 …
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…
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.
And all of it brings me back to this photo of an IBM datacenter (probably a sales related installation) in Toronto.
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…
