God help me if any of these have a serialport.

Update: They do have serialports!

I noticed this document about the "findings from the Defcon 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village". It's epic.

⚡This is a fantastic read about hacking a collection of voter machines. I've had hobby projects more secure.https://t.co/PBeCXs9HqK

— Francis Gulotta (@reconbot) August 4, 2017

Almost all of the machines lacked any encryption. Some of them had laughable "encry…

I got a new work laptop so it was time to bikeshed about my setup. I've switched to zsh (oh-my-zsh), iTerm2 (I finally get why you all like it!) and my colors are immutable but my font sure isn't.

I like my terminal text green and my background black and slightly translucent. I'm not sold on any font. What colors and font do you like? pic.twitter.com/WIsUHoUgnB

— Francis Gulotta 🌟🚀 (@reconbot) December 5, 2016

People suggested a bunch of font…

I've got a few commits around Node.js's related projects. One or two on npm, countless on node-serialport, a few on node-pre-gyp, many others. It's been a nice long line of fixing bugs for myself and seeing small messes and cleaning them.

Now I have a commit on Node.js itself =)

A little while ago I saw this tweet from my friend Myles. He works on maintaining Node.JS LTS and making sure our apps won't break as they age.

Oh hey... do you know a b…

Last year Bocoup offered me my dream job. I was trepidatious at first, my company had just gone under, I felt disconnceted from my personal life and I wasn't about to rush into something new. I needed time to recover. So I took it slow, asked a ton of questions, and worked with them to develop a beautiful proposal. Create a practice that develops software for the physical world. I'd be joining Rick Waldron, a friend and creator of Johnny-Five, an…

I wrote a little blog post over at the Sparkfun Blog about how our work on the Johnny-Five inventors kit was guided by our love of the NodeBots community.

I'm very very proud of our work on that project. =)

-Francis

A few weeks ago I started maintaining node serialport after a long hiatus. We hadn't had a release in about a year and we had some outstanding bugs that I wanted to tackle. I had also introduced some complexity around testing, years ago, that was never removed and seemed to be making it harder to work on the project. Exactly a month since my first beta release we've released serialport@2.1.0 which is one of the larger releases we've ever had. Thi…

I made a little presentation, a hack, a spike into the world of the unknown. I wanted to see if I could power a johnny-five robot with redux a powerful state manager for JavaScript commonly used with ReactJS. I could, I did, and I think you should too. The code in this presentation gets a little handwavey. I did get it working but never finished getting both the browser side simulation and the hardware controlling processes to share the same stat…

Tonight I gave a talk at QueensJS. It was my first time speaking there and it completes my trifecta of "borojs" speaking events. (I've now spoken at BrooklynJS, ManhattanJS and QueensJS!) I would have done it sooner but Sara wouldn't let me until now.

The talk was on ES6 Modules and the brave new world popping up around them. It was also about how and why we tried to migrate PouchDB to use them and failed.

You can find the presentation on github,…

"Why is the light in the refrigerator purple? It looks like I'm making a breakfast for zombies!"

I grab the makings for a mushroom cheddar omelet. We're running low on butter.  I say "Ok refrigerator" and then wait.. its display shows it's thinking about what I said and then beeps an error tone at me. It writes out "unrecognized command". This time I hit the listen button and say, "We're running low on butter." It shoots back, "Salted or unsalted…

I hung up my phone and started typing. "Jason just called me, ideas for dinner before the movie?" and sent it to Sara. My phone know's a lot about Sara and where she might be. It encrypted the message for her eyes only, indicated that the message will probably be delivered in midtown with a 70% confidence rating. After all it was 4pm on a Thursday, where else would she be?

My office runs a messages hub. It takes messages from nearby devices and p…

I was working on one of our projects when I happened to run across some code that set off my rubber ducky detector. It's a page that displays the days production quantities or displays an estimate if it's too early in the day to tell. Both cases have very similar views and they share a common interface. Our controllers were too fat and our views knew too much.

Here's the culprit.

class ProductionRunsController < ApplicationController
  def print_…

FactoryGirl the oddly named testing tool for database models is something we use a lot at Wizard Development. If you're unfamiliar with how it works, I strongly suggest you check it out. Unlike fixtures which loads a bunch of data into your database, factories will create the objects you need with the data preloaded. The difference allows you to only get what you need, allows skipping using the database all together (for much faster and more isol…

It's been around six months since I quit my job as a PSI Analyst. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, it's pretty much a glorified title for an Excel technician. I lasted a mere 3 months before the banal, repetitive tasks took their toll on me, slowly killing my sanity with every vlookup I did. There were more than a few reasons why I quit, but most of all, the corporate life wasn't for me. I couldn't imagine kissing ass for the re…

We recently added an API to The Winnower to support our new Wordpress Plugin. It was a great experience in both product and software design. Wordpress support is the first of a few great features we're adding to The Winnower to aid our users in publishing.

It was suprising to me, but these days a lot of academic publishing, if not in journals, is done on blogs. The Winnower provided publishing services to papers which were uploaded via Word or L…

Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach the Intro to HTML and CSS course with Girl Develop It, a non profit organization that welcomes all, but focuses on teaching women software and web development skills. They not only teach programming, but also teach programming related topics, such as contributing to open source software, and support other organizations that provide women with opportunities in education and development.

The Intro to HTM…