A friend of mine turned me on to Home Assistant which is a wonderful open source home automation platform. It's privacy forward (a hard requirement for me) and includes energy monitoring. It's got a neat event based system, lots of out of the box integrations and a large community of people making, hacking and helping. But what good is a home automation platform without hardware for home automations?
So one of the first things I got was a wifi ou…
This past April Roborooter turned 21 years old. (First Post!) I started it as a fork of a friends blog and it was a place for my group of friends to post updates. Everyone eventually got their own blogs (or stopped blogging) and it was mine. The name "roborooter" comes from a joke I made with my godfather. It was 2001 and domains were too expensive for my teenage self, but he thought I should have one so he bought it. He wanted to see what I cou…
I read a wonderful twitter thead about CGI and the birth of the web and this triggered a thought I've been kicking around.
Wasm is the new CGI
And to be clear I don't mean the Common Gateway Interface as a protocol. I mean what CGI and the cgi-bin application model brought to the web. They allowed people to easily write code that makes websites interactive. This shifted the web from an archive of documents to a vast network of applications. It …
I've been softly recommending people start using 1Password for the past 5-10 years. I'm no longer going to be soft about it, you have to stop using passwords, they are horrible. 1Password is a password manager. The idea behind password managers is you have it generate a different password for every single website and service you use. It remembers them puts them in a "vault", fills them in, works on your phone, and you remember 1 password to unloc…
This video dates back to around 2010 from an unknown source but remains my favorite. I give a version of this talk at every company I join. It's nothing new, but if you haven't heard it you need to hear it.
Mean time to recovery is better than mean time between failures for most types of failures. This talk has some service oriented architecture to improve your failure domains thrown in for good measure.
Also my car is a 2008 Honda Civic and it i…
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…
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.
I asked people on the internet for help choosing a linux laptop. People had opinions.
The laptops people suggested;
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…
I write more for other people's blogs then I do my own.
When I think of the Kindle, I think of an awesome device (the big one is wonderful to use) with a free data connection that needs to be hacked to be useful. Hacked to remove the ability to remove books. Hacked to allow browsing of the web. Hacked to allow my own content to be freely placed on the device. The hacking negates the free data plan because the device no longer functions along Ama…
Michael Jackson died yesterday prompting a DDOS attack on the worlds news organizations and Google. Whatever became of him doesn't change the fact he knew what he was doing when it came to putting on a performance and singing a song. I'm going to share one my favorite facts about him, he had a patent for shoes.
Method and means for creating anti-gravity illusion
No wires just shoes.
It's fascinating to watch these videos, but boy is he ever weir…
I had a problem this week. I actually had the same problem lots of times. It was fustrating as hell.
I had quite a few Windows XP instalations to do, with new employees soon to arrive at work, new laptops arriving with Vista, and some old desktops that needed 'decrufting' in their OSes. I have a slipstreamed windows xp cd with sp2 that I like to use. I haven't bothered updating it to sp3 because I haven't made the time and for a while I didn't th…
