TL;DR: Building on basic email, and with the advent of Mastodon, XMPP, Matrix and more, using and building federated networks could bring immesurable improvements to the Internet. On Walled Gardens One of the more controversial decisions I’ve made for myself in the past few years was to take myself off of the Facebook platform. While this makes it far harder for friends and family to scout me out on the Internet as a whole, I had reservations about using their platform, and ultimately deactivated my account in early 2011. The reason for this mostly stems out of two...
I’m flying a lot more as part of my current job. As I write this, I’m on a flight from Seattle to Salt Lake City (first of a connection). I enjoy the fact that I can connect to the internet while going over 500 MPH at nearly 30,000 feet in the air - it’s a wonder of science that I can do these things. However, sometimes the cost of getting the in-flight internet is a little over-the-top. Most of the time, I’ll connect to the hotspot, but then use my laptop offline (http://devdocs.io offline mode is perfect for this). ...
Late-ish last year (around November, if memory serves), I read about a new OS project which allowed its users a stark departure from traditional Linux methods. Called Nixos, the unique claim that it brought to the table was that the system configuration was managed declaratively, through functional configuration files. This includes things like package management, services executed, and user configuration. To fit along with my foray into the world of functional programming (my jumps into Rust starting a mental shift, and recent dives into Clojure sealing the deal), I wanted to give it a shot. There were a couple of...
I’ve identified that a considerable time has gone by since the last update. I’m going to put some adequate time into resolving that this month and into the future. I’ve been sitting on a couple of topics that I want to dig into (regarding how I handle email and some work I’ve been doing with Clojure). In the interim, I’ll leave you with a little anecdote/tale of caution. My wife and I (oh yeah, by the way, I got married in April. I really need to work on updates.) frequently play video games together to pass the time. I’m...
In order to keep practicing and make sure I keep sharp on what I’m learning, I like to dig through problem sets and write solutions for them. At first, the best resource for these was Project Euler, but as time went on, new projects came about that presented problems in slightly different ways: Codewars gamifies the process a bit, by rating the difficulty of each item; those determine the amount of credit you get by solving them. CodeKata, which is more of an exercise in repeated solutions to common problems, with the understanding that the repeated practice, you become...