Going through the LPI training has been a nice case of ‘old dog, new tricks.’ I learned a bunch of my Linux know-how piecemeal over the years, but nothing that ever resembled an actual training course. It’s mostly been learning about new command line flags that I somehow missed over the years, but handy nevertheless.

I’m likely due for a read-through of all the man pages again. I did this maybe 7 or 8 years ago, but I’ve matured a ton as a developer since then, and no doubt there are things in there that made little sense to me then, but would be clear to me now.

Not really sure why, but woke up at 3:30 A.M. highly motivated to copy the old “Computer Nerdery” archives from TinyLetter. The link rot was far less than I expected, but the process of moving the few articles over gave me some thoughts to chew over.

As with the charm of low-road architecture, I do love writing those little scripts that make for frictionless creativity/productivity. This is the first Hugo diary entry made by simply typing in dev-diary at the shell, with everything taken care of automatically. It doesn’t seem major, but removing all the micro-friction to writing makes a huge difference of “thinking about writing” versus “actually writing something.” Of course, now that the friction is gone, it’s just a matter of actually finding those little snippets of time that will allow me to write ;-)

Work continues on the CoffeeOutside bot. Not going to have it done for tonight, but should be in action for next week. Every time I pick up Go, it’s the uncanny valley of “it feels like C, but…” I will say that it’s great working in a ‘batteries included’ environment again. I understand the trade-offs in maintenance upstream, but from a developer productivity view, it’s nice not having to read through grungy third-party code hoping it’ll fit the bill.

Making good progress on Go implementation of the CoffeeOutside bot. I don’t know how much of it I can pin on Go being a decent language (it is) and that the logic for the bot is now pretty sound, but either way this should make for an easier experience.

I thought of a neat little metaphor while walking to the library today. If an IT group was a hockey team, development would be offense, QA defense, and ops the goalies. Development is generally thinking about features, QA looks to stop problems, and ops is a job you kind of have to be a little crazy to do ;-)

I’ve been a little too much in my comfort zone programming-wise, so I’m thinking I might take a stab at re-writing the CoffeeOutside bot in Go. I’d like to see others be able to use it, and as it stands right now you kind of need to be a Python developer to get it. Moving to Go would cut several steps off the install process.

The Bryan Cantrill video below is stirring my interest in Rust again, but I think that’s going to have to wait until 2019 when I’ve knocked a few projects off my to-do list.

I want to start getting into doing development diaries again, because I enjoyed reading the old ones I did back when I was still working on NiceBSD. I’ll try my best to make them useful and enjoyable for you as well, dear reader ;-)

I’ve just gotten word that I’ve been approved for a Pecha Kucha talk for the Winter Cycling Congress that will be happening in Calgary in February 2019. It’ll be along the lines of how running a fleet of simple, cheap-to-run bots and websites can create an enthusiastic (and data-driven) bike culture in cities.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Thanks all for waiting for today’s edition, I hope you find it’s worth the wait.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

It’s a bit late in the contest, but you can still spend some time enjoying the world’s largest trivia contest at http://90fmtrivia.org - great music, and the hosts get loopy from sleep deprivation on the last day.

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Woo! A second one! I’ve set up an archive at https://github.com/dafyddcrosby/computer-nerdery in addition to the one TinyLetter provides, just as future-proofing. Thanks to Mo K. for mentioning that I didn’t provide the subscribe link at https://tinyletter.com/computer-nerdery

Note - “Computer Nerdery” was a newsletter I ran a while back. Moving archives here for posterity.

Yep, finally starting a newsletter, after years of “I’m gonna start a newsletter!” Please throw ideas for content, as well as any good links you come across, as I imagine this will kind of be the ‘in-between’ stuff between proper blog posts (whatever that means) :-) Will keep to ~5 links/tips an email so it’s something you can flip through while eating a bowl of cereal. I don’t know how often I’ll do this (or is even desirable).

2 days in a row! That’s gotta be a record. Bumped latest https://daveops.net web build - more good stuff.

Did some thinking about the MIT OCW work ahead of me, and after digging a bit, I found that 1 unit is roughly equal to 14 hours of work per term. So looking at 228 units (which was the number I came up with when making up my pseudo degree) times 14 hours, that’s 3192 hours. At 2 hours of work a day every day, that’s about 4.3 years, which is not too bad. I read pretty fast, but the tricky part will be staying honest and doing the assignments.

Whew! Been crazy busy as usual. Got a bit sidetracked by a little project which I’m calling “The Mother of All Yak Shaves” - expect a doozy of a post when it reaches completion (I hope in the next decade :-P

I’ve also been working through an incredible stack of technical books a co-worker just let me borrow. One of the books has me digging into Windows NT internals, which I’d somehow managed to avoid since Windows 98.

Currently reading the PDP-11 processor manual and Lions Commentary on Unix 6th Edition, as well as sorting out some bugs in sw3m. My interest in maintaining sw3m is waining, partly due to the brittleness of the w3m codebase. I’ve started work on getting cookies up to the latest RFC, but pausing that work til’ the remaining issues brought up from Kuang-Che Wu’s afl-fuzz run have been addressed. This broken elbow has had me do more computer work/research in 2 weeks than in the whole summer - I’m expecting a fruitful winter.

Realized I hadn’t made a dev diary update in 6 months, and thought I’d make an update. I’ve been sort of having an intellectual odyssey on the OS front, and after watching Rich Hickey’s Hammock Driven Development for the nth time, I decided to really spend time making sure I’m working on something that I’ll really love. This isn’t abandoning the goals of the project, but taking a long think about the design before writing line 1.