Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-13

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 ;-)

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-12

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.

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-11

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-10

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2018-12-09

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.
Dev diary

Computer Nerdery 2016-04-27

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.

Dev diary

Computer Nerdery 2016-04-17

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.

Dev diary

Computer Nerdery 2016-04-16

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

Dev diary

Computer Nerdery 2016-04-15

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).

Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-12-01

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-11-30

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-09-22

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-09-20

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.
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-04-21

Cool links How Much Math Do Programmers Need What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (PDF) What’s New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers Why Don’t Schools Teach Debugging? CPU Backdoors Editing Binaries: Easier Than It Sounds Videos RailsConf 2014 - Aaron Patterson Closing Keynote
Dev diary

Dev Diary 2015-04-20

Today’s been getting a new laptop up to speed. What is it about a fresh hard drive that gives you the feeling like putting on brand new shoes over brand new socks? A chance to slough off the old files that creep into your home directory over time. I’ve got a brief article/howto in the works for making a steering wheel stand. I suspect I’ll be putting in a fair amount of time into Gran Turismo over the next few months, though that shouldn’t be cutting into NiceBSD any more than getting into the groove with this laptop.