If you do a lot of open-source/personal software projects spanning multiple repos, you’ll find a fair amount of tooling drift across projects. Keeping up all this tooling was taking up a decent amount of my time, so I decided to look into creating a personal monorepo as a way to simplify tooling by sharing a single git repo.

I’ve been writing a lot of Ruby code at home lately, and the next Cyberdelia podcast (when I get around to editing and releasing the episode) is about Ruby too. Some of this is a matter of circumstances, and some of it has been a deeper thinking about how I’ve been approaching my personal software projects.

I’ve been cranking away on CTF challenges lately as a way of testing my knowledge, which has been good at identifying the elements which I understood at the “book” level, but not at the “keyboard” or “brain” level. I think it becomes more important as you grow and continue in the computer field that you’re regularly testing what you know, as a means of ensuring understanding (and figuring out where you can improve). But I’ve wondered if these exercises are adequate in testing what I know.

I’ve been playing with Rust recently, and one of the things I wanted to do with it is get it running on Dreamhost’s shared hosting. After a bit of monkeying around, I got a little demo working with FastCGI.

After 2 previous attempts, I finally managed to cram the Rust language into my head. It took several full days and reading the Rust Programming Language to grok what was going on, but I’m confident I’ll be getting the time investment back in the coming months.

Internal tooling is not glorious work. It’s the glue that can hold an organization together, or be the thorn in the side of everyone who has to use it. You can’t really open-source the code, and even if you did it’s of minimal value to anyone outside of the organization because it’s hacked-up code to deal with specific business processes. Often the people writing it are so deep in the domain that it’s easy to lose sight of the user base and write stuff that no one wants to use or work on.

On paper, the Semantic Web is a great idea. Structured data means machines can come up with interesting links to various bits of information. Neat idea, but there are few benefits of the Semantic Web to content creators, and it leads to a variety of issues that are non-obvious at the surface.

One thing I impress upon new developers is to start keeping a blog to journal their discoveries. I’ve been keeping blogs now for over a decade, and I’ve found them incredibly helpful in my growth as a person and a developer.

When I got Gran Turismo 6, I went a little overboard and bought a racing wheel to go with it. The problem was how to actually use the thing while sitting on the couch. Fortunately, I came up with a DIY solution that was affordable.

As you’ve realized from the drastically different look, the site has gotten an overhaul, and I’ve replaced Pelican with Hugo. There was a variety of reasons I made this switch, and to be clear, Pelican is still a fine way of going about making statically-generated sites. But there was a variety of compelling items that made a switch worth an afternoon migration.

I was excited that my Oculus Go arrived a full week ahead of when it was supposed to arrive in the mail. What drew me to the Go is that it’s the first model that seems to me like it could break the mainstream.

MySQL’s default time zone is ‘SYSTEM.’ This is fine if you’re doing everything in your own peaceful oasis of ops awesomeness (har har har), but if anyone wants to replicate off your MySQL instances, you’re going to see problems if their system clock is not set to UTC.

Even if you don’t think about it, you are managing personal information: passwords, phone numbers, dates, to-do list items, email, and more. Controlling the deluge saps a significant amount of your time and effort, even if you don’t have a system. If information is valuable, how do you store and secure that value?

I think to stay sharp in the tech industry, you have to be in a constant state of uncomfortableness. If you think you know everything and/or aren’t always trying something, you’ll lose your edge fast as your ability to notice trends and adapt atrophies, and when the Really Big Disruptive thing happens you’ll be unable to find your legs.

One of the fun things I do outside of computers is meet with friends for coffee on Friday mornings at various outdoor parks in Calgary. When we first started meeting regularly, choosing the location for Friday morning involved a series of tweets beforehand as we hashed out the location details.