https://shortdiv.com/index.xml

Every once in a while you find yourself caught between two warring bureaucratic processes.

I recently saw a video from the Thinking Machines folk where the speaker was being corrected in real time as she spoke.

I started freelancing this year.

In a past job, I broke networking within my first week of starting.

The other day, I was working on translating data from a file into json to visualize the results.

Who am I, if not what I do?

In Pulumi, stacks can separate an infrastructure build by environment or by more granular concern.

In a previous role, I worked on establishing an observability stack using OpenTelemetry (OTel) which mostly involved setting up instances of OTel collector to run across a distributed network.

Across the startups that I’ve worked at, a recurring theme has been using Nomad and eventually migrating off of it.

I was recently let go from my role.

One of the hardest problems in local-first software is sync.

The goal of every data reconciliation algorithm is to ensure all replicas converge on the same state of the world, in spite of concurrent changes.

When it comes to data reconciliation in the context of building real-time, collaborative user experiences, two major techniques are often discussed: Operational Transform (OT) and Conflict-free Data Replicated Types (CRDT).

In my last post, I argued that conflict in local-first is an inherently human problem.

Conflict is a recurring topic of discussion in the local-first space.

With the rise of mobile in the early aughts, where updates and collaborative edits felt instantaneous (since they wrote directly to local storage and used shared network drives) the traditional client-server model of the web proved clunky.

There’s nothing quite like the clarity of losing your job on a friday that forces you to contend with the bigger question; who and what kind of future do you want to build for?

As the saying goes there is no cloud, just someone else’s computer.

The rise of the local-first movement was no anomaly.

In my last post, I mentioned that what makes an app local-first is its ability to keep running even when a connection falters.

I’m frequently amused by how often local-first software gets mistaken for community initiated software.

I’ve been pretty quiet about my work life lately.

A few years ago, I received news of a professor’s passing in the most bizarrely impersonal way we tend to receive news these days: via a twitter mention from a college ex I hadn’t spoken to in years.

I got laid off for the first time back in September (surprise!)

2024 was the year when I finally transitioned from surviving to thriving.

Change is inevitable, especially so in applications that ebb and flow with system changes and user requirements.

Distributed nodes share neither memory nor a logical clock.

In a distributed system, failures are to be expected.

In a distributed system, communication is crucial to ensuring no node becomes stale.

In an earlier post, I glossed over a concept that forms a fundamental tenet of systems design; the CAP theorem.

What does it mean to be consistent?

In a distributed setup where nodes share the load of processing requests and storing/retrieving data, reaching consensus is crucial to ensuring consistency in an application.

Demystifying Distributed Systems: the what and why If you deploy an app today, dealing with a distributed system is an inescapable problem.

Today was a really hard day.

Didn’t make a lot of progress today and decided to play around with shapes instead.

Geometry is the basis for drawing any shape in ThreeJS.

Most shapes in ThreeJS and WebGL can be created using primitives many of which, you can use to create composite geometries, like this really neat christmas tree.

Walking at angles When drawing in 3D and even in 2D, we rely on shapes to make up a larger geometry, which then go on to form a more complex scene.

Because we’re starting from the basics, this week we’ll focus largely on shapes and rendering shapes to the screen.

At the start of 2018, I got the opportunity to be part of the first mini batch at the Recurse Center.

A key step in the data visualization process is the conversion of data to the right format.

Redirect Rulez Browsers rely on URLs to access content on the web.

Some of the most cutting edge and effective web performance optimizations, like prefetch and preconnect, involve being proactive.

If you’ve spent some time in frontend land, chances are you’ve heard someone say “it’s just javascript” when referencing a framework, library or snazzy new tool.

Componentization is the central concept driving frontend development today.

With 2018 drawing to a close, I’d like to take a moment to review some of my personal highlights from the past year.

If you’ve been keeping up with the JavaScripts, chances are you’ve heard snatches of excitement about the latest and greatest in web technology, WebAssembly.

In the last few years, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), also known as cross reality or XR, have developed far beyond the niche realms of the gaming industry.

One of the most memorable cinematic portrayals of a voice recognition system is Hal 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The task of building for accessibility, while worthwhile, can be a rather daunting one.