I’m a technologist at Viget in Durham, North Carolina, USA. I’m passionate about making things (both digital and analog), sharing what I’ve learned, and consuming mindfully. More about me.
Journal
Dispatch #18 (August 2024) (2024-08-13)
Our boy’s two months old today! Look at this little dude.
Dispatch #17 (July 2024) (2024-07-10)
We welcomed baby Nico on June 12. He and mama are both healthy and well. Nev’s a great big sister, if a little vigorous with her affection at times. It is a big shift, going from double coverage to single, but Claire and I both grew up in four-person households, and something about adding a second kid resonates at a very deep level.
Dispatch #16 (June 2024) (2024-06-11)
TOMORROW IS THE DAY we welcome baby brother to the world, and I wanted to get this out before everything changes. I’m excited, for sure, but bringing a baby into the world is a major thing and I’m anxious for Claire. The joy can come after, once everyone’s emerged healthy.
Dispatch #15 (May 2024) (2024-05-07)
Big news, friends: we’re expecting a second kid in June. To celebrate, Claire and I headed to Lisbon for a long weekend. Highlights included the castles in Sintra (especially Quinta da Regaliera), biking in Cascais, and attending a Benfica match. We missed our Nevie, but she had a great time with Grandma and Grandpa, and it was nice to be able to stay out past 7pm.
Dispatch #14 (April 2024) (2024-04-08)
Busy March! My whole family came into town for a long weekend, then we headed down to Wilmington to run a race and spend time with Claire’s sister, then I was off to Vegas for the basketball tournament, and we capped things off at Lake Norman with Claire’s grandmother.
Elsewhere
Local Docker Best Practices (viget.com, 2022-05-05)
Here at Viget, Docker has become an indispensable tool for local development. We build and maintain a ton of apps across the team, running different stacks and versions, and being able to package up a working dev environment makes it much, much easier to switch between apps and ramp up new devs onto projects. That’s not to say that developing with Docker locally isn’t without its drawbacks1, but they’re massively outweighed by the ease and convenience it unlocks.“Friends” (Undirected Graph Connections) in Rails (viget.com, 2021-06-09)
No, sorry, not THOSE friends. But if you’re interested in how to do some graph stuff in a relational database, SMASH that play button and read on. My current project is a social network of sorts, and includes the ability for users to connect with one another. I’ve built this functionality once or twice before, but I’ve never come up with a database implementation I was perfectly happy with. This type of relationship is perfect for a graph database, but we’re using a relational database and introducing a second data store wouldn’t be worth the overhead.Making an Email-Powered E-Paper Picture Frame (viget.com, 2021-05-12)
Over the winter, inspired by this digital photo frame that uses email to add new photos, I built and programmed a trio of e-paper picture frames for my family, and I thought it’d be cool to walk through the process in case someone out there wants to try something similar. In short, it’s a Raspberry Pi Zero connected to a roughly 5-by-7-inch e-paper screen, running some software I wrote in Go and living inside a frame I put together.Why I Still Like Ruby (and a Few Things I Don’t Like) (viget.com, 2020-08-06)
The Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey came out a couple months back, and while I don’t put a ton of stock in surveys like this, I was surprised to see Ruby seem to fare so poorly – most notably its rank on the “most dreaded” list. Again, who cares right, but it did make me take a step back and try to take an honest assessment of Ruby’s pros and cons, as someone who’s been using Ruby professionally for 13 years but loves playing around with other languages and paradigms.
Links (from Pinboard)
Pluralistic: Apple vs the “free market” (15 Aug 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (2024-08-21)
So regulators are no longer allowed to regulate, but, thanks to DMCA 1201, corporations can just make up rules out of thin air and give them the force of both criminal and civil statute. The government can't govern, but corporations can.
P(Dumb) (2024-08-20)
In other other words, an AI’s ability to plan is probably going to need a whole new architecture that has a Kiki alongside the Bouba, and that doesn’t exist yet. In lieu of some smart person designing one, we’re back to the AI that radically self-improves, which means we’re back to the AI with the arbitrarily large context window (which we already blew past several paragraphs ago), which means we’re back to needing new technology for computing hardware to keep this proposition from being improbably expensive.
It's okay to lower the bar (2024-08-13)
I had to remind myself that it’s okay to lower the bar. That an average version of something is better than a perfect version of nothing. All I can do is have a go.
The World Beyond Your Head - macwright.com (2024-08-01)
The summary: I loved this book. Its little discussions of things like the importance of real-world difficulty in teaching us that we are physical, limited creatures who do not have all-powerful wills. The take on individuality: Crawford writes about the modern impulse to always prove ourselves as competent, competitive, and entrepreneurial, and how this differs from the older ideas of simply having a job, a role in society, and being judged mainly on whether you’re a morally good person ...
Time travelling for parents · Hauken (2024-07-31)
One day, you’ll miss these endless crying sessions. You’ll long for reading that same book for the 20th time. These chaotic moments are the good old days in disguise.
The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - The Verge (2024-07-24)
Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites (2024-07-16)
In this time, I’ve been on the lookout for ways to improve the site, and I’ve seen quite a few little things that are nice to use, but relatively easy to implement. They don’t really make or break a website; the absence of such features might be noticed, but will not cause any disruption for the reader. On the other hand, their presence serves as a QoL enhancement.
Midyear in a mid year - Austin Kleon (2024-07-08)
Writing books, making art, recording music… it’s all a lot easier when you don’t know what you’re doing. Better yet if you don’t know that you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s when you know you don’t know what you’re doing that you’ve got to really get after it.
Give yourself what you needed and your kids what they need (2024-07-03)
On the influence of the unlived lives of parents.
The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted (2024-06-25)
It’s a better Kindle and a better iPod, all in one gadget.