David Eisinger

Software Developer, Durham NC

I’m David, Development Director at Viget. Just getting started with a new Hugo site. More to come.

Journal

Keep Markdown Links in Order With mdrenum (2023-11-15)

I write all these posts in Markdown, and I tend to include a lot of links. I use numbered reference-style links and I like the numbers to be in sequential order. (Here’s the source of this post to see what I mean.) I wrote a Ruby script to automate the process of renumbering links when I add a new one, and as mentioned in last month’s dispatch, I spent some time iterating on it to work with some new posts containing code blocks that I’d imported into my Elsewhere section.
Dispatch #9 (November 2023) (2023-11-01)

It was nice to have a quieter month after so much travel this summer. We got a few extra weeks of warm weather, which meant a few more weeks of biking with Nev, and plenty of time at the museum and all the local playgrounds. I decided to run the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon despite having to rest my ankle for the last week of training (result, certificate). I faded pretty hard down the stretch, but still managed to finish in under two hours – not bad for an old.
Dispatch #8 (October 2023) (2023-10-06)

Italy was grand, what an adventure. We spent a little over a week in Tuscany, mostly on Elba Island, with quick visits to Siena and Florence on our way out. Our accomodations on Elba were awesome, and other highlights included Spiaggia di Sansone, Cavo, and revisiting a few favorite spots in Siena and Florence (the pizza at Il Pomodorino was as good as we remembered).
Dispatch #7 (September 2023) (2023-09-08)

We were down at Lake Norman for the long weekend, and as I was pulling up the kayaks this morning, I couldn’t help but feel like I was also sort of putting away the summer – what a summer though. The last few weeks of August were pretty wall-to-wall. I went up to the Eastern Shore in Virginia to spend a long weekend with some old friends. Our rental was right on an inlet off the Chesapeake, and they had a stand-up paddleboard I was able to take out.
Dispatch #6 (August 2023) (2023-08-06)

Nice to have a quieter month, though we still managed to spend a weekend at Lake Norman and took Nev on her first camping trip at Carolina Hemlocks Recreation Area. We also had a nice visit from my folks to celebrate my mom’s birthday.

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)

What OpenAI shares with Scientology (2023-11-22)

Even if you, as an AI risk person, don’t buy the full intellectual package, you find yourself looking for work in a field where the funding, the incentives, and the organizational structures mostly point in a single direction.
How can we keep domains working long after our death? (2023-11-15)

Dealing with your digital legacy after your death is a big issue, and one that requires a lot of thought and a lot of problems to be solved, so let’s break it down into smaller pieces and think about them individually. This post is primarily a collection of thoughts about dealing with the problem from the domains side, not hosting. Hosting is a problem for more posts.
dce/mdrenum (2023-11-13)

Keep numbered, reference-style Markdown links in sequential order.
An app can be a home-cooked meal (2023-11-11)

But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.
36 Hours in Durham, North Carolina: Things to Do and See - The New York Times (2023-11-02)

The North Carolina city’s evolution from a faded tobacco town to a diverse cultural and culinary destination has been years in the making.
Why I Am Not a Maker - The Atlantic (2023-11-01)

When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.
The beauty of finished software (2023-10-31)

It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.
From the cloud to your computer: a new theory of how software works (2023-10-30)

But there are plenty of people out there who think we don’t have to choose. They think it’s possible to build software that both belongs to us and works across all our devices, that is collaborative and user-friendly and has an offline mode. They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.
Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR’s traffic (14 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (2023-10-30)

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.
Rendering Tidbyt graphics in Rust - macwright.com (2023-10-30)

In a way it’s a perfect antidote to the behaviors that the internet and social media have been brainwashing us all into. It’s optimized for nothing but my own personal enjoyment.