I recently launched Dot dot vote, a simple web
application for running anonymous dot-voting polls. Dot-voting is a quick and
simple method for prioritizing a long list of options. I find them to be quite
useful in when planning software development projects. Every team I have ever
worked with has had far too many potential projects than they have people or
time, dot voting can help customers
and stakeholders weigh in on which of the projects are most valuable to them.
Dot dot vote makes it trivial to create
short-lived polls which don’t require any user registrations, logins, or
overhead.
I have finally started to come back to Otto,
an experimental playground for some of my thoughts on what an improved CI/CD
tool might look like. After setting the project aside for a number of months
and letting ideas marinate, I wanted to share some of my preliminary thoughts
on managing the trade-offs of extensibility. From my time in the Jenkins project,
I can vouch for the merits of a robust extensibility model. For Otto however, I wanted to implement something that I would call “safer” or “more scalable”, from the original goals of Otto:
Recently I have been exploring using Diesel for a
simple Rust web application. I quickly ran into a very confusing trait
bound error, listed below when integrating with chrono. It took me a
while to understand and fix the error, which I thought I should write down
for later!
I stumbled into an annoying problem
yesterday when setting up Onion
Services for the Gopher site(s) I operate on a FreeBSD machine: two different
rc.d scripts were conflicting.
Never trust a developer who praises the purity or elegance of the C programming
language. I find comparisons often made between Rust and C for “systems
programming” to be one of my least favorite, and most disingenuous discussion
topics among developers on the internet. It’s like comparing roller skates to
an electric car. While they both can transport you from one place to another,
only one of them is likely going to bring you safely to your destination.
Good news everyone! This site can now be accessed via a
Tor Onion Service.
While the main site brokenco.de is served via GitHub Pages for HTTP, the
entirety of this content is also available at the following onion (v3) service:
I have never regretted a bike purchase and my recent acquisition of a Yuba
Supermarché is no exception
to the rule. I have thoroughly enjoyed the front-loader (non-electric) cargo
bike and have already ridden over 25 miles in the past two weeks. The bike has
a couple minor annoyances, but one which I had to quickly address has been the
tendency for the steering to loosen up, especially over bouncier terrain. In
this short post, I would like to document how to tighten the steering up on
this cargo bike.
The web is getting faster but feeling slower, something which I have
complained about loudly on Twitter but now
some folks have put together data to back it
up. The web is
simultaneously a medium to transmit documents (e.g. an article) and an
application platform (e.g. Jira). Anecdotally it seems to me like far too many
publishers think of the web only as the latter. There are more and more
websites which require significant JavaScript or other multimedia resources to
render what ends up being a few paragraphs of text. If you don’t believe me,
just visit the website for your local television news station with
NoScript turned on. In my own way, I have been
resisting this push by keeping this blog as barebones as neceessary to present
the content you’re reading now. On a whim, I recently took this idea a little
bit further by deploying a Gopher site (viewable over HTTP via a proxy).
You never really appreciate disk space until it’s all gone. This morning I
noticed that my laptop had come perilously close to exhausting all its
available disk space. Oops! Normally I would prune some Docker images with
docker system prune -f but this time around I couldn’t blame Docker, the
wasted space was due to cargo,
critical part of the Rust development toolchain.
I stumbled across a crate which implemented string parsing that I
wished to incorporate into some of my serde.rs
deserialization code. Unfortunately the crate in question,
cron does not implement the
#[derive(Deserialize)] macro on its Schedule, so I needed to fiddle with
one of serde’s “field attributes” in order to move forward: deserialize_with.