Roughly 275 miles ridden in the past four days and it’s time for a rest day of only 43 miles. Only. The things cyclists say sometimes never cease to astound me. Day Five on AIDS/LifeCycle also has the honor of being Red Dress Day, a day which brings out make up, costumes, and of course dresses.

Most of my training and cycling has been solo, but today was so much fun because it was all about teamwork. The day starts with a good steady climb known as “the evil twins”, includes a gorgeous and long descent to the coast, and finishes outside the town of Santa Maria. For one reason or another I found myself cycling in largely small groups of 2-4. Teamwork means coordination, communication, and speed.

Riding from King City to Paso Robles is short, 63 miles, but challenging for two reasons: “Quadbuster” and the heat. Attempting to avoid either giving me too much trouble, I woke early at 4:15 and was able to be one of the first 20 riders out of camp. Shivering in the cold and foggy pre-dawn air, I was reminded of my stiff legs, stiff after almost 200 miles in two days in the saddle. For a number of reasons Day Three can be brutal.

The second day of ALC is the big day, by the cue sheet it’s 109 miles, but yours truly ended up clocking 112 miles. The road is rough but fortunately the tailwinds are generous almost the entire way from Santa Cruz to King City. I woke to my alarm at 4:15am and started today’s journey.

This is my second year of AIDS/LifeCycle and the differences are incredible. The ride is different, and I am also a very different rider. I have put down over 2,500 training miles. I am riding a lighter aluminum tube bike, which replaced the bike I broke on ALC 2019. I am one of three representing Team Germany, Jens and Ulf flying all the way from Berlin to raise money and support the community in California. Today was day one, 81 miles from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to Santa Cruz. Today was incredible.

Designing, working with, or thinking about data consumes the vast majority of my time these days, but almost all of that has been “in the cloud” rather than locally. I recently watched this talk about SQLite and Go which served as a good reminder that I have a pretty powerful computer at my fingertips, and that perhaps not all my workloads require a big Spark cluster in the sky. Shortly after watching that video I stumbled into a small (200k rows) data set which I needed to run some queries against, and my first attempt at auto-ingesting it into a Delta table in Databricks failed, so I decided to launch a local Jupyter notebook and give it a try!

I was recently emailed by a new friend asking for some tips on how to break into software engineering. I love emails like this for two reasons: I really want to help everybody be successful in this industry, and I think we need more people from “non-traditional” educational backgrounds to enrich the industry. Since I had some scarce free time, and I ended up writing them a novel of a reply, I wanted to share my tips with anybody else for whom they might be useful!

A bit of belated news but thanks to all the advocacy work we have been doing at Scribd_ I am now a Databricks Beacon. The Beacon program is similar to Docker Captains, Microsoft MVPs, or Java Champions, a group of folks who are considered both skilled with the technology and in communicating/sharing best practices, tips, and short-comings with the broader community.

Last time around I didn’t train well enough, got sun blisters on my lips, and broke my bike. This time around I could not be more excited for AIDS/LifeCycle to be back for 2022. The goal of AIDS/LifeCycle is to raise funds for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Los Angeles LGBT Center, both of which provide numerous critical services to their respective communities. For my inaugural year in 2019 I was incredibly fortunate to raise over $6,000 and this year I am shooting for $10,000. I am also training a lot more intelligently this time around, I’m aiming to have a great time in 2022 and a strong mind and body will be key to that!

From my perspective one of the most important steps to address climate change is investment in cleaner power generation. Imagine my displeasure when I started doing the math on some of my recent power bills. Where I live Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is the predominant utility company but fortunately I am also able to purchase electricity from Sonoma Clean Power. Nevertheless, I still receive a bill from PG&E which is the owner/operator of most if not all of the transmission and generation capacity in the region. In Northern California there is no love lost for PG&E, which has been found responsible for negligence leading to numerous wildfires, gas pipeline leaks, and explosions. Much of this negligence has been due to postponing of forfeiting maintenance in order to recognize higher profits. To add insult to injury, it seems like they skim a healthy margin off of residential producers/consumers as well.

Today I fell into a rabbit hole around user and process permissions and had to learn how sudo actually worked. For the program I was working on I set out to figure out how to perform something akin to a “user swap” when launching subprocesses. On its face it seems simple enough, my program runs with user id 1000 and I wish to shunt child processes over to run as another user id. sudo can do it, so why can’t I? “For reasons” is the answer.

For some recent web application projects like dotdotvote and riverbank I reached for Tide and built them in Rust. I have a lot of reasons for liking Tide, not the least of which is that it is reminiscient of Sinatra in the Ruby ecosystem. Perusing the internet today I noticed this really great blog series by Javier Viola which will walk you through the full process of developing a real application with Tide.

This weekend I learned some unfamiliar behaviors with the way Handlebars handles nested variable scopes. I typically use Handlebars via the handlebars-rust implementation which aims to maintain nearly one to one compatibility with the JavaScript implementation. They have block scope helpers such as #each and #with, both of which create an inner scope for variable resolution. Unfortunately, the syntax can be quite unintuitive for accessing outer scope once in those nested scopes.

Vim can be used as an IDE of sorts for Rust by using a variety of plugins, that don’t always play nicely together. A few weeks ago while I was hacking on some Rust and these errors started showing up inline. Blaring red text basically as soon as I was done typing half-finished thoughts.

“Serverless” is sometimes referred to as “cgi-bin” which isn’t entirely fair as it’s somewhere between cgi-bin and FastCGI. Somewhere along the way both faded from memory. While goofing off last weekend wondered to myself: is FastCGI still useful? Unlike the classic cgi-bin approach where a script or program was executed for each individual request, FastCGI is a binary protocol which allows for longer lived processes serving multiple requests. It continues to be used in the PHP community but seems to have largely fallen out of favor. Nonetheless I decided to tinker a little bit with FastCGI in Rust.

Last week as part Delta Hack 2021 I hosted a live coding stream to introduce new-comers to Rust or delta-rs to both Rust and contributing to the project. I have been enjoying writing code live on Twitch which is typically more akin to pairing with the fourth wall. This session was different in that I was intentionally start at a more foundational level: getting started with Rust itself.

Investing the time to learn FreeBSD jails has led to a dramatic increase in the number of services I run in my “home lab.” Jails, which I have written about before, are effectively a lightweight quasi-virtualization technique which I use to create multiple software-defined networks to segment workloads. Jails have allowed me to change my “home lab” dramatically, allowing me to reduce the number of machines and increase hardware utilization. For now, the days of stacking machines, dangling Raspberry Pis, or hiding laptops on the shelf are all gone. Almost all my needs have been consolidated into a single FreeBSD machine running on a 4 year old used workstation.

Ransomware is the most significant and dangerous evolution of computer-based crime I have seen, and it’s going to get worse. Ransomware attacks have compromised oil pipelines, hospitals, and beef. While they’re nothing new over the past two years, targets have become increasingly high-profile and the adverse impacts of ransomware have similarly become more dire. Based on my read of the reports and incident reviews, these attacks seem to largely be affecting physical infrastructure assets: workstations, servers sitting in closets, and small-scale data center operations. Given this trend, it might be easy conclude that running in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud offers some level of protection. I strongly doubt it, and I think ransomware is about to get worse.

Everything went fine. Social media is awash with anecdotes about getting vaccinated, side effects, and opinions about other people becoming vaccinated. I recently crossed the waiting threshold after my last dose and felt I should share my experiences as well.

I want smart appliances, not the current commonly understood “smart” Internet-of-Things (IoT) appliances, but smart in actually useful ways. A couple years ago I had solar panels installed. The “smart” I want is pretty simple: I want devices that know about surplus energy. Devices which have lower power idle modes that can kick into more productive usage when solar power is bountiful. Generally IoT devices seem to be almost everything I don’t want. I don’t need devices that listen in on my conversations, track my data, and open up security holes in my home network. In this post I want to outline what I do want from “smart” appliances in my home.