Intuitive Understanding of Sine Waves

Sine is a natural sway, the epitome of smoothness: it makes circles "circular" in the same way lines make squares "square".

Spoonbill (2016—2023)

I woke up every single day for the next two months after signing those deals, convinced that I had somehow broken the law and I would find in my inbox an email saying "no, sorry, this has all been a misunderstanding, you must return to us all of that money." The process of sending an invoice of that size was surreal in a way that few things since have quite been, and more than the actual financial gain it was a deeply useful lesson in understanding that the numbers which look big to a twenty-four-year-old look like rounding errors to a sophisticated company.

It's painfully rare for a piece of software to have a true sense of narrative closure: either it succeeds, and is immortal, or it is killed: killed by shifting priorities and shrunken budgets and changing macroeconomic headwinds and more exciting ideas.

The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

We need a verified not-shit-person badge. Some mechanism, ideally decentralized, ideally reputation-based, that lets maintainers distinguish between "human who has demonstrated basic competence and good faith" and "entity or bot submitting or causing to be submitted auto-generated changes to mass repositories for credential farming."

Practical Decentralization

[The more people contribute to a shared network, the less appropriate "personal computing" metaphors becomes. It becomes inevitable to index aggregate data on their behalf, and these are shared resources that require governance. Pure p2p fails here because it has no solutions for shared governance.]

[Servers simplify operational challenges that come with p2p, like reliable uptime, device sync, and key management.]

A shared data space enables modularity, separating powers away from the popular hosts.

How n8n Handles Vulnerability Disclosure - and Why We Do It This Way

[Closed-source security updates are hidden from attackers, which means the time they need to reverse-engineer a patch is a window for users to safely apply the update. Open-sources security patches are immediately visible and become a roadmap for attackers to target those who haven't updated yet.]

[We currently publish patches and advisories on the same day to minimize the exploitable window. We also develop fixes in private and merge into public only when it's announced.]

BidWix

BidWix is not a marketplace. It does not handle payments. It does not write contracts. It does not take a cut. It does one thing only: it helps two people land on a price, quickly, without stress, and with a result that feels balanced.

Instead of negotiating out loud, both parties enter a private limit price, once.

[Buyers enter their maximum offer, sellers enter their minimum ask. The numbers stay secret. There is no 'counter offer' or back-and-forth: it's one shot.]

[If a freelancer wouldn't accept less than 100 for a small task and a client could stretch to 900 if they had to, BidWix would suggest the geometric mean of 300, which is three times higher than the freelancer’s minimum, and three times lower than the client’s maximum. Both sides win by the same factor.]

Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era

[Fediverse: communities of 50–100 people, "a slightly bigger group chat". Bluesky: planet-scale network. What could go in between? Blacksky is 'Reddit-sized' or like a large forum at around 100–200k people.]

[Moderation can also be a form of "community care" that people actually enjoy and appreciate, rather than just a task to be done.]

[Contradictory when almost nobody in the community does moderation or understands the primitives, yet most seem to think it's decentralized. If the main provider goes away tomorrow, will you know how to keep the infrastructure running?]

[People are busy and have kids: they don't need to know what a PDS is.]

[Build what helps people find joy and feel good about themselves.You can't scare them into using decentralized tech "for their own good".]

Sustainable Open Source

newcomer’s contributions aren’t as complete or far-reaching than those of experienced contributors, so it is doubly important for you care about the people and their enthusiasm about your project more than that typo-fix they put on the website. We’ve turned someone who fixed a single typo on the website to a steady contributor and well respected community member that now helps out all over the project

How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source

For early stage projects, care is the only thing you can give them. But once you’ve shipped version 1.0.0 or even 2.0.0, once you wrote all the documentation, once people start using the project in production with success, once you’ve talked the 100th person through getting started on IRC or Slack, your priorities have to change.

iCloud's unpredictable sync means the engine is "trust Apple magic somehow"

"non-technical users" → "jargon-free people"

UI/UX Benefits and Trade-Offs of Local-First Apps

[Beware generic solutions: they don't know your needs.]

[Instead of directing users to "please resolve this conflict", the UI could say "Bob made a different suggestion"]

15 years of Local First: a best-of report from the field

[When humanity's achievements are tabulated a hundred years from now, the Ebola vaccine will be listed, and I'm proud that our work with CouchDB and offline-first software helped make it happen.]

[Documentation is a 10x multiplier for your development speed.]

noticing a reflexive relationship between publishing a website with tools, and then wanting tools to consume what was published as objects

LLMs have made me smarter because my distrust in them increasingly causes me to figure things out for myself

How do I count all commits in a git repository?

# count for in branch alfa
git rev-list --count alfa

# count across all branches
git rev-list --count --all

How to cherry-pick commits from another repository in Git

# add the other repository's commits
git remote add alfa ../bravo
git fetch alfa

# show commits from branch charlie
# (note/copy the ones you want to merge or the start and end)
git log alfa/charlie --oneline

# apply commit 789c05c
git cherry-pick 789c05c

# apply commits 789c05c to fd1b130
git cherry-pick 789c05c..fd1b130

clown core: Diarrhea Inferno Welfare Burrito

gradual voice-leading and suspensions with fast-paced drumming

clown core: existence

wild creepy sensory overload