After I have had quite a busy week a few weeks ago, I am very happy that not only did I turn in my dissertation as planned (okay, one day later than planned, but that’s within the margin of error), but my job interview lead to me getting an offer! This means that I will move to the Netherlands in a few months to start a postdoc fellowship at the European Space Agency! :) I need to do some planning for that, which I am very excited about.
Other than that I need to give a presentation tomorrow, but I haven’t planned much more than that. It’s nice to know where I’ll be heading and it calmed me down quite a lot.
Hopefully getting the home lab+NAS machine online! Might end up as a weekend thing, given that the replacement RAM isn’t due to arrive until Friday, coming from the opposite side of the country and all. I’d do well to get some of the anticipated server apps (like the photo hosting service) online with an extant box in the meantime. Can’t wait forever to get off of the cloud and that will make the actual day of setup that much lighter of a lift.
Getting my PARA system back in order. The projects have gotten cluttered amid other executive function challenges. That’ll do me good.
Joining a friend on stream. Looking forward to that. Will be my first time on a stream in too long!
And that’s probably enough! Going to keep it relatively simple otherwise as it feels like I’ve overtaxed myself mentally and emotionally a bit last week and could use the recovery time, plus there’s a May trip that requires prep. Here’s to a relatively chill week!
Working on Cloud Native Buildpacks. I’m crossing language lines and hacking on our PHP buildpack. It’s fun to get out of my comfort zone. Our buildpacks are written in Rust.
It’s this one. It uses community builds of DECtalk, is written in .NET, and uses Avalonia. Lots of things are a bit cursed with it, like how I host the configuration generator on my site, because I didn’t want to set up the oauth flow over a local server, but it works.
(My prediction that things would break turned out true - I forgot to ship two extra files I can’t get MSBuild to include properly.)
I finished enough of my static site generator to make writing and publishing easy, now it’s time to force myself to write things. I’ve learned some things better already by forcing myself to write about them. My two struggles right now are structuring posts and then figuring out out how to end posts (summary? conclusion?). I’m trying to pay better attention to these things in tech blogs I read to figure out ways of doing that.
Good luck! I spent nearly a year blogging virtually daily (https://jcholder.com/2021/06/29/blogging-break.html) back in 2020-2021 and thoroughly enjoyed that. One of my tricks was to build and maintain that routine, even if it meant some rather silly haiku, in order to keep the wheels greased for when the inspiration struck.
At work, short week, as it’s Holy Week. I started to modify a Scala 2 code for Spark. I usually program in Kotlin so I will probably start a minor side project I have in mind in Scala to find interesting stuff (I only slightly modified Scala code, never added new features to an existing codebase). I wish I could use Scala 3 and learn Scala 3 from scratch but I think our Spark clusters are not ready for it.
Attempting to do revision but inevitably getting distracted and implementing the C2Y features in my compiler. Done defer which is lovely, probably the most needed feature of C
Working on a cyberpunk short story. I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut regarding the worldbuilding for Botnet of Ares - I figured some more freeform writing might help out. It’s coming out great so far, I’m halfway through the story at about 1500 words, and I’m quite pleased with the result so far.
Trying to build an open-core product from my open-source libraries that landed Blue Ghost on the Moon six weeks ago. The plan is to build a GUI with egui, which connects to a grpc server that manages the additional features that aren’t open-source (notably a behavior tree for spacecraft mission design). I think this should enable running machine learning cases (which none of the current similar software provides). The grpc interface would only be used for long running tasks (targeting / optimization / monte carlos), and simple tasks would be fully local (eg parsing mission files).
Does this approach sound reasonable? Am I making things harder than they ought to be?
So here’s one of my projects: I am working with another developer on my team to put together a collection of short (< 10 min) videos about the system we work on.
I work at a large company, and trying to educate people about our system is a vital part of the job – it does little good to build powerful new features if no one uses them because they don’t understand or even know about them. I have written lots of different kinds of documentation: runbooks, in-code documentation, whitepapers, slide decks, training sessions, hackathons, presentations at internal conferences, and probably a few more. I have noticed that I get a surprisingly large number of comments from people about recordings of talks which I have posted online. Apparently that medium is working particularly well at reaching people.
So our theory is that we can put together a series of short videos and we are hoping that it will be effective at reaching people. We put a good deal of work into making it easy to record the videos and hope that after we launch it we will continue making a new video every few weeks – given enough time that could lead to a fairly complete library.
Check back with me in a year or so – I am curious to discover whether this will be as effective as I am hoping.
Taking a break from job hunting. I’ve been getting nothing but automated HR denials this time around when I’d usually have a callback within the second week of applying which is extremely demoralizing. It’s been a month and I’ve fit beyond the asking requirements for most of the jobs I’ve applied for, but still nothing.
I recently finished up the addition of asymmetry in the key derivation, in combination with the shared symmetric secret (that can be rolled over when using cathedrals in a safe way!) this finally gives PFS to the sanctum session keys.
I am looking at introducing ML-KEM this week so that it ends up being a hybrid in combination with a shared symmetrical secret requiring an advisary to break several steps before gaining access to your traffic.
On the reliquary side I introduced an account page that has some bare bones stuff on it for now, including a section that allows you to extend the time of your account free of charge as its a community service. I hope to add some more useful stuff to this page somewhere under the coming few days. Maybe flock management, I don’t know yet.
I also changed some confessions [2] stuff so that it pads out the encrypted voice traffic to prevent any information leakage for the encrypted voice channel.
I’m curious to try some live stream hacking of all of this this week. But it’s usually distracting.
After I have had quite a busy week a few weeks ago, I am very happy that not only did I turn in my dissertation as planned (okay, one day later than planned, but that’s within the margin of error), but my job interview lead to me getting an offer! This means that I will move to the Netherlands in a few months to start a postdoc fellowship at the European Space Agency! :) I need to do some planning for that, which I am very excited about.
Other than that I need to give a presentation tomorrow, but I haven’t planned much more than that. It’s nice to know where I’ll be heading and it calmed me down quite a lot.
Congrats!
Finally finishing addressing the very last copyeditor comments for the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and sending it to the printers!
static noises
Going to Ruby Kaigi tomorrow, so that’s basically my entire week.
Looking forward to meeting a bunch of folks and exploring Matsuyama.
Hopefully getting the home lab+NAS machine online! Might end up as a weekend thing, given that the replacement RAM isn’t due to arrive until Friday, coming from the opposite side of the country and all. I’d do well to get some of the anticipated server apps (like the photo hosting service) online with an extant box in the meantime. Can’t wait forever to get off of the cloud and that will make the actual day of setup that much lighter of a lift.
Getting my PARA system back in order. The projects have gotten cluttered amid other executive function challenges. That’ll do me good.
Joining a friend on stream. Looking forward to that. Will be my first time on a stream in too long!
And that’s probably enough! Going to keep it relatively simple otherwise as it feels like I’ve overtaxed myself mentally and emotionally a bit last week and could use the recovery time, plus there’s a May trip that requires prep. Here’s to a relatively chill week!
Working on Cloud Native Buildpacks. I’m crossing language lines and hacking on our PHP buildpack. It’s fun to get out of my comfort zone. Our buildpacks are written in Rust.
As part of internal software? The only thing I could think of using those are VMware Tanzu (CloudFoundry).
Heroku now supports CNBs as a part of our “Fir” generation
https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/3188
Here are local tutorials for all officially supported languages https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks?tab=readme-ov-file#heroku-cloud-native-buildpacks. I maintain the Ruby experience.
Managed to update my Twitch TTS software yesterday, since it relied on an API they shut down today. Expecting a bunch of things to break today.
Other than that, I’ll be swearing at my bicycle a lot.
Oh? Want to hear more! I’m joining a friend on their stream tonight and might set mine back up as part of that.
It’s this one. It uses community builds of DECtalk, is written in .NET, and uses Avalonia. Lots of things are a bit cursed with it, like how I host the configuration generator on my site, because I didn’t want to set up the oauth flow over a local server, but it works.
(My prediction that things would break turned out true - I forgot to ship two extra files I can’t get MSBuild to include properly.)
OH! Dusty! I know this dragon!
Trying to develop writing as a habit.
I finished enough of my static site generator to make writing and publishing easy, now it’s time to force myself to write things. I’ve learned some things better already by forcing myself to write about them. My two struggles right now are structuring posts and then figuring out out how to end posts (summary? conclusion?). I’m trying to pay better attention to these things in tech blogs I read to figure out ways of doing that.
Good luck! I spent nearly a year blogging virtually daily (https://jcholder.com/2021/06/29/blogging-break.html) back in 2020-2021 and thoroughly enjoyed that. One of my tricks was to build and maintain that routine, even if it meant some rather silly haiku, in order to keep the wheels greased for when the inspiration struck.
My advice would be not to agonize over it and instead just write, you’ll naturally find a way of writing that makes sense to you :).
At work, short week, as it’s Holy Week. I started to modify a Scala 2 code for Spark. I usually program in Kotlin so I will probably start a minor side project I have in mind in Scala to find interesting stuff (I only slightly modified Scala code, never added new features to an existing codebase). I wish I could use Scala 3 and learn Scala 3 from scratch but I think our Spark clusters are not ready for it.
Attempting to do revision but inevitably getting distracted and implementing the C2Y features in my compiler. Done
deferwhich is lovely, probably the most needed feature of CWorking on a cyberpunk short story. I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut regarding the worldbuilding for Botnet of Ares - I figured some more freeform writing might help out. It’s coming out great so far, I’m halfway through the story at about 1500 words, and I’m quite pleased with the result so far.
Trying to build an open-core product from my open-source libraries that landed Blue Ghost on the Moon six weeks ago. The plan is to build a GUI with egui, which connects to a grpc server that manages the additional features that aren’t open-source (notably a behavior tree for spacecraft mission design). I think this should enable running machine learning cases (which none of the current similar software provides). The grpc interface would only be used for long running tasks (targeting / optimization / monte carlos), and simple tasks would be fully local (eg parsing mission files). Does this approach sound reasonable? Am I making things harder than they ought to be?
Hopefully recovering from this viral infection that has kept me away from work and isolation from my family for a week.
So here’s one of my projects: I am working with another developer on my team to put together a collection of short (< 10 min) videos about the system we work on.
I work at a large company, and trying to educate people about our system is a vital part of the job – it does little good to build powerful new features if no one uses them because they don’t understand or even know about them. I have written lots of different kinds of documentation: runbooks, in-code documentation, whitepapers, slide decks, training sessions, hackathons, presentations at internal conferences, and probably a few more. I have noticed that I get a surprisingly large number of comments from people about recordings of talks which I have posted online. Apparently that medium is working particularly well at reaching people.
So our theory is that we can put together a series of short videos and we are hoping that it will be effective at reaching people. We put a good deal of work into making it easy to record the videos and hope that after we launch it we will continue making a new video every few weeks – given enough time that could lead to a fairly complete library.
Check back with me in a year or so – I am curious to discover whether this will be as effective as I am hoping.
Taking a break from job hunting. I’ve been getting nothing but automated HR denials this time around when I’d usually have a callback within the second week of applying which is extremely demoralizing. It’s been a month and I’ve fit beyond the asking requirements for most of the jobs I’ve applied for, but still nothing.
More work on sanctum [0] and reliquary [1].
I recently finished up the addition of asymmetry in the key derivation, in combination with the shared symmetric secret (that can be rolled over when using cathedrals in a safe way!) this finally gives PFS to the sanctum session keys.
I am looking at introducing ML-KEM this week so that it ends up being a hybrid in combination with a shared symmetrical secret requiring an advisary to break several steps before gaining access to your traffic.
On the reliquary side I introduced an account page that has some bare bones stuff on it for now, including a section that allows you to extend the time of your account free of charge as its a community service. I hope to add some more useful stuff to this page somewhere under the coming few days. Maybe flock management, I don’t know yet.
I also changed some confessions [2] stuff so that it pads out the encrypted voice traffic to prevent any information leakage for the encrypted voice channel.
I’m curious to try some live stream hacking of all of this this week. But it’s usually distracting.
[0] https://sanctorum.se/sanctum/
[1] https://reliquary.se
[2] https://github.com/jorisvink/confessions
Camping for a couple of days, and help a friend in their land.
Learning to use nftables for my home server. Learning to setup different Wireguard topologies.