Platforms like Facebook and Twitter stopped promoting posts with links a few years ago. This forced users on those platforms to post content directly there instead of directing followers to external sites. I detest this behavior in social media platforms. Instagram in particular is the most frustrating of these platforms, since you functionally...
A stream of bright green chemicals leaked from Tesla’s Palo Alto campus and flowed into a storm drain and creek, prompting a hazardous cleanup response. Tesla doesn’t have a permit to store this type of chemical, officials said, and the electric car company could be fined. Seems bad maybe?...
American Airlines is piloting a new system aimed at curbing the phenomenon known as “gate lice,” an industry term used to describe passengers who crowd the boarding area ahead of their assigned group. Today I learned the term “gate lice” exists. What a disgusting term to be adopted by an industry. A 2005 forum post claims to be the inventor of...
To Whom It May Concern: Pursuant to the California Public Records Act, I hereby request the following records: Any and all available audio recordings of announcements - i.e. RE schedules, health notices, schedule interruptions, promotions, emergencies - and other audio material created to be broadcast to transport patrons on trains, buses, light...
San Francisco transportation officials moved a step closer this week to modernizing the train control system that runs the Muni Metro system, eventually ridding it of a system that uses outdated technology and runs on floppy disks. I wanna know what’s on the floppy disks The software that runs the system is stored on floppy disks that are loaded...
I’m not sure I have the patience to maintain a fleet of static HTML pages, but I like the initiative behind this! It seems like Alex does some cool archival work. https://alexwlchan.net/2024/static-websites/
Every semester, I see a bit more ChatGPT being used in classes. … when my groupmates are proxies for $20/month subscriptions, without even particularly imaginative prompts, I lose all motivation. This is sad and concerning to me - I also saw a thread on Twitter the other day full of similar complaints from university students that their...
And so, while we software engineers enjoy free hosting & custom domain support with GitHub Pages / Cloudflare Pages / etc, normal users are stuck with a bunch of greedy clowns that make them pay for every little thing, all while wasting ungodly amounts of computational power to render what could have been a static website in 99% of cases. Yes,...
The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register. I believe there’s similar legislation in place in CA...
And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I...
The other day, I stumbled on this 2017 thread from the retro tech Youtuber CathodeRayDude. He complains about the state of modern (circa 2017) UIs and contrasts them with the keyboard-driven UIs of yesteryear. I don’t think his point is that everything is worse as a mouse-driven GUI, but that a lot of GUIs would be better designed in a different...
How To Read An Article On The Internet reminded me of this rage-inducing gem of a site. This takes users through all of the things that happen when you browse the web these days, and I love/hate it. https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/
I’ve recently been motivated to make some improvements to this site, in the hopes that it might become a more ready place for me to do public writing. Some of those changes you may have noticed, some not. # The Clips section Motivated by other online writers, particularly Tracy Durnell, I created a place to share short thoughts on interesting...
This website publishes a number of RSS feeds that you can subscribe to if you’re interested in following along with my writing. Next to each link is approximate post volume from each. Long-form blog posts only - ~0.25-1 post per-month Clippings only - ~several posts per week /now entries only- ~0.5-1 post per-month All posts
A simple guide to reading in 9 simple steps This evokes something similar to how-i-experience-web-today.com, which actually takes you interactively through all of the terrible steps involved in modern web browsing. https://www.marginalia.nu/log/95_how_to_read/
I recently went to the Kill James Bond live show in London, and it was so much fun! There were some guys there dressed as contractors from “Hench,” the fictional gig-economy app the podcast hosts predicted would be the future of henchman employment. In addition to their costumes, they were telling people to try out their new tabletop RPG “Hench,”...
But then, in 2018, it all changed, supposedly to appease some downtown merchants. From then on, the VTA staff has been struggling to plan for a single-bore tunnel, about 53 feet in diameter with platforms buried eight stories underground, that will require tunnel lining twice as thick as originally planned and excavation of millions more cubic...
I really like green space in cities, so it’s sad to hear about some being destroyed. At least it’s for affordable housing and not like luxury shopping or office space or something. But after 12 years of struggle between the city and garden advocates, on June 18, 2024, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled six to one that the City of New York...
This article is very unsurprising to me as a SF resident, I love SF so much but I do dislike how sleepy the city seems to be. When I go somewhere that has late night options, I barely know what to do with myself. San Francisco is one of the best food cities in the United States. That is, as long as you plan on an early-bird special. According to...
Christian talks about what he did when an airconditioning system powered by a cheap android tablet needing a $1,697 repair when the tablet inevitably stopped working. Forcing customers to replace an entire system just because the cheapest component failed might be really profitable, I have no idea… But I do know that it annoyed me enough to make...
Gosh, so much stuff has happened since my update in June. Started my sabbatical from work at the end of June, off until mid-October! Pride month in SF was a lot of fun Parties/dancing Trans march I got to spend the whole weekend with my GF Rode on the back of my GF’s motorcycle in the pride parade Did a bunch of walking around SF - In one week, I...
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen some blog posts of a very similar vein to my recent post Technoelitism and the IndieWeb Movement. It seems I’m not the only one with some critical thoughts about this movement and the goals it both claims to have and actually seems to express. I realized while surveying some of these posts that I actually had some...
While I was surfing some new IndieWeb sites the other day, I had a little bit of a mad-at-the-young-people moment of being upset that so much of the modern web experience is algorithmic schlock that people just accept. I was contemplating writing a tongue-in-cheek “kids these days don’t even know how to browse the internet” blog post (these do...
Attending a bunch of events in SF, it’s pride month! Getting ready to begin a sabbatical from work at the end of the month! Reach out if you’d like to meet up in SF in the next few months or Seattle in early July (not if you want to talk about work though) Planning a trip around the world, reach out to me if you have recommendations or want to...
I live in San Francisco, and I don’t own a car. This means that I walk or take public transit nearly everywhere that I go. There’s a lot of ways to find out when the next bus/train/tram/trolleybus/cable car/ferry is stopping nearby so that you don’t miss it. There are no shortage of apps that will guide you to your destination using any and all...
Finished reading Blood in the Machine Writing a blog post about a project - building an always-on transit departure dashboard with Rust and an old Kindle Adjusting to some big life changes Trying to organize residents of my building into a co-op Probably going to keep playing pinball after the SF Queer Pinball League wrapped up (I finished 5th!)...
I was recently given a very thoughtful gift, a custom LED sign from Custom Neon reading “Stay Silly.” I first heard this from Maia Arson Crimew earlier this year in a Twitter post about being investigated by US Congress after it discovered a vulnerability in an airline’s storage of the FAA no-fly list. I and a lot of other people found this...
Things are starting to feel a bit more normal after moving. Started reading Blood in the Machine - a very interesting book comparing the labor squeeze and consolidation of power surrounding the industrial revolution to the monopolistic behavior of big tech companies today Playing in the San Francisco Queer Pinball League’s new season Taking...
I think that Hackernews is a consistent source of interesting articles to read, but I like to avoid the comment section for my own piece-of-mind. I also like to get the content that I care about delivered via RSS, so that I’m not consistently re-visiting HN (or other sites) for more content. For a while, I’ve been relying on this github project,...
Mostly right now I’m decompressing after some stuff Speaking at QCon SF Finishing move to new apartment with partner, wow the views are so pretty here Watching shared custody doggie while ex was at conference (why yes, i am gay actually) Quarterly planning @work I’m focusing on Independent web content Being thoughtful with how I spend my time &...
Just a list of sites that I think are cool. # Blogs ## Tech maia arson crimew - the tiny gay cat that hacked an airline last year Hazel Weakly - super smart, fellow speaker at QCon SF 2023, interesting thoughts & stories on tech industry Jeff Gearling - self-hosting, homelab type stuf jwz - owner of DNA lounge, blogs about tech in current and...
I’ve used Rust as a primary language since 2019, and I’ve been managing developers using Rust as a primary language since 2021. For developers new to the language it can seem intimidating at first, but there are a number of helpful resources available to newer Rust developers to help understand the more complicated topics. These resources are all...
I spoke at QCon San Francisco with my colleague Hunter Laine about a high-performance timer system that we built at OneSignal with Rust, Tokio, and Scylla. A recording of the talk should be released on the QCon Website on October 20th. Download slides
I generally like to leave open the possibility that I’m wrong. I try to avoid having strong opinions. In a few cases however, I fail in this. This article is about one of them. I ride a lot of public transit both in in my home city of San Francisco and while I’m traveling. While I generally succeed in finding my way around stations and streets,...
I spoke at QCon NYC 2023 about how OneSignal built a pipeline for processing Postgres updates using highly concurrent Apache Kafka consumers, and the struggles that we ran into during that process. Download slides Watch recording
Thanks to the fact that I sometimes share coding videos on my YouTube channel, people occasionally see what my workflow looks like and they ask me what plugins I’m using. This is non-exhaustive, really just intended to be a canned response. # Shell - Nushell I’ve been using Nushell as my daily driver shell for the past few years. It’s really...
I was recently inspired to get back into doing software stuff on microcontrollers, and I thought I’d start out by looking into the state of the embedded Rust ecosystem. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to accomplish, but I had a few Lilygo T-Display microcontrollers. These are cheap ($8 each at time of writing) ESP32 boards with lots of gpio...
Lily Mara (she/her) is a Software Developer based in San Francisco CA. She speaks domestically and internationally about Rust software development. She has been writing Rust since 2015, and using it as her primary professional language since 2019. She is the author of Refactoring to Rust, a book on the gradual introduction of Rust code in...
I spoke in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney this year at the YOW! conferences. I had an incredible time! The organizers put a ton of work into making the speaker experience great and I hope that this translated into a great experience for the attendees as well. My talk was about OneSignal’s experiences scaling Apache Kafka, the steps that we took...
I spoke at QCon London 2022 about improving application performance through the gradual addition of Rust code via FFI. This is similar in subject to my book, Refactoring to Rust. Link to recording and slides on QCon Website
I spoke at RustConf 2021 about the temptation to optimize Rust forever, and the importance of keeping this optimization in perspective. Link to RustConf site
Refactoring to Rust is a new book that I’m working on. It is about the gradual addition of Rust code to existing software projects. Since you presumably have some software running in production, the incremental process can provide a faster route to running Rust in production and better performance than you could get from a greenfield Rust...