A systems design perspective on why chess.com's servers have been melting

I'm working on a terrible idea of a project, and this project uses MIDI. That means I need a MIDI implementation! I chose to use an existing library, midir, to connect to devices and receive messages. But the reason I was interested in this not-yet-announced project is because I wanted to understand MIDI. So it was time to implement the...

My computer setup attracts attention when I'm out and about. This has two effects: engineers1 ask me about it, and everyone else ignores me. These effects are not undesirable, but further testing is required. The main reason I have such an unusual setup, though, is more practical: so my arms/hands do not hurt from using my laptop. I wrote about...

A little while back, I wrote that we shouldn't say "auth" but should use other terms instead. I stand by my argument in general, but it also has another side to it: my suggested terminology makes sense in some domains, but not in all domains. And that's because terminology isn't—and can't be—universal. After I wrote that blog post, I got an email...

I use Talon to control my computer some of the time. It's mostly voice control, but it has so many other controls built in! One lets you use an eye tracker as a mouse. I thought this sounded like a neat interaction for other situations too. When I mentioned this to a friend, he suggested building a game with it. First, though, I had to do some...

We should always be supporting each other, but it feels particularly important right now. An election just finished in the US, which means that half the country lost and has to face the coming changes. In particular, this is a scary time for many folks who have been targets in the past couple of years, with escalating legislation against access...