(Disclaimer: I am not now nor have I ever been a sailor. I hope my meaning survives my nautical ignorance–if not, please email me and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve probably also made some errors in the ecology as well.)

I.

You wake up in your cabin, stretching up from your berth and groggily gathering your morning routine–the tea, the water, fresh clothes, perhaps a shave. The sun lazily crawls up through the windows and slowly slides down the wall as you rouse yourself.

Introduction

I’ve worked at several companies that had some remote component for collaboration. Sometimes that meant Slack, sometimes Google Chat, sometimes something else, but the experience has given me some thoughts on what works and what doesn’t work. I’ll focus here on Slack (or similar product) practices.

Some of this stuff is aimed at anybody who uses Slack, some of it is aimed at people who are organizing teams–there is hopefully something here to help everybody.

Introduction

A thread on Lobsters got me thinking…what would I want out of an ideal emplyoment situation?

Since I am cheerfully funemployed as of August, I figure I have the time to delve into this a bit. This is all dreaming big; I am under no illusion that any place like this actually exists. It’s naive, but after a decade in industry I think it might be nice to take a break from pragmatism. And yeah, some of these are not the way I live my life currently for one reason or another.

Introduction

I’ve been looking more and more at the ideas behind building comfynets–small self-hosted collections of tools and pages for communities. I’ll probably do a writeup on the sort of stuff I’d like to see in one.

Anyways, one of the bits of fallout from a backchannel I sysadmin involves the custody of data. We’ve got a chat instance setup which supports persistent messaging and so forth, but it’s backed by a database. I am currently the only one who has access to said database and I’m eventually going to be handing the whole mess off to somebody else in the community to deal with since I don’t want the responsibility anymore. Anyways, that’s a second tangent and writeup.

Introduction

Today I finished reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a first-person recounting of his experiences fighting Fascism during the Spanish civil war. Scattered thoughts follow.

The author

I want to point out that George Orwell was a true mensch–and that his wife was amazingly competent and patient, both for putting up with his adventurism and then saving his ass when the secret police came knocking. In the author’s own words, he set out to Spain to shoot himself a Fascist, and participated in the most direct of action until he was shot in the throat.

Little under the weather yesterday and today, so just gonna list some things I’ll try to write about soon:

• Multisystem deployment with KVM and Nixops
• NAS Appliance with Nix
• Fermi estimations and how web development is an embarassment
• Assorted things standard libraries Should Just Do (tm)
• Adventures in home smart lighting
• Thoughts smart city data stores

Catch y’all later.

Every year I do a huge gumbo cookout (8 gallons) with friends for NYE. I figured I’d record the recipe for posterity:

Gumbo ingredients

• Pack of turkey necks (3 or so)
• whole bunch of Andouille sausage (pack or two)
• whole bunch of mild italian sausage (pack or two)
• a duck (dead, cleaned, boneless if possible)
• 5-10 lbs chicken boneless chicken breasts
• a handful of bay leaves
• bunch of file powder
• bunch of green onions
• 12 qt. (plus or minus) of low-sodium chicken broth
• 3-4 celery bundles (transverse sliced, say 1cm wide)
• 3-4 green bell peppers
• whole bunch of garlic, minced and whole
• Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce
• few yellow onions, diced
• few big cans of diced skinless tomatoes (Rotel or other)
• couple cups of butter
• couple cups of white flour
• whole bunch of okra, sliced (deseed if you want to thin the gumbo a little, leave seeds in if you want to save a lot of time)
• salt
• parsley
• black pepper
• beer or beverage or your choice

No shellfish because I don’t want to deal with those allergies at my parties, but otherwise shrimp and crab make for some good eating.

This post was originally going to be about how I provisioned a 20TB NAS using ZFS and NixOS. At lunch today I got word that my old boss and friend Michael (Mike) had passed a bit over a week ago, so instead I’m going to write about a few good memories of him by way of celebrating his life and my privilege of having been part of it for a few years.

Once upon a time I worked on a web-hosted research platform for human-robot interaction. My colleague and I partnered to make a nice series of games which could phone home, log results, and show data.

It was built on JS, jQuery, Rails on the backend, and hosted on Heroku. I’d later rewrite the backend to be a much smaller node-based one. I think we may have been the first group to get ruby on Rails into an ICRA paper!

Introduction

This is a quick little ramble about the scope of minimum viable products (MVPs), their schedule for creation and delivery, and finally the interplay of those things on developers.

What’s in an MVP

The entire purpose of an MVP is to create the simplest, cheapest expression of a business idea possible to test if the market wants the thing you’re making.

Ways to succeed:

• Your MVP should contain be clear, incremental step towards a business feature or idea–ideally testing only one thing.
• Your MVP should be instrumented/monitored to figure out if it is actually creating results for the money funnel.
• Your MVP should be cheap enough you don’t care if you need to replace it or throw it away. There’s no point in running an experiment if you’re not gonna try new things when if it doesn’t pan out.

Ways to screw up: