Posts

As I look to reduce the number of touch points that are required to make a change to my personal system, I’m always thinking about how to reduce complexity and leverage existing tooling. In this way, we can continue to leverage an existing foundation to build out further abstractions. One such lever I have worked on over the last year was using my gRPC protobuf definitions to generate LDAP schema files that could be loaded into the server to match the objects that I’d be working with in Go. ...

On the path to improving the reliability of a given system, the oscillation between two modes of work is often necessary. The first mode here is that which is directly affecting the change on a system, and the second describes that which is improving the method by which change is made on a given system. These are references for a mental model that could be applied to a system as simple as a lever, or as complicated as an automobile manufacturing plant. The systems I tend to work most closely with are computer and network systems, but this is likely applicable for other sorts of system operations where humans are concerned. ...

A few years ago, I started dabbling with the ESP chips that have become so popular. For me, the ease of WiFi, and the Arduino compatibility meant that I was able to get up and running much faster. Not having a background in electrical engineering, the simple things like having a good base with the PCB, a couple sensors built-in and easy expansion makes all the difference. Before the ESP chips, I’d tried several other wireless communication chips that were each challenging in their own way. Since my ultimate goal is to report the sensor data to a monitoring service, getting up the stack so that I could use IP communication was a big win, and the ESP chips are perfect for this. ...

I give thanks to all those in my life who have forgiven me for my humanity, for my inability to act in the most dignified and uprightly manner at all times. I give thanks for the opportunity to remember my blunders, and improve my behavior and the manner in which I seek to conduct myself, without loosing the relationships that that have grown with others, the forgiveness from whom I work to either repay, or pay forward. ...

I’m a planner, and whether I want to be or not, my mind just starts to push out and extrapolate on the present to derive the future. Lately I’ve been finding that its quite difficult to plan in multiple areas of my life at the same time. Each tendril of a plan tends to have its own agenda, calling on my attention to meet its own conclusions, but attention is an increasingly limited resource. ...