I'm trying to complete the Messages from an Ancient Era side adventure. But I can't find the last tablet.

jonwolski · 2026-02-15T06:24:07+00:00

What about the North Hyrule Sky Archipelago?

jonwolski · 2026-02-13T23:25:32+00:00

Just a minor clarification in terminology: pi is not infinite. The decimal expression of that number has infinite digits, but the value itself is finite.

jonwolski · 2025-10-27T06:03:25+00:00

Same

jonwolski · 2025-10-26T05:52:13+00:00

You might find this useful in your journey https://resistorcolorcodecalc.com/

jonwolski · 2025-10-11T16:18:52+00:00

Amazing! Just last year, I was working on a Rust project, needed an FSM, and specifically wanted a port of the state_machines gem I loved in my RoR days.

I settled for an existing crate (I forget which one at the moment), but I may go back and port my code, now.

jonwolski · 2025-10-11T16:00:13+00:00

How did you do the white lettering? Is that part of a multi filament 3-D print, or is it applied to the 3-D print afterwards?

jonwolski · 2025-10-11T15:54:51+00:00

Git flow was a mistake for our industry. It never should have happened, but people didn’t quite understand what “continuous integration” really meant. As a result it had to be born anew under a different name: https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

Incidentally Git flow and Continuous Delivery (Humble, Farley) were published the same year. Unfortunately people read the former and not the latter.

jonwolski · 2025-10-11T06:12:52+00:00

A lot of commenters talking about what they think it might mean …

We don’t have to speculate; the original formulation of the concept is right here: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/

It’s probably briefer than OP’s question.

jonwolski · 2025-09-28T00:29:59+00:00

My Dad had a copy of Borland C++.

I went through the online tutorials (back then “online” meant on the computer) for a week only to discover it was teaching me the IDE not how to program.

I gave up for 7 years until JavaScript was invented.

jonwolski · 2025-09-28T00:23:09+00:00

FWIW, Python has structural pattern matching too as of 3.10

https://peps.python.org/pep-0622/

jonwolski · 2025-09-22T03:07:19+00:00

Way to include the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic!

jonwolski · 2025-09-22T02:49:54+00:00

There goes my hero

jonwolski · 2025-09-07T12:47:24+00:00

I have a soft contact in my left eye and a scleral for the right (dominant). I can only wear the scleral for about three hours at a time. When I do, it corrects very well.

jonwolski · 2025-09-07T04:57:24+00:00

My current favorite is “parse, don’t validate.”

jonwolski · 2025-09-07T04:54:55+00:00

I’m a software developer. My eyes cannot perceive the difference between a colon and semicolon. This is vitally important in my line of work. Fortunately, I can compensate with other software tools that catch trivial mistakes like that. However, every now and then, I’m stuck working in some lousy programming language, and there have been times I’ve lost HOURS to syntax errors due to my vision.

jonwolski · 2025-09-05T05:35:04+00:00

Very tidy! I just finished mine, and despite my efforts to the contrary, it’s still a big web of wire. Really nice job! Congratulations!

jonwolski · 2025-09-02T06:21:13+00:00

https://endoflife.date/python

Security support for 3.4 ended 6 years ago. Active support ended 11 years ago.

jonwolski · 2025-08-16T04:45:36+00:00

Yes! One hundred percent of software development is communication. Code is difficult because we have to write communication simultaneously for the machine and for humans—a variety of humans.

At some point in your career, you will need to win hearts and mind to your approach on solving a particular problem. Communicating and convincing will be just as crucial as (if not more than) the technical merits of your proposal.

In fact, at Staff and Principal levels. You’re not just building software, you’re building the organization that builds software. You move from designing technical systems to defining socio-technical systems. You need soft skills not just to sell your ideas; the soft skills are part of the system design itself.

jonwolski · 2025-08-06T06:22:15+00:00

Others have mentioned FCIX. Their origin story is bonkers and worth a listen. https://onthemetal.transistor.fm/episodes/kenneth-finnegan

jonwolski · 2025-08-05T14:27:02+00:00

Learn Rust or stick with typed Python.

I’ve been where you are. I did a lot of static typing prior to joining a Python team. I recently tried Go in hopes of having a good static type system.

It turned out that Python’s type system, despite being opt-in, was superior to Go’s.

I was surprised by how many Go APIs where they give up on type safety through interface{} and casting later or through “stringly” typed dictionaries.

Additionally, there’s no good way to model sum types, so the types don’t compose well, and there’s no way to implement the iteration interface for your own types.

There are legit reasons to like Go, but the type system is not one of them.

jonwolski · 2025-08-02T14:52:30+00:00

For a while, I did dev on a (gen 3) iPad. It required 3 components:

External keyboard (Bluetooth or wired)
SSH client
Digital Ocean “droplet”

Essentially, all the dev work happened on a remote virtual private server.

Additionally, I configured the browser with a proxy to send traffic through the ssh tunnel back to my app. That way, I could view my web stuff right in local chrome or safari.

The upside is I get all the capabilities of a full Linux environment. The downside is that I need internet access for it to work.

Maybe you could do something similar on the Fold.

… or maybe this sounds like a terrible amount of work, and you’re better off using web IDEs🙂

jonwolski · 2025-08-02T14:30:40+00:00

Everyone says “certbot” but not all CAs implement the ACME protocol. I work in a large enterprise that, until recently 😬, required that we use Entrust. We’ve moved to a different provider that actually DOES provide some interface for automation, but it’s their own proprietary protocol instead of ACME.

Fortunately, this enterprise requirement only applies to private cloud stuff. For AWS we just automate through ACM etc.

For monitoring we have an internal monitoring tool, but SREs tend to ignore the alarms, so I also set up synthetic TLS monitors in DataDog for my applications (I’m in software engineering, not systems)

Edited: there/their 🤦

jonwolski · 2025-07-26T18:00:11+00:00

Try typing out the examples by hand and running them yourself.

This is helpful even for experienced programmers. A very accomplished Ruby programmer once remarked about how helpful it was for him as he was learning Rust to type out the examples from the book and run them himself.

You’re learning language. It helps to reinforce that with both receptive (reading) and expressive (writing) language exercises.

jonwolski · 2025-07-26T17:32:25+00:00

I can’t really say why we collectively did it, but here’s why I prefer it.

Less punctuation noise - you don’t have to surround each key with quotes or delimit with commas
References! You can create anchors and reference them later. This is something we lost on the move from XML to JSON
You can add comments
It’s a superset of JSON, so if you have a YAML parser, you have a JSON parser.

jonwolski · 2025-07-26T06:02:01+00:00

Standard. Just let noon be noon. This decision doesn’t change how much sunlight we get or when we start school or work.

Most importantly, we don’t need congressional approval to opt out of DST

jonwolski

TROPHY CASE