rants and news from the fringe
Parsing locations in Aguaxaca September 3, 2025 The little Aguaxaca project has been humming along for a month now. Ingesting data as it comes, and I decided to take 30 minutes to take a look at the mess I’m now in. *starts panicking* Lots of things here are mostly for my own sake. Sorry if that’s noise in your RSS reader. Where were we? Currently, I get a list of water-delivery spots (locations)…
Aguaxaca August 17, 2025 Hi there! Long time no see. Not that I expect to publish frequently these days. This is the pitch for a little open-source project that’s kept me busy a few evenings. Some months ago, we moved back to the city of Oaxaca. We’ve lived in the countryside nearby for years, but it was soon very clear that “nearby” was actually pretty far when thousands of people try to use the…
Monthly SQL hell September 30, 2024 Recently, I learned from MySQL 8.0 docs , that: If you want to make your queries as fast as possible, look out for Extra column values of Using filesort and Using temporary, or, in JSON-formatted EXPLAIN output, for using_filesort and using_temporary_table properties equal to true. So, I guess that I should probably stay away from these filesort and temporary…
Random Preonic sounds June 11, 2024 I kind of warned you about making sounds with the Preonic keyboard, because 80s beeps will never go out of fashion, and these clicky switches aren’t noisier enough anyway. Check the previous post if you need to, this is a follow up. Playing sounds is very simple with QMK, thanks to the cute PLAY_SONG macro, to make the board play very geeky boops. Since we…
Tap dance and Caps word June 10, 2024 If you’re into mechanical keyboards, you probably know about Tap dances and Caps words already. If not, well these are two features of QMK : a tap dance allows you to remap rapid successive taps on a key to a different function ( ref ), and caps word is a function that turns on CAPS but only for the next word you’ll type ( ref ). As the Tap dance docs clearly…
Introducing mdstat September 25, 2022 MailDir Stat (mdstat) is a small program I wrote some time ago to play with zig : it lists MailDirs, and optionally only those that contain unread emails. Nothing incredibly new, just a small itch to scratch. It came from a small frustration with (neo)mutt where I sometimes like to have a tree of mailboxes in the sidebar ; but I only want to see the unread…
There and back again May 18, 2022 It’s interesting that there’s still a post about joining MailPoet on the homepage. It makes this place feel very dusty, full of cobwebs, and memories, and this post kind of ironical. I stayed at MailPoet for more or less 2 years. I remember feeling exhausted and depressed at the end of it. A nice burnout to use the proper term: yes, you could get burnout before…
Rebenchmarking Go, Crystal, and Ruby December 14, 2016 Don’t you ever tire of benchmarks? Most of those are inaccurate, hardly reproducible, and often misleading. With that out of the way, I present a benchmark of some very fine programs to compare the speeds of Go , Crystal , and Ruby . ;) I like Ruby a lot, have used Go for some years, and I consider that Crystal is an interesting middle ground:…
Babies October 25, 2016 I have put my startup-y projects aside for a while now. There is only so much time that I would invest in something that won’t pay its server bills, no matter how fun it is. Still, not easy. Anyway, to move on I joined MailPoet a few months ago, taking over a project that had been entirely developed by one person, using a technology that no one else there knew very well…
Scrum and agile August 15, 2016 Like a failed communist state that equalizes by spreading poverty, Scrum in its purest form puts all of engineering at the same low level: not a clearly spelled-out one, but clearly below all the business people who are given full authority to decide what gets worked on. Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible
