Programming and general geekiness from Jeremy Dormitzer
2021 is almost over! And it's been over a year since I've written anything about my work-in-progress graph database unifyDB . BUT just because I'm bad at blogging doesn't mean I haven't made any progress. In fact, a bunch of exciting stuff happened for unifyDB in 2021, and I'm going to info-dump it all on you 🙃. Aggregation, sorting and limiting This one was really…
Ok, I know. That was kind of a lie. No static site generator can ever really be purely functional, since the side effects are the whole point. But I think I found a way to build a site generator that retains all the benefits of a purely functional architecture - simplicity, flexibility, and hackability. Let me back up. I have been looking into new technology for my website for a while now. Right…
This is the first development diary for the database I'm writing, unifyDB . I wrote a brief introduction to the project here . In this post I'm going to talk about unifyDB's query system: what it does and how it works. I want to start with an example of a unifyDB query, but to understand that we need to understand a bit about how unifyDB represents data. All data in unifyDB is…
Phew, it’s been a while! Over a year, in fact. And what a wild year! Lots of good things happened: I got married, got a new job that I love, moved to a nice new apartment. Also some not-so-nice things, but since you are all living through 2020 just like me I don’t think I need to go into those. But I have still found some side-project time, and I’d like to start talking about what I’m building. So…
In which our hero discovers the power of normalization and JSON-LD The problem with JSON I’ve been doing a lot of research for my current side project, Pterotype . It’s a new kind of social network built as a WordPress plugin that respects your freedom, encourages choice, and interoperates with existing social networks through the power of ActivityPub . It’s undergone several iterations already –…
Kaniini , one of the lead developers of Pleroma, recently published a blog post called ActivityPub: The “Worse is Better” Approach to Federated Social Networking . It’s a critique of the security and safety of the ActivityPub protocol . They make some good points: ActivityPub doesn’t support fine-grained access control checks, e.g. I want someone to be able to see my posts but not respond to them…
In my last post , I wrote about an emerging web standard called ActivityPub that lets web services interoperate and form a federated, open social network. I made an argument about how important this new standard is – how it tears down walled gardens, discourages monopolies and centralization, and encourages user freedom. I genuinely believe what I wrote, too. And so, to put my money where my mouth…
A new kind of social network There’s a new social network in town. It’s called Mastodon . You might have even heard of it. On the surface, Mastodon feels a lot like Twitter: you post “toots” up to 500 characters; you follow other users who say interesting things; you can favorite a toot or re-post it to your own followers. But Mastodon is different from Twitter in some fundamental ways. It offers…
Haskell School of Music I recently discovered Haskell School of Music. It’s a book about algorithmic music, which is awesome because: a) I’ve been obsessed with procedural generation for years and b) I like music as much as I like programming. So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that someone had written a textbook combining my favorite areas of study. Haskell School of Music is…