Hey! I'm Mykal. Welcome to my blog's RSS feed. This contains all my posts, photos, notes, etc.
I started working at Railway! Well, since April 20th, technically. I've just been too busy having fun to write about it. Why I Joined Railway If you've even briefly talked with me about software, you'll know I've been a Railway fan for years. Beyond just loving the product, a huge part of why I took the role is how Railway thinks about support. Railway treats support as a core signal for product…
At 19, I put a note in my wallet that read "If you're working on harder problems today than you were last year, then you'll be alright." It was a rough estimate of something my uncle had said to me that day that I wanted to remember. The quote stuck at the top of my mind for years, and as I've gotten older, I've picked up a few more pieces of knowledge. I reformulated them as questions and have…
"And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we’re gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better.…
Found a fun little hack today while trying to copy some test output from my Ubuntu WSL terminal into the Windows clipboard. Yeah yeah, I know you can select the text in your terminal and it'll automatically be copied into your clipbaord. There's just one problem with that. You have to use a mouse (🤮). If you're anything like me, taking your hands off the keyboard mid-flow is akin to sacrilege.…
I've been messing around with the 1Password developer tools and CLI and have found it extremely useful. However, I found the docs on the website regarding setting up the 1Password CLI in a WSL environment to be either incomplete or just non-existent so I wanted to throw together a guide on how I got everything working on my machine with Windows 11 and Ubuntu 24.01 LTS (Noble Numbat). It's not an…
I just read this article and the linked MIT study (TLDR: people "using AI consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" in testing) over my lunch break. It confirmed a thought I've been having quite often lately; we should probably think of AI a lot like we think of candy. A nice sweet treat every once in a while, but not something that should make up the majority of…
I just setup a work laptop and and took the chance to look into what setting up a "dotfiles" for windows would look like. Specifically, what it would take to keep track of apps/tools that I'd need and automate the process of setup on Windows. I've setup dotfiles on linux machines before, but never windows as I sort of just assumed that package manager just wasn't an option on Windows. I'd used…
I've noticed I'm spending more and more time with only a terminal open lately, with that, I've found quite a few handy little CLI apps, utilities, and even built setup a pretty shell theme. What my setup looks like I use zsh as my primary shell with oh-my-zsh and a powerlevel10k theme with the Meslo NerdFont to add all the fancy icons and ligatures into my command line. I've also been messing…
It's not perfect, but I think I'm finally starting to get the latte art game down. I had built some bad habits early on that made it very hard for me to get any art down. Here are some adjustments I made in the last month that got me from white blob to leafy-heart-thing: Get an automated milk steam wand. I don't know if my old steam wand was just bunk, but I could not get consistent milk out of…
I work with docker containers pretty much every day and debugging containers that crash immediately on startup has been a common headache for me. I came up with a little "hack" that has helped me with this problem so I thought I'd share it here. The problem Debugging containers is relatively easy when they're up or online! You can open a shell in the container and peek around to see what's…
I've been using this site for a year or two to create my profile pictures and add some semi-ordered noise to pictures. I've had a few people ask how I do this now, and thankfully the answer is very easy! there's just a website that does it for you 🙂 Enjoy! Thanks for reading this post in your RSS reader! If you want to respond you can write me an Email or reach out on Mastodon . Read the full…
I've been hanging out over on Bluesky the last few weeks. While bumming around on there, I found this library called @skyware/bot and was surprised by how simple building out bots for the app is. Minimum viable bot No, seriously, it's so easy! All you need is a bit of JavaScript: import { Bot } from "@skyware/bot";const bot = new Bot();// I would use an app password for this if you can!// app…
I've been on a bit of a tear building out an NGINX reverse-proxy and web server repo at work complete with a whole bunch of goodies (automated testing, deploy, monitoring, and log aggregation, oh my!). With that in mind, I've been writing a lot of web server config lately for a whole bunch of services. I needed a good way to quickly validate configs locally without pushing to a test server or…
I came across this site while doing a workshop on kubernetes a few months back. Much like " The Grug Brained Developer ", I keep coming back to it every few weeks for a once over. The site has also been really useful in code-review as a solid set of principles. I'm a bit late to the party given that the site says it was last updated in 2017. The tools and services it suggests are a bit outdated…
<iframe style="height:600px;" src="/games/picosnake/picosnake.html"></iframe> One of the first "technical" things I remember doing on a computer was making games in GameMaker 8 while watching old-school youtube tutorials . Playing and making video games was largely how I got into programming in the first place. The first "real" website I ever made was an Assassins Creed fansite I built for my…
Today I learned you can literally use Visual Studio Code as an SSH client . You just enter the server address, login, use the built-in terminal, open a folder as a project, and edit all your files as if they were on your machine normally. I don't know how I missed this for so long. I knew that you could use SSH to connect to remote machines or hosts in VS Code, but I always assumed that you had to…
I built out a /follows page that lists all the RSS feeds I'm subscribed too . Thankfully, Astro and Commafeed made this very easy to build out.All I needed to do was: figure out how to programmatically pull out the blogs I follow from commafeed (my feed reader) pull the blogs I follow but into an Astro page and create a basic template to display it. git commit, do a lil pull request, merge into…
AI and LLMs have been the hot-topic this year. While I don't think AI systems are wholly good , I do tend to think that it's impossible to put tech like this "back in the bag". You can either learn what's out there and know when it may be an appropriate tool to reach for (this can also be never: crypto had no real use-case, for example), or you can operate without that knowledge and operate as…
I just watched this talk by Andrej Karpathy, "Intro to Large Language Models". Large Language Models (or LLMs) being the AI systems that power tools like ChatGPT . I'm not neccesarily a stranger to LLMs. I've been exposed to the barage of AI news and watched a few small talks on them. I use tools like GitHub Copilpot and ChatGPT daily and I've even started building some toy/proof-of-concept…
Look at this photo I took at the grocery store a few days ago. All I wanted to know was the BIN number so I could easily pay for a pastry at checkout. Look at all the other stuff in this photo though. We got the tray, and the pastries on the tray, the out of focus tray below, the location metadata built into the photo, etc, etc. The data I needed was just like 6 characters. But it was way easier…
Bun v1.0 just launched, and I've been very surprised by how hyped people seem to be with the release. Deno (currently on v1.36) has been around for quite awhile, has seen pretty heavy adoption in certain circles and by certain companies (especially in edge environments like with Netlify Edge Functions and Cloudflare Workers ). I spent the afternoon digging around both Deno and Bun's sites, and…
I just deleted 8gb of old node_modules folders for inactive projects! Just run npx npkill in your terminal, and npkill will scan your hard drive for all your node_modules folders, display the last time they were accessed, and let you delete them. side note, npx is great for running node applications in a one-off context; Underappreciated NPM feature in my opinion. Thanks for reading this post in…
Thank you for saying it, Dave. My Markdown linter gets mad whenever I use <img /> tags. It drives me nuts. Either add proper image formatting to the spec, or let me use my HTML tags! Thanks for reading this post in your RSS reader! If you want to respond you can write me an Email or reach out on Mastodon . Read the full post on the site
I started as a Systems Analyst I at UFV on May 10th, 2021 and am stoked to be moving on up into a Systems Analyst II role as of May 17th, 2023. What I've been up to Honestly, it's hard to believe that it's been 2 years since I started at UFV. I've grown a lot in the role. I can't talk too much about what I've been up to but I can give a brief summary of the type of things I'm working on. I've had…
I just bought a physical copy of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom . Why? because I want to be able to play it in 4-5 years when Nintendo inevitably retires the Nintendo Switch online store. But why would Nintendo shut down their digital shop? Doesn't this mean everyone who bought digital copies won't be able to re-download their games? Yeah! it does! but check out what Nintendo did to their…
I was just reading through Maggie Appleton's post on "Computational Notebooks" [^1], and came across Google Colab which provides free cloud compute for Jupyter Notebooks. The notebooks are just saved in your google drive account, and it's dead simple to get up and running. Just open the link above, click "file" then "new notebook" and you're off to the races. I've used them for prototyping…
I just built a little "job" or "process" that monitors this site's RSS feed, and posts all new entries to my Mastodon account. So when I make a post here, it automatically gets syndicated out to Mastodon! Typically, I would build this all out from scratch (in the name of learning, of course!) and spend a whole afternoon on it, maybe even two or three afternoons if I'm being honest with myself.…
This is one of my favourite YouTube channels . They really capture the wonder of learning in a way I find really rare. Their videos always bring on a sense of nostalgic learning for me. I remember being a kid and reading books about robotics or space in my Oma's basement and just being stoked about the future. Their videos on space sciences and future-earth are always favorites of mine. As a…
I wrote a very "stream-of-conciousness" thread on AI and how we probably can't put it back in pandoras box on Mastodon. You can read it as a primer below: <iframe src="https://indieweb.social/@mykalmachon/110090905453454176/embed" class="mastodon-embed" style="max-width: 100%; border: 0" width="400" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><script src="https://indieweb.social/embed.js"…
Josh's post on AI, large language models like GPT3/GPT4, and what they mean for the future of Front-End Development (well, really work in general) is great. It sums up a lot of the feelings I have about the topic and is written much better than the mess of point-form notes I've been working on for the past few weeks. I would be lying if I said I was a little afraid about what a world with these AI…
I love containers. I think they're cool . Like any tech they have their issues[^1], but when done right enable automated deploys, self-repairing systems, and a direct programmatic "source of truth" interface for infrastructure. All of which can be a huge asset in an organization with a significant number of server-based applications, jobs, daemons, and systems. Despite all the benefits, and our…
I spent this past weekend at a cabin on an island. It was great.I wrote around 2000 words about this cabin on an island, and how it gave me some much needed perspective on life. I'm not going to share what I wrote though; it was a bit too personal. I'm just going to post some phone photos (forgot the real camera at home, whoops!) of views around said cabin instead. Let this post act as a quick…
The painting above is titled "The Realm of Convenience II" and was painted by Chris Woods in 1990.It's maintained by and on display in the UFV Permanent Art Collection[^1] My history with the painting This painting was on display between a bunch of classes I had at UFV and I would see it in passing regularly.As a busy student, I always liked the painting, but never engaged with it more than a 30…
I redid my site! ... again! I've been messing around with the look and feel of this site on a dev branch for a few months,and started a dedicated feature branch for the overhaul a few weeks ago. I'm pretty happy with the look , but I made more than just stylistic changes. I added some content types, ripped out some features,and moved all my old content over to /garden/posts So what gives? what is…
I've had a few friends ask for this recipe so thought I'd write it up on the blog. Commonly served after a hard day at work or when fighting off the cold; spice tends to clear out my sinuses. 🧑❤️👩 Typically serves 2 people ⏲️ Takes around 25-30 minutes to prepare I don't have exact measurements for a lot of things so you'll have to do some experimenting; I've been sort of keen to the "put sh*t…
I was gifted an espresso machine over the weekend. I've been enjoying experimenting with it and have already seen pretty significant progress. That said, I've still got a long way to go. Getting the machine has me revisiting some of my favourite coffee spots and thinking about how damn good they are. As with all coffee, there's definitely a level of "tuning" you have to do to get "good coffee"…
Happy New Year everyone! I've never written one of these "end-of-the-year retrospective" posts, and I've not been much of a new year's goals guy in the past (you can set goals any day, really). That said, I've seen a bunch of friends post retrospectives and goals for the year, so I wanted to join in and see what all the fun is about. Maybe I'll keep myself accountable to some goals and have a bit…
My Wife Kiya and I at my Father-In laws wedding. Thanks for reading this post in your RSS reader! If you want to respond you can write me an Email or reach out on Mastodon . Read the full post on the site
Flipnote Hatena is a now-defunct online platform based on sharing digital "Flipnotes". These were drawn in an app called " Flipnote Studio " released on both the DS and 3DS. Here's an example of an early Flipnote created by one of the devs: <iframe src="https://archive.sudomemo.net/watch/embed/mm3d05l2nc3bcftirpkwckwy1nvc" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" height="429" width="512"></iframe> I used…
This is a highly specific post about recovering failed NextCloud updates that will only really be relevant if you're hosting your own NextCloud instance. Feel free to skip this one if you're not interested! In all honesty, I'm mostly writing this for my future self 😅 At around 11:00 pm tonight I started a NextCloud update on my home lab. I thought "ehh, this will be fine!". It was not fine. The…
Advent of Code, day 6, is done! This was another quick one. """ Advent of code day 6: not writing a set of steps for this one because I already got it in my head 😎 """ from collections import Counter def load_file(): """load file in from input.txt """ with open('./input.txt', 'r') as file: return file.read().replace('\n', '') def string_has_unique_chars(string: str) -> bool: """check if a string…
Today's challenge , well uh... wasn't today's challenge 😅 I didn't write any actual code this weekend; instead opting to spend some time resting with family and friends. To be honest, I completely forgot about this challenge until about 10:30 pm today. So, with around an hour left in the day, I took a shot at part one of Advent of Code's day 3 challenge. Check out my solution below: """steps for…
Advent of code challenge #4 is done and dealt with! These last two challenges have been the first time I've used any sort of discrete math since university. Given all the discrete logic I've crammed into my brain from school, distilling these problems down to simple set math has made them quite a bit easier to work through. Here's my solution for part 1 and part 2 of day 4's challenge:…
Advent of Code challenge #5 is all done, and I'm officially caught up! The "hard-part" of this challenge for me was the just making the data usable. The actual task of moving the things around based on steps was pretty quick to implement. These are my-least favorite kind of advent of code challenges because it feels a bit like artificial difficulty in video games . The functionality that "solved"…
Today's challenge took a lot more code to solve than my solution for day 1 . There's just a lot of conditional branching going on. As far as I can tell that's sort of inherent to the classic "rock paper scissors" program this is based on, though. That said, I'm sure there's a "cleverer" way to solve this, with probably less conditional branching code-mess and more maps with pre-defined scores.…
As with most years, the advent of code challenges for day one were pretty simple! Regardless, I had some fun putting together some equally simple solutions. from functools import reducedef load_data(): with open('./input.txt', 'r') as file: return file.readlines()def calorie_by_elf(data): results = [] curr_elf = 1 # id for the current elf. May need this down the line curr_cals = 0 # accumulator…
A few friends and I were talking about the hot-topic of the Elon Musk twitter takeover, specifically, we were talking about this tweet: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!</p>— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a…
Ideally Let's Encrypt and Certbot will just ✨automagically⚡ generate all your SSL certificates, but if you're working with internal services (basically anything not exposed to the public internet), or legacy systems that are very specific about the CA / root certificate, you'll still need to generate some certificate signing requests (CSRs) and request a certificate the old-school way from someone…
As someone who's worked freelance on and off for years, I've heard quite a few people drop the phrase "we're not a tech company". This is usually said in a pessimistic tone after someone is pitched on a new website, a new business process automation, an application that could be brought in to save time, or some work to modernize an aging piece of tech already in their business. Every. single.…
It feels like a good chunk of the previously untouchable "tech giants" that rose to popularity (and generated buckets of money) over the last ten years are falling apart all at once. Elon just bought Twitter , and I'm not stoked about what he's got planned: Elon is touting "free speech" as the key to making Twitter "the de facto public town square". IMO this is a dog whistle for racists,…