Similar to my decade-late discovery of Ruby on Rails, I recently discovered Elementary OS which is also a piece of often-overlooked technology from the 2007 technology era. This is a slightly edited version of a thank you post on their Reddit.
Swarm logic (or swarm intelligence) in software is a design approach where complex, intelligent behavior emerges from many simple agents following simple local rules — with no central controller coordinating them. Each agent only knows about its immediate environment and neighbors, yet the collective produces sophisticated global behavior. The “intelligence” lives in the system, not any…
The hosting landscape ranges from low-cost, high-maintenance to high-cost, low-maintenance solutions. The sequence is roughly as in the image below: full-on VPS => Heroku platform-as-a-service => containers services like Lightsail => serverless functions like on Vercel, Firebase, Cloudflare Workers.
At Pila, our immediate mission is to bring 21st-century energy resilience to every household and retire the gas generator for good. Distributing batteries throughout buildings for modern energy security is the first step. But as the grid breaks into a billion of these intelligent, independent systems, Pila’s far more ambitious goal is also to help define the systems and protocols to ensure they…
San Francisco seasons are like the expansion pack to the normal seasons. The base game had sun, snow, leaves & bloom. The developers were pushed to come up with new ones, and the best they could come up with is rain wind fog and another sun (but less hot). We just got a puppy. We’re currently the uncool parents with our puppy. We are learning to not be so distracted that we ignore our adult…
Transparency in open-source software
Ocean Beach has many, many moods, from windy spring, to gray summer, manic ecstasy of clear blue fall days to the doom and gloom of stormy winter.
It’s taken me 4 years of owning a Subaru Crosstrek to work out how to take my valet key surfing without putting the fob into a radio bag (so that the fob in the car doesn’t just keep the car unlocked). This is a key feature for people who transport water sports gear with their Subaru (as their ads would like to suggest they’re built for), yet couldn’t find it in the manual, on Youtube, or online.
In general, it seems like a bad idea to “start over from a clean slate” in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels.
Ever since Heroku turned off their free tier, many have been at a loss where to host small, hobby, or archived projects. Paying $12/mo for each one of them quickly adds up. I dislike modern Heroku alternatives like Render, Fly.io and others as they cost as much as Heroku, but are not as ergonomic in my opinion.