For those who don't know, I gave birth to my daughter, Willow Jean, in August 2024. I had an entirely uneventful pregnancy, even playing in a 36-hole, two-day men's golf tournament five days before she was born. She arrived via spontaneous unmedicated labor, and I was lucky that her delivery was uncomplicated and moved along reasonably quickly. I played A LOT of golf while pregnant, walking and…
EDIT: In June 2026, I finally received my membership card in the mail, which makes me an official member of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians! Miigwech. On August 1st, the Tribal Board of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians voted to open the membership rolls for the first time in decades. This is a huge moment for me, because although I am a direct descendant of somebody listed on the Durant…
Maven's first bird was a funny one. I don't recall the details leading up to the moment "dead bird!" rang out, but I'll never forget the heart thumping moment when I realized that my puppy, just weeks from her first birthday had done it—that she had found a grouse and held steady through the shot. I remember that I was shaking, a symptom of pure joy coursing through my veins, so you can imagine my…
I have maintained this website, taravancil.com , since 2014 . It was my final year of college, and I had been waiting years for the taravancil.com domain to become available. A few years prior, I had the inclination that I needed a website, and that it should be my name. I don't know why I felt possessed to have my own place on the Web; I had no idea I would eventually build a career as a software…
Maven pointed her first bird today. I cried. We were on one of our bird walks, working on the usual things— heel when we're near roads and snowmobile trails, come , sit , wait . At about an hour in, we hadn't seen any birds and we were both getting tired from walking in the snow, so I started directing us back to the car. Maven was working ahead of me and moved toward a small patch of hemlocks. I…
A running list of Maven's nicknames in no particular order. Donatella Santiago Stinkerdoodle Mavy Bean Sweet Pea Poopies Mike Dyson Goebbels (when she's being a shit) Little Shit (also when she's being a shit) Chocolate Croissant Stinky Bean Jumping Bean Bean Sprout Beanie Baby Mavis (courtesy of my cousin Tanner) Coach Beard Stinky Mama Stinky Poo Smooth Slick Gene Simmons Poo Poo Magoo Whisker…
It was a big, heavy year, but I can't in good faith say that it was trash (see 2021 , 2020 ). I'm stepping out of 2022 feeling proud, happy, hopeful, and loved, which is a major improvement on how I felt one year ago. This pretty much captures the vibes of my 2022. Could be worse. Big Life Changes At the end of 2021, I was heartbroken, out-of-place in a place that I had accidentally made home, and…
The Beaker Browser project has officially been archived. If you're interested in learning more about the project's backstory, successes, and failures, I recommend reading Paul Frazee's post-mortem . When I left Beaker four years ago (gosh dang time flies), I had no doubt it was left in good hands. There is no such thing as smooth waters in the business of running a decentralized web startup, but I…
Meet Maven. Maven is a nine-week-old German Wirehaired Pointer . Eventually she'll be my hunting partner in the grouse woods, but for now she gets to just be a puppy. She already knows her name and responds to come . She's stubborn, food-driven, and has more energy than her legs know what to do with. We're a lot alike. I love her. Maven running with a freshly-sharpened filet knife in her mouth.
Today I shot and killed an animal for the first time. I've been looking forward to this moment for so long that it almost feels uneventful. Certainly overdue. * * * I grew up in a hunting and fishing family, and I was lucky enough that the men in my family nourished my interest in the outdoors (sadly this is not a given.) I'm told there exists a picture of a toddler Tara holding a pair of…
This post has a soundtrack . Like 2020 , 2021 was trash. But a different kind of trash? It was also big and transformative and important. I'm still grateful to be alive, housed, and fed. I'm stepping into 2022 with no goals, only vibes. These are the vibes: Here are some 2021 highlights. Babby's First Car Accident I got into a car accident. Some ding dong ran a red light and t-boned me. I got a…
2020 was trash. I don't have much to say about it. I'm just thankful to be alive, housed, and fed. Here's our Christmas card: A picture of our Christmas card, because lol, I'm not about to recreate that layout with CSS Grid. We didn’t have high hopes for 2020, and boy, it did not disappoint. On Thanksgiving of last year, Adam’s daughter Alexis was diagnosed with leukemia. She spent December in the…
Here’s the news: I’m joining Glitch ! I’m joining as a front-end developer on the community team, where I’ll help maintain glitch.com . Illustration from glitch.com In November, I announced that I was leaving Beaker [1] . In short, I left because I want to be a full-time developer, but Beaker needed me as something more like a developer advocate/designer combo. I still love Beaker very much! It…
I’m leaving Beaker ! You might be expecting this post to expose a controversy or detail complaints about working on the project, but there is no controversy, and the complaints I do have will be familiar to anyone who’s formed a company or maintained an open-source project. I’m leaving Beaker because I want to be a full-time developer. I was a developer on Beaker—I built Beaker’s internal…
My kitchen is by no means a shipwreck, but there’s definitely room for improvement. I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Airtable which proclaims to help you “organize anything”, so I thought “hey some organization can’t hurt” and spent Sunday inventorying my entire kitchen. I've spent the day putting my entire kitchen inventory and my recipes into @airtable and this is one of the best Sundays…
Updated August 31, 2018. Originally published on January 4, 2018. I publish this website on dat:// and https:// . As of August 31, 2018, my publishing workflow involves three tools: Hugo , a static site generator The Dat CLI , for publishing updates to the Dat network homebase , for syncing updates from the dat:// version of my website to the https:// version 1. Building my website This website is…
2017 was my most productive year yet. Not because I achieved superhuman levels of productivity, but because I made the transition between figuring out what to do with my life and doing something with my life. It feels damn good. The year began on a high note: I had just moved back to Texas after spending three months in New York while at the Recurse Center . Even better, I started my first…
Today Code for Science and Society (CSS) announced that its Executive Director, Max Ogden , will step down from all leadership activities related to CSS and the Dat Project . You can read the Dat team's complete statement , as well as the CSS board's statement . Beaker's Involvement I work on the Beaker browser , and part of our core technology is dat:// , a peer-to-peer protocol that's developed…
On Writing is part-autobiography and part-styleguide, and much less tactical writing guide than one might expect from a book about writing. King's recounting of how he became a writer is scattered with side-stitching stories about poison ivy and heartwarming affirmations of his wife Tabby's role in his success. You might think an autobiographical undercurrent would be gratuitous or boring, but…
We’re Blue Link Labs, the creators of Beaker, a peer-to-peer Web browser. Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve launched Hashbase, a fungible hosting service for the peer-to-peer Web. Read more on Medium »
One of the most interesting phenomena on the Web is the popularity of services like GitHub, CodePen, and Glitch, which provide tools for sharing, duplicating, and remixing other people’s projects. The practice of learning from and using existing code as boilerplate is a critical piece of what’s made innovation on the Web platform so open... Read more on the Beaker blog »
The spirit of openness has been baked into the Web since its formation. The Web was built to share documents written in plain text that could be downloaded and viewed transparently... Read more on the Beaker blog »
Earlier this month, I spoke at bangbangcon about how Merkle trees are the backbone of nearly all decentralized technologies. Here is a summary of my presentation: The Web Is Centralized, but Why? There are two powerful centralizing forces that affect how the Web works today: The server problem Host-based addressing We'll address them in turn. 1. The Server Problem If you want to host files on the…
We’re big fans of Markdown, so we’ve built in support for Markdown formatting to Beaker... Read more on the Beaker blog »
Today I worked on a fun 'lil set of p2p exercises written by mafintosh . I wrote a very basic p2p chat tool, which at the moment requires that the network be fully connected, or rather that each node in the system is connected to every other node. The code is on GitHub , so you can try it out for yourself! In 3 separate terminals run these commands, which will connect three peers and allow them to…
I'm reimplementing my cryptopals solutions in Python, and today I worked a challenge that required me to calculate the Hamming distance between two equal-length strings. Hamming distance is a measure of difference - it indicates how many corresponding characters in the input strings are different. For example, the Hamming distance between TARA and TART is 1. Well, that's not entirely true. More…
Today I moved fast and broke things -- this site to be specific -- but it's all OK because I know what went wrong and (I think) I know how to fix it! Here's the short story: I currently host this site on Amazon EC2, but since it's just a static site, it's hard to justify the cost of EC2, especially since there are much cheaper options that still allow me to manage my TLS certificates (which is a…
Today I read a lot. Per the recommendation of Mike Nielsen , I'm working through The TCP/IP Guide and practicing working with Wireshark along the way. I also re-read some parts of the Raft paper , specifically focusing on the the arguments that support Raft's safety guarantee -- the guarantee that it if any server has applied a log entry to its state machine, then no other server may apply a…
I've been practicing evaluating time complexity with Big O notation, and while I can intuitively recognize when an algorithm runs in linear time, constant time, or quadratic time, I've not been able to intuit why and when a runtime is O(log n) or O(n log n). Until today! So here are some notes that hopefully will be helpful for understanding why a program has a time complexity of some factor of…
Today was great . Something I'd been trying and failing to understand for days finally clicked, and it feels so good. Basically I didn't intuitively understand why an algorithm is O(log n) or O(n log n), but now I do! I wrote a post so that if I ever forget I'll have notes to help me relearn it. It finally started making sense because while I was learning about the heap data structure and trying…
I don't have a formal CS education, so one thing I'm focusing on at RC is filling in the gaps in my knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Today I focused on sorting algorithms. I learned about and implemented insertion sort and quicksort , in the process became much more confident with Big O notation. I used to be intimidated by evaluating algorithm efficiency, but as with most unfamiliar…
Today was marked by the realization that when one asks for help at the Recurse Center, amazing things happen. I woke up this morning with the intention of addressing the issue with my zsh configuration as quickly as possible. The bug had dragged on to the point that I was thoroughly frustrated, so before I spent any time tackling it myself, I asked for help in zulip and sure enough a bunch of…
Today was the first "regular day" of RC, wherein the schedule was structured as it will be for the remainder of the batch. I started the day with two goals: Make the process of publishing new posts to this blog as frictionless as possible. Work on the password manager that I wrote in Rust. I didn't complete either of these tasks, but I made progress on #1 and was really productive in some other…
Today was the first day of the Recurse Center. I've understood for a while that RC is a special place that attracts special people, but experiencing it firsthand was better than I could have imagined. I met so many smart, curious, and kind people and I can barely believe I have the opportunity to be colocated with these folks for three whole months! Most of the day was spent socializing or…
Lately I've been spending my time learning and practicing Rust, in part because I want to learn more about systems programming, but also because I'm interested in financial cryptography, and I suspect that when Rust is mature enough, many blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. applications will be built in Rust. From the outset, I knew that learning systems programming was going to be a huge…
The W3C WebAppSec working group is tasked with developing web standards to tackle some of the most persistest threats on the web. Whole categories of attacks, like cross-site scripting (XSS), are largely understood and preventable, yet tragically few web pages implement proper defenses. This suggests there is an opportunity to build better tools that enable developers to practice better web…
Yesterday I spoke at AustinJS about in-browser cryptography, and the future of cryptographic protocols being executed by JavaScript. I addressed some of the challenges of cryptography running in the browser and how we might tackle them in the future. I'd like to expand on some of the topics I discussed, and a few others I didn't have time to address. Current Tools Are Not Usable If you use GPG to…
After Zooko introduced me to TextSecure/Signal a few months ago, I started using Signal for all of my encrypted asynchronous messaging. The app is terrifically usable, and most of my friends use it, so I was excited to start using the app. But I wasn't satisfied with just using the app; I wanted to understand what was going on behind the scenes, so I dove in and tried to understand as much as I…
I used to clip coupons. I learned how to pinch pennies from the best. My dad was a frivolous man, and my great grandmother even more so. At Christmas, we unwrapped gifts with a careful touch and refolded the wrapping paper to be used again the following year. She really didn't need to reserve such fiscal caution, and everyone in the family always shared knowing glances as we carefully removed the…
After leaving university in the spring semester of my senior year, I've reflected deeply on my decision, and my college experience as a whole. While this doesn't capture my thoughts perfectly, I'll share a piece I wrote for a student-run publication at my university. The editor asked me to share something about my story. She thought it was inspiring, and that dropping out took some sort of…
I recently watched Lost in Translation , a film chronicling the loneliness of two Americans in Tokyo. One a young philosophy graduate and wife pondering her purpose over cigarettes and the Tokyo skyline from her hotel window, another a jaded movie star-turned-TV commercial actor burning cigars and time in a hotel bar between shoots. Their friendship, while forbidden by their respective marriages,…
Cobbling and exploring the caverns of discomfort. Laboring 'til a project's thorough completion. Reveling in piercing rawness and intimacy. Happiness, as I know it, is a product of the realization that prior-known happiness was only a preview.
I've been prompted to respond to the question, How do you define success? Rather than being bound to narrow definition of reproductive success, humans are capable of cognition that offers us the opportunity to rethink success as imposed by parents, teachers, and perceived social mores. Seriously, wrap your head around this thought for a moment. You define your own success. I propose that…
This morning my grumblings were fueled by my vexation that the luxury of solitude would be stolen away from me by my required participation in...wait for it...human interaction. I know, right? What a pain. Actually, my attitude this morning wasn't an anomaly. After picking my brain, I can't recall a day of my life in which disgust aimed at human interaction didn't pervade my thoughts. The very…
During an afternoon bike ride through downtown Mt. Pleasant, I found myself dodging dozens of people shouting protests against Monsanto, an agricultural company infamous for its purportedly shady business practices and use of genetic engineering. Observing this March Against Monsanto from a distance, repeated chants of "Hell no! GMOs!" served as the cadence of my whirring mind as I considered…
As a student at Central Michigan University, I'm granted access to a multitude of academic journals. The most reputable of these journals circulate revolutionary insights that aim to tackle some of the most pressing and fascinating queries of this century: HIV treatment, bacterial antibiotic resistance, quantum theory, and global climate change. At any moment, I can log onto the university…
This summer I'm participating in the CMU McNair Scholars Program Summer Research Institute (SRI) which involves conducting an independent research project with a faculty member, preparing to take the GRE in August, scoping out prospective graduate schools, and readying myself apply to graduate school. Oh, and engaging in personal growth too. I plan to chronicle my experiences as a McNair Scholar…