Jesse Dearing

At my local hackerspace, there’s a kiosk with a touchscreen that is as a piece of art. The idea is that you trade a fraction of your “intangible essence” for convenience: find a parking space faster, shorter lines at the grocery store, your phone lasts 15% longer before needing a charge. It’s silly, but the kids loved to print out receipts.

I’ve been trying to motivate my kids to do more chores and this kiosk gave me an idea. What if I made a button that would print out a list of their chores for the day. It would give them something tactile and most importantly it wouldn’t be a screen they would have to check but then get distracted with.

I’ve been silent for a long time. Pretty much since all the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. I’ve been raising kids and in survival mode.

My learning hasn’t stopped even while surviving. Obviously I’m doing more with AI. It’s kinda hard not to in this industry. In addition to using an AI coding assistant for my day-to-day, I’ve helped build AI integrations in Observable Canvas by building skills and tools to improve the context quality. I’ve also been building more services and tools in Rust. Still rooted in infrastructure, I’ve most recently used my skills to write a client and server to manage VPN connections.

I tried VSCode for 3 weeks just because I had been working a lot with Terraform and other members of my team mentioned the various plugins available for Terraform. I found using VSCode to be a really wonderful experience.

Resilience engineering is becoming a required practice as people begin to expect services to be available nearly 100% of the time. We have the same requirements of the systems that sustain us: ecosystems, anatomical systems. Our world is one complex adaptive system after another.

The following CLI tools, I have found to be extremely useful when dealing with systems to quickly find the information I need. Please note that all these commands are being run from OS X and are the BSD commands not the GNU commands that typically ship with a standard Linux distro.

The concept of Mindset based on the work: Mindset by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. has been around for some time now, but recently I was thinking about root cause analyses meant as a tool for learning. Revisiting the John Allspaw post: The Infinite Hows (or, the Dangers Of The Five Whys) make me start thinking about what makes a lot of people look at postmortems as a checkbox or paperwork and not value them as learning experiences.