Jesse Dearing

Project: Chore Button

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:39:15 -0700

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.

What's happening?

Wed, 06 May 2026 18:57:05 -0700

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.

About me

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 09:36:50 -0800

My resume in two forms:

I’ve worked in technical leadership roles for site reliability engineering for many different organizations. I like to build platforms on cloud infrastructure to enable product organizations to focus on building the software and enabling them to ship to platforms that are reliable, compliant, and can be scaled with growth.

I love taking existing services and writing intelligent code to support the operations of those services. I have experience with security, Docker and technologies designed around Linux containers, AWS, cloud architectures, microservices, monitoring, and automation.

Giving VSCode a go

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:05:26 -0800

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.

Complex Adaptive Systems in Software

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 16:57:00 -0700

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.

5 CLI Tools all software engineers should know about

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 22:07:24 -0800

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.

Fixed vs. Growth System Failures

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:06:08 -0800

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.

Go is for .Close()’ers

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 10:35:32 -0800

The Close() method is important to the reliability of a running program and it’s not easy to tell when it should be used.

Who’s Running that on my System: Case of the stolen CPU

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 01:11:56 -0700

Last week, I found myself needing to find what application a query was originating from. My typical method for doing this is searching through source code before I eventually get angry that I can’t find the query originating from an ORM and start drafting an email decreeing that all applications get distinct logins to the database that I’ll never send because who is going to listen anyway.

I had an idea for how I can track a query all the way back to the process that accessed it and I even scripted it.