Michael F. Lamb @datagrok@cybre.space

I'm looking for employment again.

I'm good at Python, Git, Linux, and Django.

I have experience with CI/CD and AWS.

I'd be very excited to work for a nonprofit or to grow skills in Rust, Haskell, or embedded development.

I'm looking for part-time work but I'd consider a full time position that's flexible enough. I'm good at remote work; I cannot relocate.

To obtain a position that meets my needs I can in turn be flexible about compensation.

Available: October 1.

https://datagrok.org/resume/

Some workflows just re-build after the merge which might work but feels sloppy and redundant to me. Others just assume everything's fine.

Today I realized that you could use the hashes of the commits' associated trees to easily see if any code had changed.

🤔 When running CI, it should find all commits sharing the same tree object and mark them all with the success status. Or it should check for the existence of previously-built trees before launching build/test mechanisms.

Your CI system does a build and test on each pull request. It uses the GitHub API to apply a success status.

But the resulting merge commit in the first-parent history of master isn't the one marked as passed. And it's not obvious that its code hasn't changed from that of the tested commit.

To handle this, I used to think that CI should build from a local merge commit, but that diverges from typical GitHub PR workflow.

(1/2)

TIL if you're interested in, say, WikiMedia's release engineering process, you can just go spelunking through their whole issue tracker, kanban boards, ticket backlog, and meeting notes.

This is amazing. Every organization should be this open, for-profit or not.

I've had a harder time finding my bearings when it was my *own* employer and it was my paid job to do so!

I managed to squat 5x5 240lbs. in March, then fell off the wagon, on and off again, on again and stuck to it, and today I just cleared 255lb. That's more than I weigh, and more than I've ever done. Woohoo!

Still can't do a single unweighted pistol squat though, holy heck those are hard

#fitness

New Matt3o /dev/tty MT3 caps on my Mitosis #keyboard

The primary reason I got these was for the contoured profile and deep spherical concavity that feels very comfortable.

Outside of that, the legends are sub-optimal for me. No available set will fit my weird workman layout; I'll probably go back to DSA on this board until I'm touch-typing faster.

In hindsight I should have purchased three packs of blank keys instead of one full set of keys with legends. Oh well.

#mechanicalkeyboards

Just applied for a job that is a great match for my skills AND non-profit AND fully remote AND adjacent to academics and scientists and educators AND I've thought about a lot AND is a very visible public good 💦 💦 💦

I'm getting ahead of myself but holy cow if I got it I might even go so far as to mention my employer in my social media profile. I could be ... proud? Of where I work?

Okay okay I gotta tamp down my hopes or the letdown when they hire someone else will be too brutal hngggg

Something remarkable that the fediverse has given me recently is _several_ links to extremely interesting and well-written self-hosted blogs, not bound up in Medium dot com fuckery. The kind of thing that Facebook and its ilk have been killing, that I had assumed the web had already lost.

There's entries going back years, so it's not like this is from a resurgence of self-hosted content. I just wasn't getting that kind of link from birdsite or fb.

I need to get RSS back into my workflow 🤔

Today I stumbled across @jjg's "halfbaked ideas" repo: https://gitlab.com/jgullickson/halfbaked/

The inventor of IPFS has one too: https://github.com/jbenet/random-ideas/issues

As do I, that I want to clean up and publish asap.

I _love_ ideas-lists like this. Maybe because they give a finger to the idea that having a yard full of half finished projects is a shameful thing. Maybe in commiseration, as a constant stream of ideas with not enough time to execute on them is a terrible burden I know too well.

Anyway, post your own if you have 'em!

When you want to modify your database schema with zero downtime, you need to do 3 deploys:

1. update the client(s) to work correctly with both the old and the new schema
2. update the schema
3. update the client(s) to remove legacy code

This is usually called "seamless deployment" or "database refactoring."

Recently realized that this applies not only to database schemas and clients, but every pair of communicating programs where one of the two can't maintain backwards compatibility.

I made homemade pasta for the first time today and didn't fail too bad, but I neglected to cut them into pieces which is why I can now cross off my bucket list "eat fettuccine noodles as tall as myself"

I've got comments from people from 4 or more years ago on some of my public Github Gists that I've never noticed before 🤦🤦🤦

I have got to get that mess into GTD or something

I only noticed because someone emailed me about my scribbled notes for a base-building strategic card game idea today https://gist.github.com/datagrok/9107521

Which was nice tbqh

Yay! My new "switch to next layout / save layout" feature has landed in QMK master.

Right now it's only enabled on my layout for the mitosis keyboard, but I have plans to offer a PR that lets it be used by any keyboard. If you want it before then, copy/paste works 😬

https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/blob/master/keyboards/mitosis/keymaps/datagrok/keymap.c#L105

It's a tiny improvement, but it taught me a lot, including the need for PROGMEM when compiling C for AVR chips, and re-teaching me what the extern keyword does

#mechanicalkeyboards

So, I'm excited to be nearly finished with a patch to QMK that implements a "next layout" key. Just one key steps through all the available layouts, then you can use shift to make your choice persist across reboots!

https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware/compare/master...datagrok:e53ebd7

#mechanicalkeyboards

Most #mechanicalkeyboards running QMK firmware allow the user to select among a variety of popular layouts on-the-fly, like QWERTY, Colemak, Dvorak, and even Workman.

There's usually a dedicated key (maybe on a layer) for each layout. If you're a Workman user you'll probably press that key every time you plug in your keyboard, meanwhile the other selector keys take up space but never get used.

This can be a problem when you're working with a tiny 46-key keyboard.

(cont.)