blog.8-p.info

Because of Ben Kuhn recommended to provide a way to subscribe a blog via email:

“Doesn’t RSS work for that?” Yes; I and all three other people who still use RSS will be thrilled if you support it! But if you want your boring normal friends to be able to subscribe, you need email too.

And Chris Krycho said that people would reply to newsletters:

One of the best things about running a newsletter was that people would reply. It was like the best parts of social media without all the stupidity. Email is great! It’s terrible, too, especially in work contexts… but for this kind of thing, it’s mostly just great.

I decided to use Buttodown as my blogging platform this year, 2023. It has RSS and web archive and that’s all I need.

Things I made is the name of the newsletter. The name is preliminary. I want to name this thing something unique like Elephant Gym (that’s a band), Coding Horror (that’s a blog) and/or Put A Egg On It (that’s a zine)…

I’ve become a containerd committer yesterday. Derek opened a pull request in March 3rd and it was merged finally.

containerd as a project has two types of maintainers: “reviewers” and “committers”. Reviewers can review and approve pull requests. Committers can merge pull requests in addition to what reviewers can do. Originally only committers were considered as “maintainers”, but it was changed in 2021. Now maintainers = committers + reviewers.

I started contributing containerd back in March 2020. Fixing a cgroup bug was my first pull request, which was needed for Fargate Platfrom Version 1.4. Then I became a reviewer in 2021. Now I’m a committer.

It has been a great journey so far. I hope that continues! Well, now I have to do more than just hoping though :)

According to Quora itself, I joined Quora in March 2012, but I haven’t used much. No answers, no questions. Their “More related to [What you clicked a few days ago]” email is annoying.

So I’m deleting my account there.

Deleting an account in Quora is straightforward. Note that, if you login Quora via Google/Facebook, you need to create a password first.

I deleted my Instagram account in 2020. I haven’t deleted my Facebook account yet.

Because I always have hard time remembering which is “index” and which is “manifest”.

I personally think computer folks aren’t using utilize modern computers much. We can render full-color HiDPI images at 60 frames-per-second. Why do we stick with Markdown?

Note that the diagram above is still a draft.

It may be possible to include other two OCI specs and have hyperlinks in there.

The rest of this post is a collection of random links and thoughts.

SVG?

Reuters Graphics is doing pretty interesting stuff regarding text rendering. Seems it is originally from New York Times’ ai2html.

Text in images and SVGs scale as you scale the image — so your text becomes unreadable pretty quickly as the artwork scales down, or looks hilariously large as it scales up. By rendering the text as html, we can scale the “graphic” up and down, but keep the text readable at the same font-size and line-height.

Can I do the same?

Scrollytelling?

I’m still not so sure that scrollytelling is the way. It would force readers to consume information as the author like, but I don’t like the way it reduces information-per-second.

Figma?

Figma looks great. I don’t know that is due to the tool itself, or the fact that most people who use Figma are designers though.

Excalidraw?

Excalidraw looks also great and used by Ivan Velichko. I personally like Swiss-ish sans-serif though.

My elder kid loves mazes. So I made a maze generator in JavaScript. It is a dad-woodworking-like situated software. I probably don’t have to do it and google it from somewhere. But making day-to-day software feels good.

What is “Situated Software”?

Clay Shirky has written “Situated Software” in 2004.

Part of the future I believe I’m seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I’m calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I’ll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.

While this future hasn’t been there yet, I still like the essay. I hope public clouds and managed compute platforms¹ make that slightly easier. People who work on situated software may not be software developers in the traditional sense. They don’t have to worry about Linux kernel versions.

If you are interested, Nelson Elhage and Hillel Wayne have written about the essay in 2020.

Maze Generation Algorithms

The page is currently using a randomized depth-first search’s iterative version, which is described in the Wikipedia page.

C言語による最新アルゴリズム事典 also has a maze generation algorithm, but it is too terse for me. I bought the book long time ago and pretty excited to read about all of algorithms, but they were overall really terse, probably to fit in the print form.

The Pragramatic Bookshelf has Mazes for Programmers. I read a bit through O’Reilly’s subscription through my ACM membership.

React

I have used Nuxt (Vue) and Svelte a bit, but this is the first time I use React. It is good! The fact that I can make a pure JSX-returning function and call it a “React component” is refreshing.

That being said, the amount of the indirection between the React + TypeScript world and the web’s native form is overwhelming.