Xe, thank you so much for your work. I love reading your blog, it’s calming and makes me laugh. I look up to you as someone who I would like to be in my professional life. Best wishes :)
Thanks! I recently just got a new lens for my camera after all of the income from last month came in. It's a very used 35mm lens for my D3300 and the autofocus is a bit broken, meaning that I'm forced to do the focus manually (which is something I want to get better at anyways).
Ethical Ads (https://www.ethicalads.io/) looks interesting, wish there were more ad-tech companies like this. Would love one focused on the travel niche.
Thanks! I have been working on that style of writing some more. I have another story in that "universe" called Protos (https://xeiaso.net/blog/protos) that you may enjoy. I'm working on some more, but it's a very subtle kind of magick that you have to poke at from all angles simultaneously. It takes effort.
I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, I might do one about spatial computing. That seems like it could be a fun topic for this kind of satire.
Here's hoping! I have also been bringing that energy to the work blog (eg: https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel), and it's been working really well. I'm working on turning the user personas that we're tracking in DevRel into Socratic characters. It's a slow process, but writing is never fast consistently.
Thanks! I try. Hacker News isn't my primary target audience, but I've come to peace with the fact that I'm well-loved there. I could really do without the harassment from the less tolerant side of the userbase, but I figure that this is the price of success.
I really like your website/blog! It's one of my fav blogs out there that I'd wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. I also like the fact that the ads are not intrusive at all
It's just enough to be a headache tax-wise, but not enough to be a viable replacement for my dayjob. Something like $50-$200 USD per month. Slow months are less, months where I post bangers are more. Combined with Patreon (consistently $200 per month), it's enough to make all of my hosting costs covered. It's seriously incredible that I can have that much support for not a lot of work. I am also looking at further cost-optimizing things so that I can move my website to something like Fly. My server that my website is hosted on is like 55€ per month and the main reason it needs something that chonky is because Tokio performs better when there's more runner threads.
Otherwise I've also been considering pooling money for a bit and buying a proper server to drop into a datacentre near where I live. That could be fun!
This was an interesting read but didn't describe what it was like to _use_ today, other than comparing UI interaction to older and modern devices. Did you try using it as your everyday music player?
The blog and the website is statically generated using a Common Lisp program. Only the comment form is dynamic and served using a tiny web application, also written in Common Lisp. See https://github.com/susam/susam.net for the source code.
You probably have seen this in the front page sometime last week due to the "Fast machines, slow machines" post :)
I started this blog during exams session back in university and I'll reach the 20-year mark next year. Wow. I write about my own projects, but also tech in general based on my current interests, which at the moment are around Rust, Bazel (again), and Unix systems in general.
It's interesting how the blog has changed: I used to write short posts almost daily describing whatever I had been tinkering with in open source projects (back when I contributed to NetBSD and Gnome regularly)... or whatever crossed my mind really. These days, most of those misc posts go into social media, and the blog is reserved for purposeful articles, which end up being much longer (and thus infrequent).
Commenting on the blog used to be much more common years ago, but these days discussion happen off-site in either social media or here. Similarly, people used to visit the blog periodically, but these days nobody does: traffic to the blog is either from organic searches or from spikes due to referrals from sites like HN.
As for how I build it: the posts are written in Markdown; I use Hugo to generate the site; Bootstrap for styling; and my custom web service (EndTRACKER) to offer email subscriptions, post voting and commenting, as well as privacy-respecting analytics.
Hey, I read your blog after you commented in another topic that was created with a link to my blog.
I didn't have the right context then to mention it, but now I do: I really enjoyed your topics on Bazel and especially the "A persistent task queue in Rust" post which I learned from.
I went back far enough that day to the point that some of your posts looked like they were taken from twitter threads, and I wondered how that worked.
If you're ever looking to work in GameDev (in Europe), hit me up.
The Bazel posts stopped for a while after I left Google, but I'm now back at a different place where I'm working with Bazel once again. So you can expect the posts on this topic to gradually come back :) (For some context, here is one: https://medium.com/snowflake/addressing-bazel-ooms-38023b736...)
Let's see if my plans to return to Europe in the next few years play out...
Edit: Oh, and the few posts that look like Twitter threads (they are tagged like that) are hand-crafted and were an experiment. I first wrote the threads as blog posts, ensuring each paragraph fit in a tweet, and then copy/pasted them into Twitter. I wrote them as a blog post because I wanted to have the "unrolled" version in the canonical source for future reference, without relying on those unroll apps.
I was going to just reply with a link to Frank Zappa's Muffin Man, but then I thought I'd better just check to see if there was any direct influence, however vanishingly unlikely that seemed.
And lo! The footnote on the about page even has a link to the song.
My most played Zappa song, sitting just above Eat That Question, Peaches En Regalia, and Montana (apologies for how mainstream that selection is).
Going to see an unbelievably talented Zappa cover band in a couple of weeks, here's a sample of their wares:
Fun story, while we were in high school, my friend's computer broke down. All of his music was on it, so I borrowed him a bunch of CDs. He really liked Zappa's "Strictly Commercial" compilation and he became obsessed. Fast forward a couple of years and he is the one sending me Zappa's bootlegs and weird recordings which I would probably never heard otherwise. He even created a compilation for me, which he named "Almost Commercial" and I cherish it dearly :)
Around 2006 these "desktop" webapps was getting popular, there are some with even more comprehensive features (for its time) which I forgot the name (probably OnlineOS, can't verify it because it's dead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_OS).
Readit News
Near 400 posts, writing about a lot of stuff. Here's some of my favorites over the years:
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/anything-message-queue - Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/a-weapon-to-surpass-metal-gear - A weapon to surpass Metal Gear
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/%F0%9F%A5%BA - : the best sudo replacement
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/sleeping-the-technical-interview - Sleeping Through the Technical Interview
- https://xeiaso.net/blog/experimental-rilkef-2018-11-30 - I Put Words on this Webpage so You Have to Listen to Me Now
https://xeiaso.net/feeds to subscribe. Been considering an email list.
I'm sure I'll come up with something eventually, I might do one about spatial computing. That seems like it could be a fun topic for this kind of satire.
https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-aws-2021-08-11 is one of my personal favorites, as well as https://tailscale.dev/blog/headscale-funnel
Otherwise I've also been considering pooling money for a bit and buying a proper server to drop into a datacentre near where I live. That could be fun!
Been writing on it for almost 18 years - a mix of tech, design, photography. Custom designed myself, but built with Jekyll.
Some recent posts:
- https://paulstamatiou.com/stuff-i-use/ (a set of "gear" pages i've been trying to keep up to date)
- https://paulstamatiou.com/digital-clutter/ (Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes)
- https://paulstamatiou.com/revisiting-the-apple-ipod/ (Revisiting the iPod: Buying and using a 20 year old iPod)
- https://paulstamatiou.com/craft/ (Craft: Thoughts on elevating product quality)
- https://paulstamatiou.com/building-a-windows-10-lightroom-ph... (Building a Lightroom PC: Why I switched to Windows and built a water-cooled 5.2GHz editing machine)
This was an interesting read but didn't describe what it was like to _use_ today, other than comparing UI interaction to older and modern devices. Did you try using it as your everyday music player?
One question: do you feel your organic traffic is hurt due to the fact your blog topic is too wide?
Found your site a long time ago, and love the design.
I have been writing here since 2001. I write infrequently, so there are only about 50 posts so far. Some of my favourite posts:
- https://susam.net/blog/lisp-in-vim.html
- https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html
- https://susam.net/blog/peculiar-self-references.html
- https://susam.net/blog/langford-pairing.html
- https://susam.net/blog/self-printing-machine-code.html
The blog and the website is statically generated using a Common Lisp program. Only the comment form is dynamic and served using a tiny web application, also written in Common Lisp. See https://github.com/susam/susam.net for the source code.
Infamous for discussions of Go.. (vs Rust..) but mostly it's me getting excited about learning & teaching computery stuff like:
ICMP in Making our own ping: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-ping ELF in Making our own executable packer: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-executable-pac... HTTP 1&2: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-http-crash-course-nobod...
Anyway yeah! Some folks hate it some folks love it, we need stuff for everyone.
Anyhow; thanks for everything you make! I hope your face is feeling better these days.
You probably have seen this in the front page sometime last week due to the "Fast machines, slow machines" post :)
I started this blog during exams session back in university and I'll reach the 20-year mark next year. Wow. I write about my own projects, but also tech in general based on my current interests, which at the moment are around Rust, Bazel (again), and Unix systems in general.
It's interesting how the blog has changed: I used to write short posts almost daily describing whatever I had been tinkering with in open source projects (back when I contributed to NetBSD and Gnome regularly)... or whatever crossed my mind really. These days, most of those misc posts go into social media, and the blog is reserved for purposeful articles, which end up being much longer (and thus infrequent).
Commenting on the blog used to be much more common years ago, but these days discussion happen off-site in either social media or here. Similarly, people used to visit the blog periodically, but these days nobody does: traffic to the blog is either from organic searches or from spikes due to referrals from sites like HN.
As for how I build it: the posts are written in Markdown; I use Hugo to generate the site; Bootstrap for styling; and my custom web service (EndTRACKER) to offer email subscriptions, post voting and commenting, as well as privacy-respecting analytics.
I didn't have the right context then to mention it, but now I do: I really enjoyed your topics on Bazel and especially the "A persistent task queue in Rust" post which I learned from.
I went back far enough that day to the point that some of your posts looked like they were taken from twitter threads, and I wondered how that worked.
If you're ever looking to work in GameDev (in Europe), hit me up.
The Bazel posts stopped for a while after I left Google, but I'm now back at a different place where I'm working with Bazel once again. So you can expect the posts on this topic to gradually come back :) (For some context, here is one: https://medium.com/snowflake/addressing-bazel-ooms-38023b736...)
Let's see if my plans to return to Europe in the next few years play out...
Edit: Oh, and the few posts that look like Twitter threads (they are tagged like that) are hand-crafted and were an experiment. I first wrote the threads as blog posts, ensuring each paragraph fit in a tweet, and then copy/pasted them into Twitter. I wrote them as a blog post because I wanted to have the "unrolled" version in the canonical source for future reference, without relying on those unroll apps.
I've been writing for a while now. Mostly front-end development, random experiments and creative coding.
My most popular post that was on the first page of HN earlier this year: https://muffinman.io/blog/draw-svg-rope-using-javascript/
I'm pretty proud of my generative, pen plotted drawings: https://muffinman.io/art/
And one of my favorites: https://muffinman.io/blog/breaking-down-krypton/
Edit: Typo.
And lo! The footnote on the about page even has a link to the song.
My most played Zappa song, sitting just above Eat That Question, Peaches En Regalia, and Montana (apologies for how mainstream that selection is).
Going to see an unbelievably talented Zappa cover band in a couple of weeks, here's a sample of their wares:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kv_U83DPZUw&feature=share7
Fun story, while we were in high school, my friend's computer broke down. All of his music was on it, so I borrowed him a bunch of CDs. He really liked Zappa's "Strictly Commercial" compilation and he became obsessed. Fast forward a couple of years and he is the one sending me Zappa's bootlegs and weird recordings which I would probably never heard otherwise. He even created a compilation for me, which he named "Almost Commercial" and I cherish it dearly :)
And thanks for the video, they sound really good!
I'm proud of my scribbles and the whole process, but I didn't expect the post would explode on HN. It really made my day.
https://dustinbrett.com/
Around 2006 these "desktop" webapps was getting popular, there are some with even more comprehensive features (for its time) which I forgot the name (probably OnlineOS, can't verify it because it's dead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_OS).
Mine is eatonphil.com. Some of my favorite posts:
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/zigrocks-sql.html: Writing a SQL database, take two: Zig and RocksDB
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/documentdb.html: Writing a document database from scratch in Go: Lucene-like filters and indexes
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-05-25-raft.html: Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/lua-in-rust.html: Writing a minimal Lua implementation with a virtual machine from scratch in Rust
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/parser-generators-vs-handwritten...: Parser generators vs. handwritten parsers: surveying major language implementations in 2021
- https://notes.eatonphil.com/emulating-amd64-starting-with-el...: Emulating linux/AMD64 userland: interpreting an ELF binary