Viewing profile — heathjohns

SEEKING WORK | Canada, West Coast | Remote | Senior Dev My specialty is startups and early-stage - gap-filling and jumping in as a swiss-army knife. I have a business degree and de…

While you're right in terms of technical prowess, there absolutely is a use case for BSD: it has a distinct culture with different values. There's a large group of people in techno…

I switched to desktop Linux in 1999, and then to FreeBSD around 2014. For me it's about culture. When you use software you're interacting with hundreds of decisions that the devs m…

Good point - sorry if my comment was a derail!

It's a different mechanism with the same outcome. If the scale of a solution is so immense that only one or two of the largest corporations in the world can realisitically implemen…

I think we need to zoom out more, even. The focus on freedom is too narrow - freedom at the cost of becoming disconnected is a raw deal. What we want is power. In the desktop era, …

Similar in that you get to keep your own data. Different in that it's lower level - it's not a social networking protocol - it's something you can build a social networking protoco…

It's stored on the server.

Names are big chunky things - you want to use them as sparingly as possible, and in general they should be "well known" - meaning a list function (which does exist as pub.srv.edsu.…

Very nice of you to say. Thanks for your interest, and best of luck :)

Thanks for your interest! It is indeed stored on an Edsu server. The data format is trivial and completely specified, so switching providers should be straightforward (an Edsu app …

Sorry about that, and thanks for the bug report! I haven't been able to test with an iOS device yet - I'll get on that.

From a quick look through remoteStorage, it looks to me like it's is focused on storage (and so appropriately named!), while Edsu is more explicitly a foundation for applications. …

Edsu's data store is content-addressed - i.e. everything is hashed and immutable from a storage perspective. A great thing about this is it makes a lot of caching problems simply g…

Funnily enough, Edsu and git's data stores are very similar in that they're both Merkle trees. It means that they both have similar benefits of trivial checkpointing, automatically…

Thanks for reading! If an app wanted to be able to switch something from public to private or back, it'd get a token with write permissions for two names, one with the prv.* prefix…

(Oh man, sorry, this ended up being an essay!) Take, for instance, statically-hosted HTTP: if I'm, say, hosting at AWS and I want to switch to Netlify, it's trivial - I just change…

It's only because FreeBSD is my desktop OS, and so I used kqueue during dev. I understand that there's a compatibility shim for Linux, so theoretically a port should be quite easy.…

Thanks! One of the goals of Edsu is that it's simple enough that you can "telnet" in and just talk directly to the server like you can with HTTP or SMTP. It can seem like a trivial…

I absolutely sympathize with the concern - but I don't believe it's an a priori solvable problem. Bitcoin is theoretically fully decentralized, but when I sold mine off it took 2 d…

You're right about the sync part, but it's an old skool client-server sync, not a peer-to-peer one.

You can run an Edsu server locally, but I wouldn't. It's meant to be run on an internet-accessible server - a $2.50/month VPS would do, or if you don't want to run your own there's…

Good point, and you're right: the buck has to stop somewhere. However, Edsu is a federated protocol with an open source implementation. So it only disappears when the last person t…

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