Viewing profile — jake_morrison

I thought about doing this years ago, but without AI, the only way was to have people do the analysis. I thought this was bad karma, as I would end up paying people in Bangladesh t…

Embedded systems often have crappy compilers. And you sometimes have to pay crazy money to be abused, as well. Years ago, we were building an embedded vehicle tracker for commercia…

I am optimistic about Ubuntu Chilselled, which automates this process: https://canonical.com/blog/chiselled-ubuntu-ga Here is a full example: https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_cont…

Apple making cars was an interesting play when they had a bunch of cash overseas and good relationships with Chinese manufacturers. Tax law changes made bringing money back to the …

You can do something similar with docker compose, driving the system from the outside. Create dockerized versions of dependencies like the database, build and run tests, and then r…

Yeah, I actually used OpenEmbedded, the predecessor to Yocto. The project was in 2011.

A few years ago I did an embedded Linux project on an ARM7 CPU without an MMU, a vehicle tracker for trucks with GPS, cellular modem, ODB2 interface, and other I/O. Lack of MMU cau…

It's a bad market, probably the worst since 2000. Some of this is overhiring and zero interest rate behavior coming to an end. Companies are shifting from prioritizing growth to pr…

Sure, you can make deadlocks in any language, but it's uncommon in Erlang. Shared state is the exception, and message passing means that things that manage state, such as gen_serve…

In some companies, staff positions can only be effectively done by someone who has been there for 10 years. They know the specific tech stack that the company uses, know the applic…

Erlang is based on virtual threads (confusingly called processes). The Erlang virtual machine schedules them on OS threads. Erlang processes communicate using message passing, prev…

Like ogres

I had a client who spent $1M+ per year on Google Ads, and Google would fly them to California each year to meet with their account manager. I don't know what the equivalent GCP spe…

I am an American who has worked with startups in Taiwan for 30 years. I am happy to talk.

If you need a company in Taiwan, it's generally best to have your main company outside and have a branch in Taiwan. It has significant tax benefits, particularly for foreigners. A …

I built a mobile app to read data from blood glucose meters. It used a magic cable that talked to the meters using RS-232 and converted the data into audio, plugging into the audio…

The fundamental problem is that domain name trademark enforcement is handled by the legal department when it should be handled by marketing, business development, and/or DevRel. Wh…

I think Scrum is a transitional phase. It is a solution to the problem of having a dev team shared between multiple business functions. The dev team keeps getting yanked around and…

I use distroless images based on Debian or Ubuntu, e.g., https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example The result is images the same size as Alpine, or smaller, without the i…

When I was a kid I ran a lawn service, and I got all my engines out of the trash. When the mowers are cheap, it's rational. They get the lawnmower out of the shed the first time in…

I wish that everyone in the US had affordable, convenient, and private access to a doctor who could help them choose contraceptives and ensure no side effects. Unfortunately, that'…

Linux from Scratch is educational but fundamentally impractical to use. I recommend using embedded Linux instead, e.g. with Buildroot. You get an understanding of the fundamentals …

Many of the leading Linux users are never going to pay for RHEL. That includes expert users who don't need enterprise support. If you make them use something else, then that will b…

Thanks for your service supporting the Ansible community. Your books are also great, and I highly recommend them to anyone learning Ansible.

Ansible is still the best for tactical automation tasks. The syntax is also approachable for people who don't use it often, e.g. developers. Ansible has poor performance on larger …