101–110 of 316 posts
I start with FoxPro so eventually get on the board of making a version of it ( https://tablam.org ), and now I'm regular at - https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/ and because this working on a RDBMs, so: https://www.reddit.com/r/databasedevelopment/
Personally I'm currently working on an AHCI storage driver (i.e, for talking to SATA drives) for my operating system.
There's a lot of information out there, especially at https://wiki.osdev.org/ about how to get code booting, and about lots of the basic hardware works. There's also places like https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/ for asking people for help.
I have been working on PlayStation 1 homebrew SDKs [1] and tools over the last year. Unlike other retro consoles - especially Nintendo consoles - the PS1 gets almost no attention at all; "PS1-style" games made using Unity or Unreal Engine seem to be decently popular, but nobody wants to bother with the real hardware anymore. Which is a shame, as the PS1 is a relatively simple platform which can be found for relativel…
Coffee I guess some things around coffee and espresso machines specifically. Depth-wise I had rebuilt some commercial machines but also just being in the forum and seeing other people's rebuilds. I wrote some software for a prosumer espresso machine that had it operating with a PID and was activating / deactivating and even had a super simple API with an iOS app (That was never submitted to the store). One day I'd like to get access to some specific old 80s-90s espresso machine that I could rework and upgrade with different stuff but not so much on the horizon due to rareness.
Plants I have a few hundred succulent plants of various types. Beyond collecting, attending meetups etc I've also grown from seed, grafted plants etc as well which is fun but I have limited space. I think one of the major things in the "scene" is to actually visit places like Mexico or Madagascar (random examples) in remote areas that have plants growing naturally. One day maybe I will have adequate space to do a lot more breeding and growing, there are some people in SF who are at the meetups who are a lot more into it (some professionally) doing cross breeding and all sorts of things or have encyclopedic knowledge.
AI images Very superficial but AI image generation is really interesting to me. Does playing around and joining subreddits count? My knowledge doesn't pass muster on this one lol
- Usenet (yes, it's still alive!)
- NNCP (friend-to-friend e2e encrypted network, doesn't need IP, can be airgapped)
- Yggdrasil (an IPv6 overlay mesh network)
- Retroshare (friend-to-friend P2P encrypted network with Chat, Messaging, and filesharing, and more)
- Urbit (weird, distributed computation network)
- Secure Scuttlebutt (P2P gossip-oriented network w/ crypto signatures)
- Gemini (simpler version of the Web, document-oriented)
There are definitely more projects out there but these are projects I play around with and enjoy using.
Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3. I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy thing…
To the best of the updates to my knowledge, they are much less powerful now than when we could use XUL many years ago...
I am not aware that the lackings forced around the time of the deprecation of XUL got fixed.
I still use browser forks to keep on using those vital extensions of yore (Scrapbook etc).
Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3. I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy thing…
That's awesome! I preordered. I've written one tiny browser extension once, which was really just for my own use, and I was a bit surprised at how hard it was to find anything that taught how to do it from beginning to end. The APIs were all well-documented, and there was a tutorial extension I could clone, but after that I was really left to searching through random blog posts and StackOverflow for help, since even…
If you're looking to get back on the horse, check out Plasmo https://www.plasmo.com/. It's by far the best and easiest platform for building and deploying extensions.
- Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics in developing countries. But also it's just technically and socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one size fits all industry solution and no…
Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code written in them. It was as if soon as the implementers actually tried to use the thing they created, they gave up.
So your experience isn't unique. I've also written a couple of concatenative languages and quickly abandoned them after trying to write more than toy programs and realizing I wasn't smart enough to reason about the stack in my head.