The path of Monastic Code Machine
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Ever since I was in sixth grade, I’ve been drawn to the machine like a moth to the flame. Last year, I turned 40 and am trying to stay retired from big tech. There are things that I miss like helping engineers blow past their limits, and there is the intoxication of massive scale. There are plenty things that I don’t miss which is why I recently completed six rounds of ketamine infusions which has been a fantastic introduction of psychedelics.
Making HTML the best that it can be
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Over the years, I’ve thought much about UIs from a low level, and for whatever mysterious reason I love building my own scene graphs, engines, frameworks, and what-not. In retrospect, this is an immature approach to a common problem which is the suck of development. Specifically, web development sucks tremendously for so many reasons. Worse yet, as we answer the siren call to make it better, we build a messy brittle unstable empire. We can take a look at the mess that is the current JavaScript front-end engineering body of work, and you don’t have to search far for frustration with npm, dependencies, poor quality, supply chain attacks, broken shit, abandonware, etc, etc, and etc. Generating complaints is like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka.
Infrastructure as User Generated Content
By Jeffrey M. Barber
A completely valid criticism of this project could be: Adama is an over-engineered bespoke piece of infrastructure in search of a problem. Fair. I had a great conversation a few weeks ago, and one of the things that occurred to me is that I’m sitting on a super power. Namely, I solved a problem of turning infrastructure into user-generated content. Allow me to ramble, dig into this, and expand.
Thoughts on Capacity Management (and more)
By Jeffrey M. Barber
This is an open design document and stream of consciousness flow session. As I’m trying to focus on getting to a minimally scalable version that is exceptionally low latency, I’ve running with my new storage engine called caravan which I’m optimistic about. I’m working on getting it deployed to production, and I’ll have introduced a single point of failure. Obviously, this has problems, but it’s also a common problem for many environments running a database.
My insight after a decade in distributed systems
By Jeffrey M. Barber
Ten years is plenty of time to accumulate generic career wisdom which I share on my personal page with my (poorly written) consolidated writings, but I want to focus on the key technical aspect of distributed systems. There are a lot of fundamentals to contend with, but I think the hardest to deal with is state. State is hard, and many people don’t want to deal with it (for very good reason).
Building a company around a toy requires embracing the toyness (and thinking beyond Excel)
By Jeffrey M. Barber
So, progress is going slow as I’m on the pathless path wandering.
It’s fantastic to wander, but I realized after reading How Tech Loses Out that I’m an anti-salesman and negative marketer. This section caused a bit of reflection:
So initially, your technical people are actually negative marketing. They recommend that people do not use your product, because they know how it was built. And like yeah, don’t, don’t buy it. So initially, the marketing skills of a company are actually negative.