Archive

Combine.social as an Org

Fixing your mastodon timeline - now with easy deployment for those who want to self-host.

From "It Works" To "It Scales"

Separate workers now work on a subset of all the users' timelines for all the users who signed up.

From "It Works For Me" To "It Works"

There is some significant work to get software from "it works for me" to "it actually works".

Fixing The Reply Count

There are a number of issues with the decentralized nature of the Fediverse. One of them is that we are not seeing replies from people we do not follow.

Monorepos Lead To Bad Developer Culture

Ironically, monorepos are better suited for small individual teams, and multirepos are better suited for large organisations.

Svelte Was Made By Vue Fans

I actually like the declarative feel of Svelte. I just don't like that it reminds me of a product which endorses malware. I don't think that is something to want to emulate.

Sandboxed NPM

I recently started a new project, and all the anxiety around someone running peacenotwar or other similar malicious code which would simply wipe my computer is coming up again.

Open Source Contribution Is… Interesting

I submitted a pull request to an open source project and it didn't get approved.

Trusted Time - Revisited

This is an implementation of a Time Stamp Authority (no longer RFC 3161, but instead Roughtime) using JWS.

Is Mastodon Development Sustainable?

We need a better way to keep Mastodon development moving forward.

Why Principle Of Least Privilege Is Bad

The Principle of Least Privilege is often bad – at least in the way that it is implemented in many companies today.

I may get defederated, and that’s ok

As a single user instance maintainer on Mastodon, the impact of defederation is much bigger on me than on the larger instances which could be self sufficient.

Don't buy NFTs

If you ever needed reasons not to buy NFTs, here are a few. And remember, friends don't let friends bet on stock markets, currency exchanges, or NFTs.

Making Nvm And Volta Co-exist With Zsh

When some projects use nvm and others use volta, then we need both to live side by side.

Setting up Kubernetes on AWS

I thought it was about time to do a definitive guide on how to set up EKS.

Google Analytics Without Cookie Popups

Get intelligence about user engagement without the poor user experience of intrusive cookie popups.

The Gig Economy Improves Employee Working Conditions

Opponents of the gig economy obviously never worked in a position with two weeks notice.

The case against serverless

Has lambda been superseded by kubernetes? Are we better off with the versatility of just instantiating a docker image than being forced into lambda protocols?

Freeing up local disk space

It turns out that iCloud does not necessarily free up disk space, even when you ask it to.

How I cleared my inbox of calendar updates

We all tried it. You invited a semi-large group of people to a meeting, and now you are getting spammed with calendar responses.

How I switched from classic hosting to Kubernetes

Kubernetes + helm does everything that provisioning server instances, configuring web server reverse proxies, and actually deploying your services does, all in one. It has to be complicated.

The perils of other peoples services

I created a completely self-contained reverse geo-location service which you can host yourself. Code and docker images available on github.

Trusted time

Time stamping is an increasingly valuable complement to digital signing practices, enabling organizations to record when a digital item—such as a message, document, transaction or piece of software—was signed.

Switching from Medium to Ghost

It seemed easy enough, if you already have a DigitalOcean or similar hosting provider. It all should be done in 5 easy steps. Getting the pre-built ghost image was the easy part.

Clean AppDelegate

The App Delegate has many responsibilites by default including crash reporting, analytics, setting up the CoreData stack, notifications etc.This breaks the Single Responsibility principle because the AppDelegate handles too many things.

How to use ZKP to prove set membership without exposing the set or the member

I present a simple example with a prover and a verifier who do not know each other in advance and only share data in the form of a commitment to a set. The source code to the cryptographic accumulator is an evolution of a product from starcoin which has an

From Swift to Kotlin and Back Again

This article is a reaction to the From Java to Kotlin and Back Again article, which I disagree with on pretty much every single point. Kotlin is popular, Kotlin is familiar if you are coming from iOS development. Kotlin gives you compile-time null-safety and less boilerplate than Java. Naturally, it’

Why we dropped Realm

Before we begin, I should describe why we started using Realm in the first place. Realm is fast. Really fast. At least in this comparison to SQLite + SharkORM. In most use cases, I rarely perform 10.000 select statements, and in most apps I have been a part of developing,