heathjohns

6 ms·

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by heathjohns 4y ago
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 decades of deep technical skills throughout the whole stack,
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by heathjohns 5y ago
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 technology who don't really care how something work
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by heathjohns 7y ago
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 made, and the more they think like you the more t
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by heathjohns 7y ago
Good point - sorry if my comment was a derail!
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by heathjohns 7y ago
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 implement it, then you've got a duopoly and all the bad p
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by heathjohns 7y ago
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, having source code gave us power, so we associated the two
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 protocol on .
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by heathjohns 8y ago
It's stored on the server.
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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.listings.names, though it's currently not som
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by heathjohns 8y ago
Very nice of you to say. Thanks for your interest, and best of luck :)
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 to do the data transfer would be easy to write, and I plan
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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.
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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. One place this shows up is that Edsu has a permissions
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 go away. So while there's no explicit support for
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 deduplicating revision histories, etc. So if you
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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, and one with the pub.* prefix. And that's a g
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by heathjohns 8y ago
(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 the place I upload my files to and switch the DNS
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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. The bulk of the code is in Rust, and that shoul
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 feature, but I've found that being ab
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 days to sync the chain - I get why people use Coinb
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by heathjohns 8y ago
You're right about the sync part, but it's an old skool client-server sync, not a peer-to-peer one.
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 at least one provider that will d
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by heathjohns 8y ago
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 to care about it stops keeping it up to date with the c
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Show HN: A note-taking web app that won't ever betray you(noteto.me)
156 points by heathjohns 8y ago|74 comments
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by heathjohns 8y ago
https://i.imgur.com/bMi0S.jpg
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by heathjohns 8y ago
Author here - I'm happy to answer any questions :)
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Launching Edsu: Changing the Economics of Online Open Source(edclave.com)
3 points by heathjohns 8y ago|2 comments
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by heathjohns 8y ago
Yep. Got a dog. That furry little bastard is an unrelenting alarm clock.
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by heathjohns 9y ago
With apologies for plugging my own project: https://www.blinklight.io/ starts right at the ground level.
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by heathjohns 9y ago
A sorry, I missed your comment! I'm currently working on getting a forum up so that people can help each other through challenges. In the meantime, if you're still stuck feel free to email me at heath@blinklight.io and I can giv

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