jake_morrison

7 ms·

1.
by jake_morrison 1y ago
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 to look at the stuff that Americans eat.
2.
by jake_morrison 2y ago
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 commercial vehicles. The hardware used an ARM7 CPU, GPS, and GPRS mod
3.
by jake_morrison 2y ago
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_container_example&#x2
4.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 US less punishing, and manufacturing in China is becoming pr
5.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 run tests against the production app container. It's par
6.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
Yeah, I actually used OpenEmbedded, the predecessor to Yocto. The project was in 2011.
7.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 caused some unexpected issues: * Because there is no MMU,
8.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 profitability. There is also a lot of asshole behavior.
9.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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_servers, only process one message at a time from their inbox
10.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 application, know where the bodies are buried, and everyone in the
11.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
Erlang is based on virtual threads (confusingly called processes). The Erlang virtual machine schedules them on OS threads. Erlang processes communicate using message passing, preventing deadlocks. You can use millions of Erlang processes w
12.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
Like ogres
13.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 spend would be to get similar treatment. Presumably higher
14.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
I am an American who has worked with startups in Taiwan for 30 years. I am happy to talk.
15.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 branch can repatriate profits to the parent company, af
16.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 jack on the phone. So, basically, it was a modem. The cable
17.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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. While companies can enforce their trademarks, it's g
18.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 interrupted. So every two weeks you get all the business pe
19.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 incompatibilities. I think Alpine is a
20.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 spring and it won't start, it would cost a signif
21.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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's not the case, so getting them over the counter is an
22.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 of the hardware, kernel, and build toolchain. And you can cr
23.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 become the most battle-tested enterprise distribution. I
24.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
Thanks for your service supporting the Ansible community. Your books are also great, and I highly recommend them to anyone learning Ansible.
25.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
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 tasks. Idempotency checks to see whether an action need
26.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline. Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2
27.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
This is such a baffling failure to understand how social networks function (see the 1% rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule ). They are alienating the most engaged users who provide the content and pissing off
28.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
Postgres forks an OS process for each connection, which is relatively heavy weight. Oracle has a similar architecture to Postgres, and they solved it with a "multi-threaded listener". MySQL, in contrast, uses threads, which makes
29.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
I run a product development consulting agency that works with entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. For the past 8 years, we have mainly used Elixir. It is good for building straightforward web apps and APIs and great for more tricky thi
30.
by jake_morrison 3y ago
A customer needed help with the size of their DataDog bill. A big part of that was log messages. They had poor logging discipline, so they started by filtering out all logs that were INFO or lower priority. But then the developers couldn&#x

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