Xander Cesari

This account (Tranquil PDS), my Tangled repos (knot), and my Tangled CI runner (spindle) are now hosted on a PC in my living room

I wonder if accountants feel the same way about abacuses as mechies feel about calipers or programmers feel about vintage computers

Software is great but I missed this kind of engineering

I love my Framework 13 and I'm definitely getting one of the new 13 Pros but right now I'm having a lot of fun upgrading this old T480S into the ultimate Linux distro hopper!

I really hope these are also hosted on progressively less standard infra, with the last on a Raspberry Pi and a solar panel talking through a modem downdetector.com downdetectorsdowndetector.com downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com

Definitely not me getting distracted from an embedded project then spending weeks building tools for declaratively packing and deploying LittleFS images and all but forgetting the original project I was working on github.com/MerrimanInd/...

Do I know anyone who's worked with LittleFS for embedded devices? I'm writing some Rust tooling for building and deploying it and would appreciate hearing about how others have used it!

I've been in "weird esoteric industry protocol running on RS-232" purgatory for months now. SCPI, VE.Direct, now ProXR. I've implemented them all in Python, some in Rust. I think I have to keep building these until I atone for some kind of sin?

There are three rules of coding with agents: 1. Keep them away from bright sunlight 2. Never get them wet 3. Never feed them after midnight

AI isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets you to the thing. youtu.be/QeY_5n75zPM?...

Building a CLI is just repeatedly naming things, aka the hardest thing in programming

The pile of ethics books discarded on the sidewalk in San Francisco is more foreboding and ominous than I wanted to see

Today's mini deep-dive was into the NTP Pool and now it's a life goal to someday run an NTP server www.ntppool.org/en/join.html

Chipping away at language tooling for the most annoying and esoteric config files I hate to love and love to hate github.com/MerrimanInd/...

One release is all you need

It's 2026 and I'm not afraid to say it to the whole world. Cancel me if you want, I have to speak my truth. Light mode is good and is the appropriate choice in many times and places.

I just switched my desktop environment from GNOME to COSMIC in minutes. Deleted a dozen lines of text, added a half dozen lines of text, and rebooted. NixOS is absolutely overpowered.

Happy year of the linux desktop (Like every other time this has been said, this post will age wonderfully I'm sure)

Why I'm (still) a Rustacean merriman.industries/why-im-a-rus...

A few days of late nights later and now I'm daily driving NixOS

Build Your Own Tools merriman.industries/build-your-o...

New entry to my Naming Hall of Fame: Electron! Electron was developed by the Atom IDE team and early on they called it 'atom-shell', as in the shell that they ran in. A shell is also the region where electrons can be found in an atom so the project became Electron, an homage to its origin.

Doing Advent of Code in Rust is 60% writing Nom parsers, 30% writing tests for your Nom parsers, and 10% writing algorithms to solve the puzzles

Love the way New Yorker drivers honk. They don't honk for victory or glory. They don't think for vengeance or justice. They honk for the sheer joy of it. Love of the game. You gotta respect it.

College replacement accelerators are morally equivalent to marketing gambling to teenagers

Does anyone have strong opinions on Matrix vs Zulip for open-source community platforms?

Like compound interest, economies of scale are the immutably powerful force multiplier that dominate the limits of any function. Open source is the mechanism by which software supercharges the entire industry with collaboration at the broadest scale. merriman.industries/open-source-...

If you wouldn't build software with it then we won't build hardware with it merriman.industries/how-to-make-...

WALL-E vs The World

PSA: @zen-browser.app is getting really good these days! The UI is getting more streamlined with every release and they've moved beyond just being an Ark-clone into their own opinion of browsing. Just good, clean, simple UI with the power user tools you need and no fluff.

If you saw this video from @cmuratori.bsky.social and thought "surely a 2.5 hour long tech talk can't be a good use of my time" then I have to strenuously emphasize that there is absolutely no fluff in this one. It's a banger start to finish. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84...