Ryan Barrett

Public Key

npub192zgfvxl3xukuwld7fcd3l88un9rxxynsxd4fay4pj3x9cgxrh2qvxegjh

NIP-05 Address

snarfed.org@fed-brid-gy.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz4pyykr0cnwtw80klyuxclnn7fj3nrzfcrx657j2segnzuyrpm4qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds9f9en8

Publishing to

nos.lol

relay.damus.io

yabu.me

Author Public Key

npub192zgfvxl3xukuwld7fcd3l88un9rxxynsxd4fay4pj3x9cgxrh2qvxegjh

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Last Notes

2026-05-05 00:14:54 UTC

Consider the world’s simplest database:
#!/bin/bash
db_set () {
echo "$1,$2" >> database
}
db_get () {
grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1
}
– Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition, Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini

2026-04-24 05:29:48 UTC

I’m no music critic, but I think Imogen Heap‘s Hide and Seek may be one of the best popular music songs of all time. Right up there with American Pie, Hallelujah, Thriller, etc. Definitely the vocorder’s pièce de résistance, I don’t know if anyone else has taken that instrument quite so seriously before, or since.

2026-04-24 05:29:48 UTC

I’ve been a daily coffee drinker for decades, and I’m taking a break for a month right now. No real reason, just trying it.
Halfway through, not much to report. One mild headache early on. No noticeable difference in energy. (I’m pretty insensitive to caffeine.)
I definitely still miss it though!

2026-04-13 08:58:52 UTC

A few challenge coins: Long Now, Google NetOps, and our family LLC.
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260415_163500591322632525349835351.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260415_1635308172641069851863099692.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1

2026-04-05 08:56:43 UTC

my sentiments exactly
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260405_1603501957E28030240100502183359.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1

2026-04-05 08:56:43 UTC

Ellis Island stories
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260409_1732042885193191680079811200.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260409_1731030144599025586732167278.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260409_1731542964968913056155872226.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/pxl_20260409_1730586643607875736793177456.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1

2026-04-02 21:08:59 UTC

In my 25+ yr career in (systems) software engineering, I can count on one hand the number of real paradigm shifts I’ve seen:
Ubiquitous automated testing, eg unit tests
Modern network routing fabrics, which made intra-DC bandwidth effectively infinite and intra-DC latency effectively zero for most workloads, Patterson notwithstanding
SSDs, which combined the speed of memory with the capacity of disk. No more counting seeks!
Cloud infrastructure
AI coding
I’m not saying anything new by including AI coding here. I don’t fully know what its long term effects will be. I doubt many of us do. And the industry is obviously far from perfect.
But coming from a late adopter, and a skeptic in general, it’s still very clearly a big deal. And I don’t see those often.

2026-03-31 17:06:51 UTC

Best paper title I’ve seen in a long time:
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog

2026-03-31 17:06:51 UTC

…this produces what I will call the AI Developer’s Descent Into Madness:
Whoa, I produced this prototype so fast! I have super powers!
This prototype is getting buggy. I’ll tell the AI to fix the bugs.
Hmm, every change now causes as many new bugs as it fixes.
Aha! But if I have an AI agent also review the code, it can find its own bugs!
Wait, why am I personally passing data back and forth between agents
I need an agent framework
I can have my agent write an agent framework!
Return to step 1
It’s actually alarming how many friends and respected peers I’ve lost to this cycle already.
Avery Pennarun, Every layer of review makes you 10x slower

2026-03-21 22:30:28 UTC

I am Springsteen, going on Spreventeen
– Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

2026-03-21 22:30:28 UTC

smoke ’em if you got ’em

2026-03-02 17:06:26 UTC

looksmaxxing is weird (at best) for all sorts of reasons, but one thing I do know: women have been doing it for millennia. guys, you’re late

2026-03-02 17:06:26 UTC

It’s VCs’ job to predict the future in all sorts of directions, and be extremely confident about those predictions, and also be wrong 9 out of 10 times. Remember that next time you hear a VC say…anything.
(Not that VCs are all dumb, or delusional, or malicious! Far from it. But still.)

2026-02-27 12:23:12 UTC

https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/pxl_20260228_1415049837987662928469718950.jpg?resize=696%2C424&ssl=1

2026-02-27 12:23:12 UTC

fresh honeycomb, from friends who keep bees
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/pxl_20260301_021133943675474822102577524.jpg?resize=696%2C522&ssl=1

2026-02-24 04:31:27 UTC

I know it’s a bad (good) day when debugging takes me all the way down into the Linux kernel docs

2026-02-24 04:31:27 UTC

- reply

What can be learned about maintenance mind from all this? One thing that seems clear is the need to examine its opposite: neglect mind. Examples of both were evident in my tale of the 1968 Golden Globe Race…
The race's biggest loser, Donald Crowhurst, had neither maintenance training nor much sailboat experience, and he was delusionally optimistic. His neglect mind was part laziness and ignorance, part surrender to fantasy.
Maintainers are realists.

2026-02-24 04:31:27 UTC

- reply

"I'm writing Python and using the cloud, how is this happening"

2026-02-03 07:11:19 UTC

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Current one: Stewart Brand – Maintenance: Of Everything

2026-02-03 07:11:19 UTC

When I’m reading a non-fiction book, I know it’s a good one if I constantly feel the urge to post quotes from it.

2026-01-29 20:51:31 UTC

I miss the Fry’s Electronics days

2026-01-03 10:20:49 UTC

is it complex, or is it complicated

2025-12-16 22:53:11 UTC

11 year old: “The best thing about Santa Claus is that I don’t have to write him a thank you note!”

2025-10-10 06:30:47 UTC

- reply

(…ideally)

2025-10-10 06:30:47 UTC

standards bodies: “bureaucracy for good”

2025-03-31 13:15:18 UTC

https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/1000018190.jpg?resize=696%2C181&ssl=1

2025-03-14 22:46:28 UTC

For years now, we’ve been giving our 10yo a weekly allowance, and generally not buying her toys or video games etc, so that she has to buy them herself. Finally got some real world evidence that it might be working.
https://i0.wp.com/snarfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/pxl_20250327_1955326407E21862372584556779646.jpg?resize=696%2C523&ssl=1

2024-04-18 17:30:03 UTC

TIL: shadow API. The developer equivalent of shadow IT. There’s a whole ecosystem of wild, feral technology here just waiting to be discovered and categorized.

2024-02-13 17:29:45 UTC

Morning all. Quite a day yesterday, and today so far. I’m obviously taking a beating from everyone who thinks the Bluesky bridge should be opt in. OK.
I want to run one idea by you all. The way the bridge is currently designed, no fediverse profiles or other content are proactively bridged into Bluesky. If someone on Bluesky wants to see or follow someone on the fediverse, they have to manually request it on the bridge. That fediverse user’s posts are then only bridged going forward, and only if someone follows them.
What if, the first time someone on Bluesky requests to follow someone on the fediverse via the bridge, the fediverse user gets prompted, “X from Bluesky wants to follow you. Are you ok with connecting with Bluesky?”, maybe via DM. I assume that would still be considered opt in?
Realistically, most people in the fediverse will never hear about the bridge. Traditional opt in and opt out both generally expect people to proactively find a setting or take some action, often one that only a tiny fraction of people ever learn about. I don’t really care how many people discover or use the bridge, but this kind of just-in-time prompt, only shown when someone wants to follow or interact with them, feels like a useful improvement in that it puts the decision in front of them directly.
Thanks to @kio for the idea. It seems promising; I’m now planning to try it out well before launch. Let me know if you don’t like it.

2024-02-12 15:50:49 UTC

Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Bluesky from here in the fediverse, and vice versa.
Bluesky is a broad network with lots of worthwhile people and conversations! I hope you’ll give it a chance. Only fully public content is bridged, not followers-only or otherwise private posts or profiles. Still, if you want to opt out, I understand. Feel free to DM me at @snarfed@indieweb.social (different account than this one), email me, file a GitHub issue, or put #nobridge in your profile bio.
A number of us have thought about this for a while now, we’re committed to making it work well for everyone, and we’re very open to feedback. Thanks for listening. Feel free to share broadly.

2024-01-28 18:01:10 UTC

Saw Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza last night. It was great. But the one act of theirs I’ll never forget was from over a decade ago: Lara Jacobs’s Balance Goddess in Amaluna. Didn’t feel like a circus act at all; it was quiet, meditative, haunting. Started simply, balancing a few palm ribs on each other, but by the end of it, she’d constructed an elaborate maze of them, from tiny to massive, perfectly and impossibly hanging in midair, defying all known physics. Otherworldly. One of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.

2024-01-09 23:22:09 UTC

Bridgy Fed now supports all web sites! You can now use it from the fediverse to see and follow any site, regardless of whether it has microformats2, webmentions, or WebFinger. Bridgy Fed extracts as much profile info as it can, generates fediverse posts from Atom and RSS feeds, and so on.
Web sites start out bridged to the fediverse as [domain]@web.brid.gy. For example, to see new nature.com articles in your fediverse feed, follow @nature.com@web.brid.gy. And as always, if you have a web site, you can upgrade Bridgy Fed to use its domain in its fediverse handle, like mine at @snarfed.org@snarfed.org.
(I’ve loved seeing other similar bridges recently too, including @twilliability@genart.social‘s RSS Parrot and @dave@podcastindex.social‘s pi-activitypub-server. We’re all pulling in the same direction!)
This is one more step toward making Bridgy Fed support people wherever they are, on any network, fully bidirectionally. Stay tuned for more!

2024-01-02 02:27:35 UTC

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and web3 are “the hosted web, the posted web, and the signed web.”
Heard this quote from Jay Graber for the first time today, via the DWeb Digest. Concise, elegant, poetic. For a straight ahead functional description, it’s got a surprising amount of soul.

2024-01-01 13:37:42 UTC

Wow. Never thought I’d see the day that Mickey Mouse would lose his copyright and enter the public domain, but it’s finally happened. The internet may have long since moved on to newer, stranger battles, but the old graybeard hell of copyright wars has finally frozen over. Truly the end of an era.