Toby Jaffey

freelance person, mostly software
He/Him
Falmouth UK

HireMe: https://www.ringtailsoftware.co.uk
Instagram (kayaking): https://www.instagram.com/kayaktoby/

Last Notes

2026-03-30 09:06:30 UTC

The cephalopods are coming! #cornwall
(and the Risso's dolphins will surely follow)
https://mastodon.me.uk/system/media_attachments/files/116/317/320/817/304/316/original/bb2d17d3e27333dc.mp4

2026-03-09 13:49:56 UTC

If you call Claude "he", but refuse to respect a fellow human's chosen pronouns, then you go in the oubliette
#subtoot

2026-02-11 22:24:18 UTC

Open source licenses let you fix your own problems and often even distribute to others. They do not give you the right to have those changes accepted into the parent project.
It’s great that you’ve used AI tools to solve your personal problem, open source has empowered you!

2026-02-10 14:41:06 UTC

Misread and now I'm sticking with it "shifting the goalposts" -> "golfing the shitposts"

2026-01-28 21:34:02 UTC

Folded slate in the cliff side #MagicInTheMundane #cornwall
https://mastodon.me.uk/system/media_attachments/files/115/974/855/610/479/230/original/dd7ee47ffe1285bd.jpg

2026-01-25 09:54:13 UTC

An egret at low tide #silentsunday #lichensubscribe
https://mastodon.me.uk/system/media_attachments/files/115/955/123/614/270/974/original/5365ab2d7a3b23a0.jpeg

2026-01-07 08:33:04 UTC

#seawednesday #merCredi #kayaking
https://mastodon.me.uk/system/media_attachments/files/115/852/877/723/359/090/original/01f5ad33c8f7832f.jpeg

2026-01-02 22:43:01 UTC

A "selling point" is a feature of a product which makes it attractive to customers...
If your selling point is "written in rust" you are explicitly saying that your customer is a programmer.
Normal people want to hear "doesn't crash", "easy wipe" or "now doesn't eat babies!"

2025-12-08 17:46:38 UTC

People complain about git, but here's two things I remember from my graduate s/w job (which really make me feel like a dinosaur...)
a) That time we held several meetings to decide if we could "branch the code", backed up CVS and then wrote the custom perl scripts to do it
b) The week when nobody could check any code into SourceSafe because someone had taken out an exclusive lock on the repo then gone away on holiday

2025-11-26 23:24:09 UTC

I need a tiny vm for a sandboxed thing and would prefer decent tooling over handcrafting something custom. So, now I'm learning z80 assembly...

2025-03-19 12:52:48 UTC

French food seems a lot less fancy when you realise that a Croque Monsieur is literally a "Mr. Crunchy".

2025-02-26 16:32:45 UTC

Today a non-technical friend asked what I do for work, so I got to try out @npub1fst…t7cr 's line:
"I write software for things that aren't computers"
Like a Zen koan, it created confusion but led to a deeper understanding.

2025-01-21 09:13:28 UTC

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While searching, I found this interesting book on associative processing. https://archive.org/details/associativecompu0000pott

2025-01-15 23:39:17 UTC

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beautiful. Looks just like caustics, I wonder if there's a similar mechanism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(optics)

2024-11-21 14:01:22 UTC

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https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10iso

2024-10-16 12:17:08 UTC

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A car door? With USB chargers and electric window controls?