• 9 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I worked at an IoT platform startup. All of our embedded device demos stopped working August 1st. I was told the same thing happened last year, but it was fine, things would start working in September. I decided to go fix it anyway. Eventually I figured out the culprit was a custom HTTP library. Instead of doing anything sensible, the way it found the Content-Length header was to loop over the bytes of the response until it found the first ‘g’ add 5 to that pointer and then assume that whatever was there was the number of bytes it should read. Unfortunately, HTTP responses have a Date header which includes the month and August has a ‘g’ in it.

    There were a bunch of these demo devices already flashed and shipped out. The ‘fix’ to get them to work, even in August, was to downgrade requests to HTTP 0.9 which didn’t require a Date header in the response.










  • I just pulled my Bangle.js 2 back out to play with making a better reminder system for myself. It works better than any of the other open source watches I’ve had with my GrapheneOS phone. The hardware isn’t open source as far as I know, but their mobile app (fork of gadget bridge) is, as are all the apps that run on the watch, and (I think?) the watch OS.


  • Check your state or country’s laws, you might not even need the contract amended. In the state that I live in any contract clause that tries to prevent you from doing any work entirely on your own time with entirely your own materials is explicitly unenforceable.

    Plus if it’s just a small open source library (assuming your employer is sane) it’d be a waste of money for them to even ask a lawyer to write a letter to you, because why would anyone care.

    If you really care about getting it right, you can find a local employment attorney and have them explain your local laws and edit and/or negotiate your contract for you. I did that once, but I felt like it was probably a waste of the $900 I paid. (I mean, it definitely was a waste in that case because that job was a nightmare and it only lasted 2 months, lol.)


  • Yeah, the last 5 jobs (of 6 jobs) I’ve had I’ve applied with a markdown file or just a link to the rendered webpage in an email, IIRC.

    In my head at least, it helps me filter for companies/managers that appreciate a hacker mentality. I also suspect it might help the applicant tracking systems parse my shit more correctly since it’s just plaintext. (Though the opposite could also be true since I assume the vast majority of submissions would be PDF.)


  • I wrote my CV in markdown for my website. I just submit the markdown file as the resume. For the few jobs I’ve applied to that have required a PDF, I just copied the text from my webpage (to get rich text formatting) into LibreOffice and exported as a PDF.

    Though, I might not not be the best example to follow, I’ve been unemployed for almost 6 months.



  • I’m in the process writing my own version of webscript.io, an old service that died back in 2017. It was a dead simple service that would run a Lua script for each HTTP request that came in to a URL. It sounds pretty trivial, but it was remarkably useful for hacking together little scripts for things like watching webpages for changes, little custom APIs for DIY IoT devices, translating from one API to another, and other simple stuff like that.

    I’ve got enough of it built that I’ve been able to make a few actually useful things with it already. A few different job posting website scrapers were the first thing I made. I also made a little script that queries a live traffic api and sends my wife an estimated drive time for her commute home. The plan with that one is to watch the drive time as it’s getting closer to the end of the day and if it starts spiking earlier/worse than normal, it can email her letting her know she should leave early if she can.





  • I’m curious, have you used Rust much? Most of those changes just feel like “rust should be more familiar to me” changes.

    Also:

    As Rust 2.0 is not going to happen, Rust users will never get these language design fixes

    Isn’t necessarily true for most of your suggestions. Since most of them are just changes to syntax semantics and not language semantics they could be made in an edition.