Though I don’t have a huge amount of time for playing computer games, I do spend a lot of time playing minecraft, as well as a number of retro games and point and clicks. As my desktop is optimized for compiling code and having many terminals up, it doesn’t exactly fit the bill of a gaming optimized machine. It doesn’t help either that I built my most recent desktop at the height of the 2019 GPU craze.

I was recently going through deprecation warnings and doing some housekeeping in one of my personal projects, NetAuth. In the process, I came across that I was using a deprecated import for the protocol buffers support libraries. As the major version number hadn’t changed, I assumed that the update was safe and changed my import. Given that the import was changing from github.com/google/protobuf to golang.google.com/protobuf I made the assumption that the import path had been changed for aesthetic and branding reasons.

I am fascinated by most network technologies, and having spent several years at this point looking at the latest and greatest I’ve now decided to look back at some of the technologies that got us to here. Circuit switched networks have always fascinated me and as I’ve recently gotten into running my own local phone systems, dial-up networking seemed like the logical place to jump in head-first. First off, lets define some terms and concepts that are central to this kind of network.

I’ve seen over the last few days a lot of comparisons being made between the power outages occurring in Texas and the power outages that are an annual event for parts of California. These events aren’t particularly compatible due to the wildly different circumstances at play, and I want to talk about why. This post will get into what engineers look at when designing a system, the concept of calculated risk, and how black swans can really come from nowhere.

I recently had the baffling experience of reaching out to a company to ask about commercial support for their product as I was having a lot of trouble getting it installed and working. Those in the know of FOSS software can probably already see the red flag that needing to engage commercial support to get even a tech demo working is usually a sign of poor engineering quality and a fragile solution.