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Lesson 1: communication is intentional and takes energy -- from both sides.

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Lesson 5: sometimes the action is "think about it".

Actionable information is great. However, one of our goals is to think better as a group than any one of us can as an individual. Doing this requires sharing partial thoughts. "Brainstorming", in other words. (This concept is emphatically Not New!)

One thing that can make both these kinds of communication (actionable and brainstormish) better is identifying which one you're attempting to engage in. Never skip this. Both can be constructive, but if your counterparty in communication mis-guesses which one you're performing, they'll allocate the wrong kind of attention themselves for responding to it, and it's very likely to result in suboptimal outcomes (if not outright negative ones, e.g. when one party only has brainspace for actionables and the other party volunteers not those, which can result in impatience and negative evaluation on one side and simultaneou

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Vision

The Timeless Toolchain is part of a vision to create more reliable and predictable computers. This also translates directly to computers that are more secure, more knowable, and thus more hackable.

At the most broad, making computers more knowable makes our whole digital society grow faster and do a better job of empowering us all.

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I'd like to hold Rubber Duck Hours (like Office Hours, but, well, ask me or do a search for "Rubber Ducking" if you haven't encountered that concept before) on some day of the week.

The idea here is that I'll offer to be an idea-bouncer -- for anything, even outside of my skill range; if you wanna talk about a thing, we'll do it! Even if all I can do is listen -- and we'll either try to brainstorm, or, just learn and share some information about what's on our minds.

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There's a few special rules that make this different than a regular meeting at work:

• Talk about anything.
• I mean it, anything. I may be an engineer, but it doesn't have to be about engineering, and it certainly doesn't have to be code review.

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(This is not a particularly complete nor finished doc, but I'll share it as a gist anyway.)

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In this document:

• Measuring Performance in Golang
• Writing Good Benchmarks
• Where is that alloc coming from?

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Key strategic tips for starting to work remotely... successfully!

One of the greatest challenges in creating a successful remote working culture is simply getting a critical mass of people on board! So, congrats: you've short-circuited your way there. Every cloud has a silver lining.

invest in your workspace

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Merkle trees can be any size and shape they want

I don't know who needs to hear this but...

Merkle trees can be any size and shape they want.

To put a finer point on it:

"Merkle tree" does not imply "binary" nor "balanced" tree,

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The String Situation

// This document is INCOMPLETE. you have been warned.

This exploration report is a brief round-up of all the places the definition of "string" -- a seemingly simple and common concept! but not trivial, by any means -- becomes critically important to systemic comprehensibility and correctness.

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Codecs and Completeness

IPLD has a very all-embracing approach to compatibility: many systems have some sort of bridge to IPLD. As a result, it's very important to understand which of those bridges are "complete", and which contain limitations; and for those that have limitations, what those limitations are. Most of this appears in the Codec layer: because Codecs are responsible for how data is serialized, they encompass almost all of the compatibility efforts in bridging IPLD systems to each other and to other systems.

We define "completeness" in terms of the [[Data Model]] (and split it into two concepts):

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concept of nav

I want spacial navigation. I don't want "kerthunk" feelings.

Here's now it works, in 2D:

• you have a cursor. But it doesn't jump around to targets or on a grid: it just... goes.
• 'wasd' go up/right/left/down as you expect.
  • Alternate mode: 'esdf', to keep you from leaving the home row. But I don't know how desirable that will be (makes shift, etc, that much harder to hit).

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Filesystems & IPLD

Introduction

IPLD is a system for creating decentralized systems based on content-addressable data primitives. One of the things people frequently want to do when building applications is handle files, and describe filesystems. As a result, we've compiled some thoughts and recommendations about how to describe filesystems in IPLD, and also produced some specifications that we suggest systems use and build upon.