"We just need to replace the whole system and then everything will be better." Famous last words? Usually! But not always ..read more

Programming is widely regarded, at least among enthusiasts, as a creative act. Calling it a “craft” has gained widespread acceptance, and it’s not unusual to hear the term “art” thrown around (if sometimes a tad flippantly). And yet, there’s something I see other self-identified “creatives” doing which seems almost entirely absent from the software field. It’s the act of explicitly and deliberately seeking and spreading inspiration. Writers join groups that throw out daily “writing prompts”. Artists, designers, models and photographers join Pinboard groups and Tumblrs and all manner ..read more

Over the past year I’ve received a crash-course in Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA). PDA is an expression of autism, but in some ways it differs radically from what people usually think of when they think about autism. Most of the autism parents I’m in touch with struggle with how to help their kids cope with unaccustomed experiences: new foods, new schools, family trips. With PDA on the other hand, the novel experiences are the easy ones. Where things get fraught are with rote, mundane, “required” activities like putting on shoes. Even putting on shoes to go somewhere the kid wants to go ..read more

It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words—and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy When you set out to choose your your autoresponder, aka CRM, a lot of resources will point you to Brevo (formerly SendInBlue). I think this is because among mature email general-purpose email CRMs, t ..read more

As of today, this site is also my canonical social media presence! Notes on making this happen: I’m using the ActivityPub and Webfinger plugins to make WordPress users into full-fledged Fediverse citizens. I had a lot of trouble getting Mastodon to recognize this site as a valid target for an account move. Mastodon demands some not-so-standardized stuff to appear on the target site that effectively makes its vaunted “account mobility” only work with other Mastodon instances First off I had to disable caching for user profile pages. To be fair this part wasn’t a Mastodon issue. I’m going to co ..read more

This is mainly a test post to verify that this blog is now on the Fediverse (via the ActivityPub plugin). Hi there, fedi-friends! The post Hello, Fediverse first appeared on avdi.codes ..read more

Once upon a time, I owned a beautiful big house in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. I don’t anymore. Now I rent a modest little rancher in a suburb of St. Louis. But every month, I still send out a payment on a home-repair loan. Because in order to sell that house in Tennessee, I had to spend $22k to replace an aging HVAC system. So much for homeownership. Let’s talk about owning software. Services require support Around 25 years ago, I became the local maintainer for my team’s CVS repositories. This was our way of breaking free from Microsoft SourceSafe. Ever since then I’ve been involved ..read more

So, you need to talk to your WordPress server from some other service. Specifically, you need to look up a user by their email and set some user metadata. You’d think this would be straightforward. You would be wrong. The examples here are using Ruby Net::HTTP, but that’s not really the important part. The code samples are not complete, and this is not a from-scratch tutorial. A bunch of prior experience with WordPress is assumed. First, know how to authenticate You’ll need an application password from the user admin screen. You might be tempted to throw this into an Authorization: Bearer ..read more

Someone asked me why I named my developer training site “Graceful.Dev“, so I thought I’d write about that. The theme of “grace” has been an emergent one in my work for years. I think that grace is an essential quality of resilient systems, at any level. Here’s an explanation, adapted from one of my talks: I don’t have a lot of hobbies left, but one thing I still do regularly is take myself out dancing. When I go dancing, I generally go to goth/industrial clubs and electronic dance music shows. If you’re not familiar with these kinds of events, they aren’t known for their couples dancing. Every ..read more

So I’ve been getting up to speed on the Mastodon codebase. Here are some notes on getting to green tests locally. Aside: I generally prefer, in order: Improve a project so it needs less documentation to get up-and-contributing. Improve a project’s documentation. Create external documentation. I am working on (1). I am also working (2), but the Mastodon docs repo has (as of this writing) 107 open PRs dating back six months, and the most recent accepted PR was three weeks ago. Dozens of PRs have been added to the queue since then. I appreciate that managing documentation contributions is its ..read more