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

Hello friends, I have a summer cold courtesy of my children and I’m not sure if it is making me more depressed, or providing a distraction from the depression. Either way, I got that summertime sadness fo’ sho. What’s new An image that lives in my head courtesy of innumerable movies: an airplane (or sail board) in a crash dive, on a bet that the dive will kick-start the engines before it intersects the ground. That has been the first half of my year: betting I could realize my vision of Graceful.Dev before I ran out of funds. It was a close one, but as of this past birthday sale, I’d say engin ..read more

A correspondent once took issue with my amplification of Alex Hanna’s indictment of Google as a racialized organization. They objected that Hanna’s accusations weren’t backed up “rigorously”. I’m publishing a version of my reply here because I may want to reference it in the future. Our most “rational” professions have a long history of looking for the most convoluted explanations of obvious bias, and calling it “rigor”. A recent example: we know as a historical fact that “computer programmer” started as a female-dominated profession, until women were systematically pushed out in the 1970s and ..read more

This book is intended as a programmer’s introduction or refresher to the Blub programming language. It is incomplete, opinionated, and short. We assume that you are a working programmer with several years experience in at least one common “conventional” programming language: e.g. BASIC, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, Ruby, Lua. By the time you finish this book, we intend that you’ll be able to: Read and make sense of conventionally-written Blub code. Navigate a Blub codebase and understand how the parts fit together. Diagnose unexpected program behaviors. Make meaningful addition ..read more

Hello friends, Spring is in the air, here in St. Louis. Nothing is blooming yet, but the daffodils are looking optimistic. I find myself, for the first time, attempting to plan a garden. In preparation for the warmer months I also finished cleaning the last of the moving-overflow out of my garage, a feat of which I am unreasonably proud. Not pictured: the astonishing bellowing that periodically emerges from these birds. The last freeze is soon, if not already past. The Humboldt Penguins at the St. Louis Zoo are in no hurry. What’s Good What’s not good is that there is a war in Ukraine. Victor ..read more