trainedmonkey

I did a first cut of moving my bookmarks on to this site instead of using Pinboard.

I still need to wire up a way to create new bookmarks, but that should be pretty straightforward.

Each bookmark can carry with it an excerpt and a comment. That way I can clip a little text for the bookmark while I’m creating it. None of the existing bookmarks use that yet because Pinboard did no such thing.

Things to be done aside from adding a way to add bookmarks include adding an Atom feed, really wiring them up to search, figure out how to be marking these up in a more IndieWeb-friendly way, and thinking about whether I want to take snapshots of the bookmarks. (Those would probably only be accessible to me to avoid copyright headaches.)

When I wanted to get away from using Discord to participate in the online PHP and IndieWeb communities, I did still want a web-based interface that provided access to the backlog of conversations from when I was offline, which IRC servers don’t generally do on their own.

I landed on using The Lounge, which has worked out very well.

I run it on my home server in Docker and it is exposed to my Tailscale tailnet so if I ever was on the road, I could still access it. The configuration is pretty straightforward. There’s a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3.9'

services:
    tailscale:
        image: tailscale/tailscale:latest
        hostname: thelounge
        env_file: ./.env
        environment:
          - TS_SERVE_CONFIG=/config/thelounge.json
          - TS_STATE_DIR=/var/lib/tailscale
        volumes:
          - ts_state:/var/lib/tailscale
          - ./config/tailscale:/config
          - /dev/net/tun:/dev/net/tun
        cap_add:
          - net_admin
          - sys_module
        restart: always

    backend:
        image: ghcr.io/thelounge/thelounge:latest
        env_file: ./.env
        volumes:
          - lounge_state:/var/opt/thelounge
        expose:
          - "9000/tcp"
        restart: always

volumes:
    ts_state:
    lounge_state:

And config/tailscale/thelounge.json:

{
    "TCP": {
      "443": {
        "HTTPS": true
      }
    },
    "Web": {
      "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": {
        "Handlers": {
          "/": {
            "Proxy": "http://backend:9000"
          }
        }
      }
    },
    "AllowFunnel": {
      "${TS_CERT_DOMAIN}:443": false
    }
}

There is an .env file that sets TS_AUTHKEY and TS_EXTRA_ARGS. It looks kind of like this:

TS_AUTHKEY="tskey-client-{something}?ephemeral=false"
TS_EXTRA_ARGS="--advertise-tags=tag:container --reset"

Another month in the rear view mirror, and time for me to reflect on my job search and remind people that I’m still out on these streets looking.

Some days it feels like I am not any closer to having a job than I was when this all started. I have a lot of applications behind me, a handful of screening calls with recruiters, a smaller number of interviews, and as of yet no offers. I have been ghosted on countless applications and once after a screening call. (That position still gets re-listed periodically.)

I am in the interview process with a very large tech company with a drawn-out interview process. I have very mixed feelings about it. Do I really want to work there? Am I going to pass through their interview hoops? A big factor in those mixed feelings is that if an offer does happen, it will require moving to another city and working out of an office several days a week.

Some of the rejections, even when they came early, have been hard. There have been positions at a few different companies that were focused on building internal tools for the company, which is something I believe I would be particularly well-suited to do, so I have been looking harder at listings that push that button.

I am grateful to everyone who has offered support, and leads on positions.

A reason that I finally implemented better thread navigation for the PHP mailing list archives is because it was a bit of unfinished business — I had implemented it for the MySQL mailing lists (RIP), but never brought it back over to the PHP mailing lists. There, it accessed the MySQL database used by the Colobus server directly, but this time I exposed what I needed through NNTP.

An advantage to doing it this way is that anyone can still clone the site and run it against the NNTP server during development without needing any access to the database server. There may be future features that require coming up with ways of exposing more via NNTP, but I suspect a lot of ideas will not.

Another reason to implement thread navigation was that a hobby of mine is poking at the history of the PHP project, and I wanted to make it easier to dive into old threads like this thread from 2013 when Anthony Ferrara, a prominent PHP internals developer, left the list. (The tweet mentioned in the post is gone now, but you can find it and more context from this post on his blog.)

Reading this very long thread about the 2016 RFC to adopt a Code of Conduct (which never came to a vote) was another of those bits of history that I knew was out there but hadn’t been able to read quite so easily.

Which just leads me to tap the sign and point out that there is a de facto Code of Conduct and a group administering it.

I think implementing a search engine for the mailing list archives may be an upcoming project because it is still kind of a hassle to dig threads up. I’m thinking of using Manticore Search. Probably by building it into Colobus and exposing it via another NNTP extension.

Because there’s nothing that quite says “hire me” like polishing your Perl bona fides, I have finally made a new release of Colobus, the NNTP server that runs on top of ezmlm and Mlmmj mail archives. (It was actually three new releases, I had to work out some kinks. More to come as I work out more in testing.)

The Mlmmj support and some of the other tweaks are really just pulling in and polishing changes that had been made to the install used for the the PHP.net mailing lists. There are also a few bug fixes I pulled in from Ask’s fork of colobus that the perl.org project uses.

I did add a significant new feature, which is a non-standard XTHREAD id_or_msgid command that returns an XOVER-style result for all of the messages in the same “thread”. The code to take advantage of this new feature for the PHP mailing list archives is on the way.

As I continue to slog through my job search, I also continue to contribute in various ways to the PHP project. Taking some inspiration from the notion of “good trouble” so wonderfully modeled by John Lewis, I have been pushing against some of the boundaries to move and expand the project.

In a recent email to the Internals mailing list from Larry Garfield, he said:

And that's before we even run into the long-standing Internals aversion to even recognizing the existence of 3rd party tools for fear of "endorsing" anything. (With the inexplicable exception of Docuwiki.)

I can guess about a lot of the history there, but I think it is time to recognize that the state of the PHP ecosystem in 2024 has come a long way since the more rough-and-tumble days when related projects like Composer were experimental.

So I took the small step of submitting a couple of pull requests to add a chapter about Composer and an example of using it’s autoloader to the documentation.

The PHP documentation should be more inclusive, and I think the best way to make that happen is for me and others to just starting making the contributions. We need to shake off the notion that this is somehow unusual, not choose to say nothing about third-party tools for fear of “favoring” one over the other, and help support the whole PHP ecosystem though its primary documentation.

I would love to add a chapter on static analysis tools. And another one about linting and refactoring tools. Maybe a chapter on frameworks.

None of these have to be long or exhaustive. They only need to introduce the main concepts and give the reader a better sense of what is possible and the grounding to do more research on their own.

A big benefit of putting this sort of information in the documentation is that there are teams of people working on translating the documentation to other languages.

And yes, contributing to the PHP documentation can be kind of tedious because the tooling is pretty baroque. I am happy to help hammer any text that someone writes into the right shape to make it into the documentation, just send me what you have. If you want to do more of the heavy lifting, join the PHP documentation team email list and let’s make more good trouble together.

I really liked these thoughts from Hannah Aubry on choosing kindness, and the whole thing is worth a read.

So, I have learned to choose kindness because it doesn't cost anything, and it's priceless. It can change someone's day, month, or life trajectory.

If I am optimistic it is because I am still holding on to this ideal and think there are enough other people out there who do, too.

It is something I try to do every day. I don’t always get there, but the trying continues.

Why CVS and Target Locking Up Products Is Backfiring - Bloomberg

None of that larceny is going to be thwarted by turning stores into plexiglass wastelands. But for the segment of theft happening off shelves, is putting products behind barriers an effective prevention measure? Although actual data is scarce, the answer seems to be yes. But that yes comes with significant caveats. Locking up merchandise “does work in the sense that it reduces theft” in the most basic way possible, says GlobalData’s Saunders. “The problem is it also reduces sales.”

I found this to be a really well-reported and balanced piece on the (growing) practice of locking up products by retailers.

This is something we always struggled with at our store. We were required by state law to have spray paint either behind a counter or in locked cases, but everything we did beyond that was prompted by our own experience. Paint markers were locked up or behind our counter. Expensive sets were behind our counter. We had a line of oil paint in stick form (“pigment sticks”) that were locked up. We came close to putting doors on an expensive line of oil paints.

We were a small business so we didn’t have great numbers on shoplifting. The monetary value of what was stolen was not a significant factor in our closing, but having to worry about it and manage it absolutely was. Arguing with customers about whether they had to leave their bag at our counter, or whether someone was “following them around,” is awful. Sometimes we caught shoplifters red-handed and had to worry about how they would react when they were confronted. I was threatened with a gun once, and we had several physical altercations over the years. Sometimes we noticed an item was missing after the fact and were able to pull video footage of it being stolen by a frequent customer. It was all soul-crushing, in aggregate.

So much of society just feels totally unsustainable right now, so put this down as one part of it.

An adjustment to my résumé that I made a while ago was to split out the software engineering work I did for our store into a position at Imperial Dog, Inc. which is the name of the corporation that did business as Raw Materials Art Supplies and served as the production company behind some of Celia’s short films.

I used the title of “Staff Software Engineer” as a sort of anchor to the level that I see myself at, but in hindsight that may have been too aggressive when applying to lower-titled roles like “Senior Software Engineer.” So I’ve updated it to “Consulting Software Engineer” which feels sort of vague and non-leveled and hopefully not similarly off-putting.

I am progressing along the interview path for a few positions now, so I have some hope that this drought will end soon and I can escape this particular purgatory.

I have slowed down on applying to jobs as I hold out hope for the current prospects, and I have been getting more involved with the PHP project again in some of the same ways that I was involved 20+ years ago.

I tackled a couple of projects in the documentation, including filling in some of the missing history of the project, removing some ancient documentation for XForms (a technology that never really got traction), and adding background and supporting material about the hash functions. A couple of these were picked up from outstanding issues in the repository, or inspired by conversations on the internals mailing list about possible upcoming deprecations.

I am also trying to dive in on the infrastructure and governance sides, which is slower going. I have mostly documented who the members of the PHP organization on GitHub are. I have access again to the machine where the mailing lists run, so I have been working on getting its configuration properly handled within the big ball of code that the team uses to manage the project infrastructure, and trying to help clean that stuff up and make sure more of the setup is known and documented. The team supporting all of this infrastructure had dwindled over the years but things have been kind of chugging along.

One way to sum up what I am trying to do by getting involved in the PHP community again is to leverage my privilege (from past participation and the usual privilege I carry) to clean up some of the on-ramps for new people to get involved. It moves more slowly than I would like at times, but I am glad to have this time now to apply pressure to the problems that I see. Seeing how the Python community has organized themselves is an inspiration.

I had written a variation of this in a couple of spots now and wanted to put it here, this weird place where I keep writing things:

Organizations with vague rules get captured by people who just fill in the gaps with rules they make up on their own to their own advantage, and then they will continuously find reasons that the “official” rules can’t be fixed because the proposed change is somehow imperfect so they force you to accept the rules they have made up.

The first time I ran into this sort of problem was probably in college being involved in student government, but I haven’t been able to come up with the specifics of what happened that makes me think that it was.

A later instance where I came across it that I remember more vividly was when I was involved with the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council and how one of the executive board members would squash efforts by citing “standing rules” that nobody could ever substantiate.

More recently, I came across it in looking at discussions of why certain people are or are not allowed to vote on PHP RFCs where the lead developers of one or more popular PHP packages have been shut out because of what I would argue is a misreading of the “Who can vote” section of the Voting Process RFC.

I was checking out the “zero-emission web hosting” providers listed at Get Green Hosting and noticed that IONOS (formerly known as 1&1) has a $2/month virtual private server (VPS) plan that should be totally adequate to run this website. So I spent a couple of hours setting one up, and now this is it.

The only hassle in getting the server set up is I had to reboot to make sure the IPv6 address I added was correctly being used by the VPS and my container setup, and I had to set up a swap file so it wouldn’t go into a tailspin when I tried to do too much.

It looks like the server is located at their datacenter in New Jersey, but I’m not actually sure.

I have been with Linode for just over 17 years, but I haven’t felt the same loyalty since they were acquired by Akamai, which has always seemed like a pretty soulless corporation.

This probably isn’t really a move that pays off in any meaningful way (getting that hosting bill down to $24/year instead of $60/year), but it was an interesting exercise. Looks like Akamai isn’t on 100% renewable energy yet, except for their Seattle datacenter, so this is an improvement on that front.

I visited what was still then East Germany in 1990 as part of the People to People Student Ambassador Program, which is when I took this picture of the ruins of the Frauenkirche Dresden, which had been destroyed during World War II. It has since been rebuilt.

I don’t think it’s in the cards, but it would be interesting to visit Dresden again and see the rebuilt version.

Anyway, this picture caught my eye again as I was looking back at my photo archives and looking at where my life stands.