Ty Sloane

Frontend Performance Tuning

2025-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

I recently chatted with a potential client about some front-end work that I might be able to help them with. I was asked if I had any experience with front-end performance work, specifically with React. I chewed on this for a moment before answering that I didn't.

It's pretty rare that I've actually had the opportunity to work on a front-end where the actual performance was a pressing issue beyond anything else, where React and the UI is being pushed to its limits. The kind of situation where the UI/UX is so complex that the UI chugs or is unresponsive—whether due to the sheer amount of data in the DOM or complex interactions etc.. But, nearly every time I'm working with React, performance is well above product requirements. Often, issues of performance are having to do with bottlenecks in backend service(s).

This realization made me feel a bit unchallenged and curious about what work I could find that might push this boundary for me. From observing some of the clients I've worked with (and other folks' experience on the teams I've been on), it seems that this kind of work appears more commonly for larger companies where they:

a) might actually have front-end performance issues</li>
b) have a budget to improve front-end performance, even if those changes would be (subjectively) negligible to users.</li> </ul>
Note that this is just an observation I’ve had, working for client companies ranging in size of 2 people to 3000 people (and plenty of legacy code).
Many years ago, my first boss at my first programming job said that most programming for the web is mostly building forms (and of course, displaying the data from those forms). He was being reductive to make a point—but at the end of the day, the statement did help me wrap my head around approaching web programming. As such, I think it's pretty uncommon to find a user interface that isn't related to form-esque CRUD operations, has a complex UI and user experience, and where performance is a problem. Web applications like Figma (and its use of web assembly) come to mind.
Another caveat in all this is that a lot of the time that I'm working on various front-ends, nobody, including myself, is testing for low-powered or lower-end devices. There's a pretty evident bias as everyone working on the front end is usually working on some kind of high-powered MacBook Pro, and it's altogether too easy to forget that many people are either on their phone or are likely on a much lower-powered device.
Even if performance is a problem, it is often forgotten (just like accessibility, unfortunately)—well, at least until a company has enough budget (or legal ramifications to deal with, in the case of accessibility) to sand down these rough edges. Perhaps this slow-to-move attitude is somewhat in line with the nature of developing for the browser—it's easier to be reactive rather than proactive. The rigorousness of schemas and database security and other such things aren't as pressing. Maybe there's been a history of flexibility and leniency that puts performance in the backseat at times. I don't know.
I hope I come across this sort of front-end work in the future, even if just for my curiousity’s sake. It might be more rare than I think.

Marvelous Programs: Syncthing

2025-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

I present to you a themed-blog-series called Marvelous Programs, in which I share various computer programs that make a big difference in my day to day life. Syncthing</a> is a great one to pick as my inaugural post. I've used it on and off for probably six or seven years. More recently since setting up a new home server, it's a mainstay in connecting several computers 1</a> together.
Following in the tradition of most Go programs, it works across multiple platforms as a single binary with everything contained. Using Syncthing is very similar to using a program like Dropbox. However, there isn't necessarily a centralized UI that coordinates multiple computers so much as there are multiple computers all running their own instance of Syncthing.
I use Syncthing with the "PARA" methodology for organizing folders. I don’t sync my entire PARA folder-set so much as the projects I’m currently working on and any frequently accessed files. Syncthing is efficient enough that I can stop working on one computer and by the time I walk over to another it's usually synced everything I need to continue whatever task I was working on.
Occasionally, while working in a git repository I will notice that I have a couple sync-thing conflict files but I haven't looked into what's causing this when it occurs as I've not actually encountered any corrupted files yet.

Footnotes</h4>
^{1
At one point I was able to sync to my Android no problem, but when I switched to iOS, I did not have as much luck using syncthing, and have not been back to check how well it works on mobile since then.
</div>}

I miss Clojure

2025-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

I used to write Clojure for my day job. I worked on a contract for about 8 or 9 months where I had the pleasure of working in ClojureScript daily, both for building an API (yes, instead of using Clojure and the JVM) and for building a mobile app (this was well before shadow-cljs).
There were a lot of bumps along the way, and several strange bugs (I recall working with controlled inputs in re-frame on mobile to be particularly nasty), and yet it was one of the most delightful environments to be in. I was also using Emacs at the time, too. Paired with Clojure, I was working in the land of lisps. I loved the ability to evaluate code in a buffer and see the results pointed at by a nifty little ASCII arrow =></code>. In retrospect, this was the most niche set of tools I've ever used in my career. I'm glad for it not just for the sheer fun of writing Clojure code, but how much it taught about debugging my tools (for better or for worse).
Going to Clojure meetups and working with folks writing Clojure definitely changed my understanding of programming fundamentally—Lisps are known to do this. But as important (if not more important) as the tools were the people I had the pleasure of meeting and working with. It's unfair of me to pigeon-hole a group of people based on their programming preferences, but I'm going to do that anyway—the folks I met who wrote Clojure were the most interesting programmers I've met—not just in their approachces to programming, but even their personal lives, as I got to know them.
The folks I met writing and reading Clojure were often the smartest people in the room. Whether by chance, luck, or circumstance—they were. I felt like I understood a fraction of what they did, but they were welcoming and happy to share their knowledge, even if I didn't understanding everything on the first pass.
These days, if I'm working on any kind of full-stack project on my own, I almost always reach for Elixir and Phoenix. It has enough elements of Clojure but saves you the need to bolt together your web stack via a series of libraries. It is a powerful set of tools in its own right, and has its own unique communities, too. I like it a lot. I've read that Elixir took a lot of inspiration from Clojure. I can see that. But I haven't yet had the joy of meeting many folks doing Elixir, and seeing their passion (I know they're out there). I know that some of the things I'm sharing here are sentiments that others have felt in other programming languages—whether Go, Ruby, Rust, etc. It just happened, that for me, at the right time in my career and my personal life, it was Clojure.
This post's title is true, I do miss Clojure. But I think I miss the people who used it, who got together to chat, share knowledge, and hangout more.
Impatienter and Dumberer 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00 Cheeky title aside, I'm going to contribute another take to the AI discourse. Useful or not, I can share my reflection that's been running through my head lately. I am noticing myself becoming more impatient and learning fewer programming-related-things due to my usage of LLMs. There's really not much more to say than that. What might have taken me more time and mental work in learning how to do something previously now simply doesn't take any work at all. My brain is not learning new things. Not only that, when I try to stop and ask myself, "Hey, would you like to try to learn this and actually read the documentation?" I am too impatient to do so. This is fine and good if your entire goal is to get that result. But as everyone and their cross-stitched pillow keeps telling me, it’s the journey that is more important than the destination. But I’m starting to not have a journey at all. I’m too impatient to even leave the house. I sort of realized this as I took on setting up a home server, my first computer-y hobby project I’ve done in my free time in ages. You should see the long Claude conversations I had in order to orchestrate Docker, set up backup scripts, and learn enough about Arch Linux to be dangerous. But if you ask me how the nuanced parts work, I'd come up short. What's more, nearing the end of theproject, I was growing so impatient to have my slick home server setup that I was barely reviewing the python code that Claude was spitting out. It may be a me problem but it's still a problem. Still, it was pretty amazing for me to be able to set up a home server with such little effort. I see now that with each project like this that I take on, there is an opportunity to assess: is this one of those moments where I want to learn everything, you know, the old way? or, do I want to get results faster and risk getting impatienter and dumberer?.
Diving into self-hosting

2025-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

I've tumbled deep down the rabbit hole of self-hosting/home servers. As far as rabbit holes go (do they go on infinitely?), this has turned out to be an educational and fun one. What began with self-hosting our photos for our family has turned into an all-out slew of installing applications to try them out, explore, and come back with a cohesive system.
There are a lot of tutorials on getting started in this domain, so I won't turn this post into that; more so, I'll share what has been fun to explore and what tools I ended up using.
The current state of things ended up like this:

Running a Beelink SER8 with an added 1TB NVMe drive (for a total of 2TB internal space) running Arch Linux.</li>
An external Samsung SSD I got on sale (2TB)</li>
An external keyboard and monitor for when I don't want to be using the CLI via SSH</li>
The following programs:

Actual - Budgeting software</li>
Audiobookshelf - Podcast and Audiobook manager</li>
Booklore - Ebook manager</li>
Bookstack - Low-resource wiki</li>
Caddy - Router</li>
Ghost - Blog/CMS</li>
Jellyfin - Media streaming</li>
Paperless-NGX - Document management</li>
Umami - Analytics for public sites</li>
Homepage - Internal bookmarks for running programs</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
I use all of the above with varying degrees of frequency, with Immich, Actual, and Ghost being the most frequent. I really like Paperless-NGX—a program that allows you to scan, perform OCR, and tag and file away paper documents.
It took about a month of puttering on and off in the evenings to get things working. As is my custom with these kinds of tinkery projects, I just set sail with an idea and chase it across the horizon until everything works. Sometimes this would get frustrating, and other times it was surprisingly easy.
Along the way I learned more about Docker, which had previously been a black box, as well as systemd</code> timers, cloudflared</code>, and a backup program called Restic</a>, which took some time to wrap my head around. Which leads me to backups:
Backing up</h2> Several weeks went by where I was actually using the above programs, filling them with data, before I thought about building a backup plan. This became a little scary, so I spent some time investigating Restic. In short, it allows you to sync files from Location A to another "repository," Location Z. What's more, you can remotely access those files by "mounting</a>" the repo, and then explore and interact with the directory as if it were locally available (it's not). I think it can do a lot more, but I haven't needed anything beyond what I've gotten set up. Hobby Satisfaction</h2> There is undoubtedly a satisfaction to self-hosting. During my research, I occasionally came across people (usually on r/self-hosted) asking how much time/money people were saving running their own server. Most times the replies were along the lines of "I have spent more time & money than I have saved." Running your own server is undoubtedly a tinkerer's wonderland. There's no shortage of things to try and tune, as well as necessary tasks like keeping things up to date and being wary of falling behind on security updates. With that said, I've managed to host two Ghost sites, which saves me paying $9 a month through Ghost's hosting, or for a Hetzner or the like hosting option. If I continue using just Immich to host photos, I would be saving upward of ten to twenty dollars a month on something like iCloud storage or Google Storage. That might seem insignificant to some (especially when contrasting it with the amount of time spent learning and setting up a home server), but saving somewhere around $50 or so dollars yet also understanding and operating the system that manages your own data is a sort of combined satisfaction that I haven't really experienced before. More important than any monetary savings is a satisfaction that comes with knowing how a system that benefits you (and a few friends and family perhaps) operates under the hood. I've figured out a few more things about Docker, systemd, Arch Linux along the way, also sparking curiosity about databases. A word of warning</h2> As much as I’ve enjoyed this process, I’m aware of at least some of the risks. The reality is that I could lose all my data. I could even have a backup on Backblaze or Hetzner and that could disappear too. I can’t hold a candle to iCloud’s reliability. I could spill water on my server, have a power outage that zaps the computer into oblivion, so on and etc. On top of that, exposing services to the internet is a bit scary if you don’t know the full expanse of what might be involved in securing a service. I felt I did my due diligence here, but I also imagine it won’t take much to prove me wrong there. Returning from the rabbit-hole</h2> There are a few avenues I still want to explore - a few apps I want to try and different Linux distributions. I’m very interested in nix/os (but it seems I would need to divide myself in two so that one life can spend its waking hours comprehending that world) as well as several other programs I haven’t tried setting up (Vaultwarde, Forgejo, Komodo, Navidrome). Moving on from this project is difficult—there’s a lot more I could do, a seemingly infinite number of tweaks and turns to dials and knobs. I’ve mostly left this working and abstained from installing more applications just because I (and the server) have the bandwidth to do it. If you get a chance to run a home server, I’d recommend it. MiniPCs and Raspberry Pi’s are available and affordable. Understand the risks and do your due diligence. Information is widely accessible on how to get things set up. I used Claude plenty of times to help with learning how to dump databases, writing scripts to back things up (please, make sure you audit and review all code you use from LLMs) and to do general debugging when necessary.
Radio Silence - An Unfinished Playdate Game 2025-06-12T00:00:00+00:00 About 8 months ago, I started building my second game for the Playdate. The working title was "Black Hole" (later to be renamed "Radio Silence") and the idea was simple: you are a crew member in a spaceship that needs to enter a black hole. And so you orbit around the black hole, collecting raw materials from space debris, which you then use to craft items to help you successfully enter and cross through a black hole without getting crushed (Yes, I know that it's physically impossible to go through a black hole, but this is also a fictional game). When I started this game, I was coming off the momentum of… Exploring Zellij + Helix 2025-01-11T00:00:00+00:00 I have been exploring some new coding tools lately, specifically Helix</a> and Zellij</a>. Before I dive into those, let's talk about emacs. I've been an Emacs user for about seven or eight years, primarily using it as a GUI application rather than in the terminal. I love it – it's incredibly powerful, and the key bindings are burned into my fingertips at this point. Emacs served as my one-stop solution for pretty much any programming language, and the addition of native compilation and LSP-related tooling made it even more capable. I particularly benefited from its rich ecosystem, saving countless hours with tools like Magit and Org Mode.… Electrolight Devlog 2024-06-24T00:00:00+00:00 What follows is the entire devlog for the first game I ever really finished — ElectroLight for the Playdate! Electrolight is available on itch.io</a>. Pen Plotting Pals 2024-05-22T00:00:00+00:00 This past weekend, I wrapped up a project I've been working on for a few months: making some pen plotter art for a friend as a surprise gift. Here's the end result: The three images above depict locations in Toronto (plotted in black) overlaid with the bike routes (plotted in orange pen) of my friend Chad, who does food bank deliveries through the Bike Brigade. I had a lot of fun making this—below I'll walk through the process in more detail. Getting lots of GPX Data</h2> Earlier in the year, Chad shared some GPX data with me that were dumps from Ride With GPS, so I could move them into Strava via their API integrations. After helping with that, I had hundreds of GPX data files just sitting around doing nothing on my hard drive. Around the same time, my friend Henry showed me a program called QGIS, and we hacked around with it a little bit during a side-project night. After digging into QGIS, I started to explore making a poster with the GPX data I had kicking around. I spent a few weeks noodling on this but ended up discarding an idea, not really being happy with the design that I created. Accessing the pen plotter</h2> A few months later I became acquainted with an Axidraw, which is a pen plotter tool. The Axidraw was made available in my co-working space thanks to a generous member who had brought it in, encouraging others to play around and learn how to use it. During another side project night, Henry showed me how to use the pen plotter. And in the span of that night, we were able to draw a local map using QGIS, Inkscape, and the Axidraw. We watched, mesmerized, as the pen plotter plotted away. </video> With my poster idea in the project graveyard, using a pen plotter became an appealing alternative for making some art with the GPX data I had sitting around. After this most recent side project night, I had a rough idea of what the work would involve to do the same thing but with GPX data on top: (re-learn how to) pull down vector tile maps</li> overlay GPX data</li> figure out how to export separate layers and send them to Inkscape as SVGs</li> learn how to work with the AxisDraw with Inkscape.</li> use the AxisDraw, with a mixture of multiple inks, preferably.</li> </ul> Working with QGIS and GPX Data</h2> I began by making a new project in GPX and tried to find a way to batch import large quantities of GPX data. It turns out it's not too difficult using a Batch GPX Importer plugin</a> that I found through this GIS forum post</a>. I also found a post getting into how to import vector map tiles</a>. It would later turn out that I wouldn't actually need this Vector Map tile, although it provided a useful base layer to then lay on top of the street lines and the GPX lines. Since I only really needed to draw lines to represent roads, Henry showed me a way to use something called Quick OSM</a> to query for just the content that you want from OpenStreetMap. This allows you to, say, ask for highways or residential homes or other things you might find on a map without having to necessarily pull in everything. Above is a screenshot of how the GPX data looks over top of the whole city. Above screenshot demonstrates querying just street map lines and overlaying GPX data. Preparing a test print</h2> Once the above was in place, I decided it was time to actually get plotting using the Axidraw. During this session, I read some documentation on the Axidraw and Inkscape, and found that it wasn't too complicated. I had used Inkscape a lot when I was a teenager, and so I was still familiar with the interface, and honestly, it hasn't changed a ton. I looked for some tips and people described, starting with a small test print. What I had above was far too complicated, so I decided to try and clip my SVG to just show a smaller section of the map and just print that. Along the way, I learned about spatial bookmarks, which are a useful tool in QGIS. Basically, you can align your map the way you like, looking at a specific viewport of it, set a bookmark and then be able to return to that view at any time. This was useful as I started to set what I wanted to be the exact regions I would print. Exporting SVGs from QGIS is a bit confusing, and I didn't actually write down how to do it in my log for this project. Basically, there's a canvas tool that allows you to create an export in QGIS, and then you can spit out an SVG or a PDF. Once I had an output, I tossed it into Inkscape and clipped it to a page size of 3.5 inches by 4.5 inches and decided to do a few different tests for the Axidraw. First, I tried using a Platinum Preppy fountain pen. It's a great pen, it's cheap, and it's very smooth. But I quickly learned that you should be using the same type of pen if you're doing multiple colours, because the width of the pen in the holder is actually going to change where the ink comes in contact with the page. A bit obvious in retrospect. I also quickly realized that there were some parts of the GPX data that were tightly condensed and ended up tearing through the paper. Next, I tried using microns. I had two in black and orange of the same size. I had read that they were great candidates for pen plotters; however, I didn't have much success. They either got bent or became quite dry in the process of plotting. Along the way, I found a great blog post</a> about different pens to use with pen plotters. Three completed prints</h2> A few days later, I had a successful working session on this project. I returned to the co-working space with some new paper to test, some mixed media 100-pound 12 by 9 paper that I had bought a couple of years ago during the pandemic. I thought it would be stronger and hold up better than printer paper, which it did, but it still got torn by the pen plotter’s repeating strokes on very dense areas. So I did some more research and headed over to the art store to pick up some Bristol paper. 1</a> Then I tried printing using the Jelly Roll pens by Sakura, the same company that makes Microns. I found that the Jelly Roll 08 Orange and Black turned out to be far superior to the Microns. I was a little concerned that they might not have the same archival quality, but in the end, big shrug. Trimming the plots</h2> The next day I got up early, made my breakfast, and dedicated about 45 minutes to chipping away at this. I trimmed the edges of the prints and had a good time doing that. It was actually very satisfying, although I did make a few mistakes. Not a big deal, though, because I'll be using a mat to cover up the prints and uneven trimmings won't show. I created a mock mat out of a thick piece of mixed media paper to see how it'd look with two images up, and I was pretty happy with it. Framing</h2> I wasn't sure what I would do for framing or for the mat. I didn't really want to take it to a frame store because I knew it would be expensive. So I looked around a few thrift stores, but couldn't find anything remotely useful. Then, I happened to mention this project that I've been working on to a friend, and she quickly pointed out two respective websites for buying frames and buying custom mats 2</a>. I was able to use the online web interface for the mat to request three cutouts, and it came to $15 or so, while the respective frame was around $60 for an 18 x 12. Both the frame and the mat showed up in about 6 days. I was pleased with the look of both, although they are not the quality you would find in a frame shop. But for the price, it's hard to make an argument otherwise, at least for a project like this. The frame didn't come with real glass (well, maybe it's plexiglass). You peel off two thin films on either side of it, and then you have this clear sheet of plastic, basically. My partner, who has experience in custom framing, helped me mount the pieces on the mat, frame them, and stick it all together. Wrapping up</h2> This was a super fun project. It's a bit of a strange one in that I started it nearly a year ago, but in a different way. Sometimes it can be hard to table ideas or give up on them completely. But this was a nice example of seeing something kind of come back from the dead a little bit. I really enjoyed working with the pen blotter. It satisfies the parts of my brain that want to create art, but also use code or other technical tools to make them. I haven't framed a piece of art either for myself or anyone else in a long time, but it creates a sort of finality around what you've done, which is really satisfying. I was surprised to find that I wasn't really doting too much on the final appearance of this creation. The glass that came with the frame got a little bit scratched, the pen plots aren't perfect, I tore the paper when cutting them by hand, but none of this really matters too much to me and none of it is really visible to the viewer. I'm learning to identify imperfections in whatever I'm working on and starting to see when they really matter vs when only you will know they exist. This was also a great follow-up project to creating Electrolight and publishing it. I wanted a break from gamedev before embarking on another game. This project took about three months to execute, but that was spread out over only, say, six or seven actual sessions of focused work. I look forward to coming back to the Axidraw, creating playful art for just myself, and seeing what I can come up with, maybe on different surfaces with different kinds of pens, or maybe something more experimental. Thank you for reading. Footnotes</h2> ^{1 Side note, I never really realized where the word Bristol board came from, but Bristol is kind of paper I guess. It's often used for markers, making comics, or anything that needs a smooth tooth. </div> ^{2 Small lesson/note to self: just tell your friends what you're working on. If I hadn't mentioned my search for a frame, I wouldn't have gotten this helpful advice. I've been way too bashful to talk about my projects in the past. </div>}} The road to Half Marathon 2024-05-22T00:00:00+00:00 This past Sunday, I completed my first half-marathon race. It was an overwhelming success by my standards: good weather, good friends, good running. I have been training for this run since May of this year and I'm pleased with how it all went down. I decided to write a log as I trained. I kept going strong, logging entries after runs, all the way up to September. I'll include the entirety of the log, some 5000 words below the race-day recap. </blockquote> The Race</h3> For me, the race began the night before when nine of us got together to have dinner. Several of my friends had joined a running club back in the spring and had encouraged me to join the runs (and eventually, to sign up for the half-marathon). I wouldn't have signed up without this encouragement (and partially the jealousy of missing out). Anyway, I've never been one for throwing parties, but having these friends over for dinner to celebrate our training (and to eat a lot of carbs) was such an obvious delight for me that we set to preparing the meal and making room for 9 people with glee. For dinner we had: vegan pasta, spaghetti, a kale salad (with hunks of baguette croutons), 4 homemade pizzas, a homemade focaccia, and a bread cake. We ate, and we ate, and we ate. Jeff, my oldest friend (and newest running mentor) stayed the night, visiting from out of town. We cleaned up after dinner and made our plan for the morning. Up at 5, out the door at 6:30. We both slept well enough, and got moving. I'm still getting used to how dark it is at this time of year. We made oats and then went for a walk in hopes of getting our stomachs moving. It was dark as the middle of the night as our footsteps echoed around the block. We got back and got on our bikes and made our way down to Queen and University. It was fairly empty at 6:45 in the morning, compared to the absolute swarms of people who would show up in the next hour. We dropped off our bags and went looking for the washrooms. The line up for the main washrooms was unbelievably long, so we set off jogging to try to find an alternative. Just around the corner on Armoury st. we found what we were looking for. We stretched and warmed up. Jeff and I set off to find our corrals. Jeff would be in the very first—aiming to be his personal best of 1:23:58(!). We hugged and wished each other good luck; I knew the race would be emotional for me at times, including in that moment—knowing the ambitions we had for ourselves. For me, Jeff had donated his time and advice generously, helping me prepare the way for first-time training for anything, and my first actual race. I found my way to my corral, wandering through hordes of people, unsure of where I was supposed to be. Eventually I found the blue corral, got in and waited. It was at least 30 minutes between Jeff starting and my corral starting. I listened to music and tried to keep warm. The race started off slow for me. I was trying a new feature on my Garmin running watch Jeff had shown me — a feature called Pace Pro that provides kilometer-by-kilometer pacing strategies. Unfortunately, using this new-to-me feature meant that my watch seemed computationally overloaded—it couldn't play music at the same time as offering pacing instructions (which, writing this down now, feels absolutely absurd to me that a watch can do any of this stuff). So, I ran without music for the first 12 km. The first half of the half was great. It felt insignificant to what would come next. I ambled along between 5:30 and 6:00 per kilometre. I took in the signs of the cheering spectators and didn't feel like I was pushing myself particularly hard. By the time I hit about 8 or 9km I started to feel a bit fatigued—but to my surprise, still fine. The only thing: I had to pee (of course). But I refused to stop and continued on, still taking water/electrolyte-drinks passed out by volunteers at every opportunity. At this point, I didn't feel the impact of the cheers, but I did appreciate the brass band on Bathurst! Eventually, I hit Lakeshore. The sun was bright and on me. I felt some fatigue, but largely fine. I used an energy packet called a "Gu" at 12k. I didn't much feel like eating it, but knew it would probably be for the best. I started to wonder when I'd arrive at the turn-around point to come back along Lakeshore—I watched impressive runners already coming back at high speed. Along Lakeshore were many bushes and trees, but I resisted the temptation. Before long, I was at 14km. Here something strange happened to me. I think it was the music, which I tried to get working several times, and had finally stuck. I became possessed by a sleeping energy. I sped up. I really sped up. I was jumping up onto the curb to pass people in large swathes. My average pace went from 5:23 at 14km, to 5:07, to 5:00, to 4:54, to 4:32. At several points during the race, I felt emotional. I couldn't quite cry though, whether for focus, or my brain just going haywire. But I was running high at this point. A few tears leaked out, but I was probably also grinning like an idiot. Suddenly, the cheers from the spectators meant a lot more. I remember locking eyes with a woman giving out high fives. She pointed fiercely at me, her eyes determined as if to say you! you're giving me a high five!, I returned the look, and ran by, fulfilling the contract, and speeding up for it. The crowds of spectators and the sound of cheering got louder and louder as I approached the finish line. I saw my partner and Jeff cheering me on in the very last stretch. I was shocked out of my running reverie. Their cheers meant the world to me. I stopped and gave them both a hug, despite their cries to keep going, keep going!. What's 5 seconds to give a hug to your people — I already knew I was well ahead of my goal—sub 2:00—thanks to my new pal Pace Pro. Everything was just gravy at this point. The last kilometer got hard, though. Really hard. All of a sudden I felt like stopping. I had to stop—I had not walked yet, but suddenly it seemed like the safest thing to do. If I saw myself, I'd probably have looked paler than usual (if possible?). I was scared I was going to collapse. I had pushed too hard. My burst of speed had lasted up to the last 200 metres or so of the race—there was no keeping it up. As soon as my feet stopped to walk, I looked up—the finish line was right in front of me. So, I trotted through to the end. Perhaps stopping for the hug was part of it - my body came down in that moment, and trying to get it going again was a hard argument to make. Passing through the finish, I took several slow breaths, looking around somewhat frantically for water. I couldn't believe how anxious I felt. I had been on top of the world for the last 20 minutes, but it just hadn't lasted right to the end. This being my first race, I had no idea what kind of state I was putting myself into—I was just going along for the ride. I ended up fine, in all respects. I found water, I found my friends, and I found some food. I could feel the emotions rising as I approached my partner and Jeff. I hugged them both, and cried a little. Jeff hit a new PB (1:20:31!), and came 98th out of 13,000 or so runners. I had finished sub 2:00. It was a good day. We waited in the sun for the rest of our group. The race was over. We got on our bikes and went home. Processing Hack Night 2024-03-22T00:00:00+00:00 I attended a Processing Jam this week! Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping. </blockquote> I haven’t used Processing since around 2020, when I created a few sketches</a> as an homage to an exhibit I saw at the AGO of Margaret Priest’s construction series. I’ve long been inspired by people like Tyler Hobbs</a> and Matt Deslauriers</a> who are making some pretty wild, cool stuff with code. It was fun to crack open Processing again — in my case, I use a wrapper around Processing in Clojure called quil</a>. After looking up quil again, other than a few threads that asked "is quil still being maintained," etc., I got it working with no problems. I started by drawing a few ideas in my sketchbook to see what I could come up with. Then I hacked away at rendering a bunch of circles on the screen. Here’s how it came out: Most of this came as a result of mashing code until it came together. I had some help from a friend at the gathering to center everything (I always trip over centering things in Processing). I’d like to do more creative coding, but it’ll have to get in line behind the game I’m building (which is sufficiently creative-coding already). Find the code below! It was fun to write Clojure again; I kind of forgot how expressive it is. (ns mar-20.core (:require [quil.core :as q] [quil.middleware :as m])) (def w 4500) (def h 4500) (defn setup [] (q/frame-rate 30) {:angle 0}) (defn update-state [state] ; Update sketch state by changing circle colour and position. {:angle (+ (:angle state) 1.1)}) (defn rnd-col [] (q/fill (q/random 120 255) (q/random 120 255) (q/random 120 255))) (defn draw-state [state] (let [margin-pc 0.1 width-for-circles (* w (- 1 (* 2 margin-pc))) margin (* w margin-pc) num-circ 20 circle-max-size (/ width-for-circles num-circ) circle-shrink-px (* circle-max-size 0.1) num-rows 10] (q/smooth) (q/no-loop) (q/background 250) (doseq [hloop (range num-rows) :let [h-offset (/ h (inc num-rows)) circ-y (+ (* (+ hloop 1) h-offset))]] (doseq [iloop (range 4)] (doseq [jloop (range num-circ) :let [ circle-size (- circle-max-size (q/random 3 (- circle-max-size (/ circle-max-size 10))) circle-shrink-px) circle-diff (- circle-max-size circle-size) circ-x (+ (* jloop circle-max-size) margin (/ circle-max-size 2)) ] ] (q/stroke-weight (* w 0.002)) (rnd-col) (q/ellipse circ-x circ-y circle-size circle-size))))) (q/save "test.png")) (q/defsketch mar-20 :title "" :size [w h] :setup setup :update update-state :draw draw-state :features [:keep-on-top] :middleware [m/fun-mode]) </code></pre> A break from side-project hacking 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00 The other day a friend asked me what I was working on, programming-wise. To my surprise, the answer was: nothing. Pretty much since I started learning to program in 2015 I have almost always had some kind of programming-oriented project going on (while also working). Now, to be fair, this non-programming has only been going on for about 3 or 4 weeks. I was making videos for a game I started on the TIC-80, but I fell off of it . And while I intend to do more, I'm delightfully surprised to see myself absolutely fine about falling off an idea so quickly and not pursuing any side-project programming. Of course, I've got other new and persisting interests. I continue to practice… How should a blog be? 2023-03-26T00:00:00+00:00 I'm having a nice, slow Sunday evening where I've decided to revisit this little blog here and putter on its design a bit. It would be fair to say that I seem to be in a perpetual state of mediocre satisfaction with this thing. While poking at some Tailwind styles, I started wondering what a blog should be (somewhat facetiously). I have some ideas, but I think I might have more ideas of what it shouldn't be, for me. Mark the days when something 'clicks' 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00 For the past few months, I've been practicing figure drawing in the mornings before work. Today, something clicked. Suddenly, it seemed like I was better proportioning heads, arms, and legs, picking up on how to lay down shadows with the charcoal, and I was moving faster and more confidently. Simply, each drawing, from the 1-minute quick-draws to the 10-minute drawing at the end of the session, was better.… How doth I read a technical book? 2022-11-23T00:00:00+00:00 With all that in mind, it’s questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts. </blockquote> A quote from "Learn to program in 10 years</a>" A sync is a sync, until it's not 2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00 I've been writing Elixir at work for a few weeks. Yesterday I dove into a friend’s JS codebase and immediately got confused by the async stuff. While I used to write JS full time, the past 6 months I've spent in Elixir-land has really spoiled me. I haven't written a lot of async/await code. It's supposed to be simpler than Promises, which are also simpler than callback-soup. Right. It's a bit embarrassing, but after all these years of writing JavaScript code - I still trip over async stuff. Sometimes I'm hard on myself - mostly my interior dialogue thinks: You haven't written enough JS to have it be second nature. That might be true, but there might also be more to it. A Moment with Helix 2022-11-10T00:00:00+00:00 I had some free time to play around with the Helix editor (again) yesterday. It's very cool, but I quickly realized that I was useless trying to navigate the editor's functions; my fingers have some serious muscle memory from Doom Emacs at this point. After using it for 10~ minutes, I noted several features that I need access to (I'll get to that later). (To be fair, this isn't me slamming Helix; if anything, I'd like to use Helix more so that I can have a quick go-to editor to use in a pinch when emacs isn't available (ie, I broke it) or I only need to edit a few small files.) Learning About Streams in Elixir 2022-10-31T00:00:00+00:00 Note: This post was originally called "Why not use Elixir Streams all the time?" Half-way through the writing of that post, I started googling this question and realized that there was already some research done and I quickly got a variety of good answers. With that said, I think I'll leave this post up, as it was fun to write (and it might be fun to read if you enjoy seeing someone think-out-loud-on-paper about new topics)!… Another quarter rolls in 2022-10-06T00:00:00+00:00 It's time for another post to update on my year of quarterly projects. I wrapped up the previous quarter and managed to successfully finish six paintings, as I planned. I hit the goal hard at the beginning of the quarter, completing 3 paintings in the span of one month. I mostly worked on a set of arches 7 x 10 paper, although I did also experiment using clayboard. I'm happy with the results and I'll post some photos in this post when I get a chance. I started to run out of steam after the first month as I quickly became interested in comics. Before I knew it I had dozens of comics out from the library and was reading how to make comics by Scott McCloud. So my focus was split.… Summer and Winter 2022-08-29T00:00:00+00:00 I'm writing to you from a windy summer night in Toronto. Summer has flown by. I looked up at the calendar, and it was August 29th. So, time flies, what else is new? The last two months have been interesting. I started a new job at the end of June, I slackened on my goals (sort of), and I have just been living life. This is the way of summer. The way of winter is one of planning and diligence. It is the way of making New Year’s resolutions and then going at them eagerly. Then, summer rolls around. People are out. Things happen more spontaneously, and at the end of the day, I want to spend less time in front of a computer (doubly so, with the new job). So what have the last two months brought me? Baby's First Genserver 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00 In this post, I walk through learning about and creating my first GenServer for Galley</a>. While on vacation, I was able to return to Galley and work on a feature that I've been wanting to do for a while - adding countdown timers to recipes. Ari's Garden</a> originally implemented this feature in JavaScript using a setInterval</code>, and because it was a static site, I couldn't really persist these timers for users . When I started out working on Galley, I knew I'd be able to leverage having a server to make this feature work properly. I didn't know anything about GenServer at the time… Some thoughts on imposter syndrome 2022-07-31T00:00:00+00:00 Hi there 👋, Today I'm writing from a cottage patio, taking my first stretch of summer vacation. I have five full days off, plus some weekend time. It feels great so far. It has been a hectic month starting a new job, and now I have some time to decompress and let some thoughts unfold. Seems like a good time to write and reflect a bit, I'd say. One topic that has surfaced a few times over the month is imposter syndrome. It is a commonly written-about topic in my field, so I won't be adding anything new to the literature, save for my personal experience. But, in the spirit of working on my transparency and openness initiatives, I think I better write about it!… Refactoring Ecto queries with reduce 2022-07-08T00:00:00+00:00 Today I want to share a fun refactor that finally "clicked" for me (and it was right there in plain view for quite some time!). Let me set the stage. First week of professional elixir 2022-07-03T00:00:00+00:00 I get to write Elixir at my new job! This is my first time writing it in a professional setting. I have written Clojure for work and while Clojure and Elixir share quite a few similarities, I am learning lots of new things. Most of my learnings are around Elixir idioms and growing my knowledge of the concepts that the syntax of the language wraps around. In a sense, this post is sort of a follow up to my post on side projects vs work for learning. The previous post is pretty... vague and hand-wavey, but this one will be a bit more concrete on some of the things I've learned. Let's jump into it. Thank you, blog 2022-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 Today I'm writing a small post to thank my blog (and circuitously myself, I suppose) for helping me find work I'm interested in doing. I started a new job last week at a software consultancy. The consultancy places consultants at different clients in pairs or small groups. The clients could have any range of challenges or technical problems, using any variety of languages/tech stacks. And so, when joining, the consultancy tries to find a best fit between the consultant and client based on technology and interest. A naive mini parser 2022-06-30T00:00:00+00:00 At the end of last week, I had a bit of fun approaching how to migrate recipes from Ari's Garden</a> to Galley</a> The high-level problem is that Ari's Garden is an elm application that consumes a big JSON file</a> whereas Galley needs recipe data to be input by form. Finishing Galley 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00 Today I'm delighted to say that I've deployed Galley, making it the first project of my "4-projects-a-year" that has been completed (and with 2 weeks to spare). In this post, I'll write about why I think I was able to complete this project and about deployment. Let's start with the latter. Image Uploading in Galley 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00 Oh, hello again. It's the 9th of June already. How did that happen? I'm blaming part of the haze of the last few days of a bad chest cold I got that drowned me in a sea of Nyquil + sleeping + reading. I have until the end of June until I move on to my next project. Galley is almost done; its MVP - what remains is to set up an email system and to import some recipes. I've been putting off setting up the email system because I know it will have to cover a lot - user registration and confirmation, email and password changes, as well as other stuff I'm sure. From my brief scanning, the Elixir libraries for email management have definitely improved since I last perused them sometime in 2018. Conditionals in Ecto Queries 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00 I had a fairly productive refactoring session on a small function that I thought I would write about. In Galley, my recipe/cooking application, I have a home / index page where users can search and view recipes. At the current state, a user can search by recipe name and can filter by all recipes or their recipes. At the moment I am building out a tagging functionality such that a user can search by tags shared between recipes such as spicy, salad, or easy, for example. With these three sources of permutation, I need to account for a database query that could have a mixed bag of search queries, tags, and filters. Dynamic Liveview Forms 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00 I'm back with another post on Elixir. This one is about working with LiveView and building dynamic forms. When I talk about dynamic forms I'm referring to the ability to add or remove any number of form fields for a "embeds_many" data type. In the case of Galley, the recipe form has many parts to it, the pertinent ones here being the ingredients and the steps. Any recipe has a variable number of ingredients and instructional steps. I needed to enable users to add and/or delete form fields to fit their recipes. This turned out to be a bit harder than I thought, as I waded into the world of LiveView and the mechanics of Ecto and Phoenix at the same time. A few weeks at Alchemy Camp 2022-04-24T00:00:00+00:00 I'm back with a post with some thoughts on Elixir & Phoenix after using it for a few weeks. It's been really fun. I'm using Elixir & Phoenix to build "Galley," a web app for storing recipes. Brewing Elixirs in the Galley 2022-04-14T00:00:00+00:00 It's a new quarter, so I'm working on a new project. This one will be a rebuilding of my old cooking site, Ari's Garden</a>. The new project is tentatively called "Galley". This post is a bit of a long-winded ramble about what I would like Galley to be, the tech it would use, and how it will be different. 2021's Picks 2022-01-02T00:00:00+00:00 I don't have an extensive list for things I discovered, watched, read, or listened to in 2021, but here are some standouts: 2021 - New Year’s Reflections 2021-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 The year whipped by. It was a big year for me, in many ways. I turned 30. I achieved a goal I have had for quite some time - to live in a new place( see: Montreal</a>). I spent a lot of time drawing and toward the end of the year - painting. I have many things to be grateful for here (and for those who are reading this that know me personally, I'm certainly grateful for you :) ).… A few quick thoughts on Swift 2021-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 What's this? I'm reading up on yet ANOTHER programming language? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a bit of a while coming. I've been wanting to rebuild laundromat</a> and some other MIDI sequencers for a while. Originally, I thought it might be fun to build them with SDL and a tool like C, but a combination of different factors made me think that I should just build for iOS (although I have mixed feelings about building in the Apple ecosystem). A few quick thoughts on Zig 2021-12-05T00:00:00+00:00 I love to jump from programming language to programming language whenever I feel I need a jolt in my world(view) of programming. This time I did not stay in the world of Zig long enough to build anything with it, but I'm glad that I stopped in and had tea, so to speak. The last month or so that I have spent working in Rust in my spare time has given me a bit more confidence in the idea of systems programming, and so I took a quick detour to consume some articles, podcasts, and talks about Zig.… Re-writing Firn in rust - pt. 2 2021-11-11T00:00:00+00:00 Well, I did end up starting a re-write of firn. I'm having a pretty good time! I'd say I'm about 30-40% done and have probably spent about ... 35 hours on it? It seems like a lot for a project (and I suppose it is), but the learning curve for rust has been steep. I am moving faster and faster with each commit, however, and I suspect it will certainly not take as long to complete the re-write as the original took. After all, I'm mostly porting old features from clojure to rust - I don't have to do any experimentation with the actual infrastructure of how the program works. All in all, this has been a good way to learn a new language. At the end of the experience I'll have acquired some new skills and knowledge and will also, arguably, have a better/faster product too. I'm happy I wrote the original version of Firn in Clojure - at the time, I had been taking a break from programming and it was the right way to get back into the world of it - I still loved Clojure, and I knew I could get back into the swing of building things quickly with it. Getting re-acquainted with Clojure would later also gave me the momentum to launch into building Trunk</a> Now, Clojure wouldn't be my first pick anymore for building a CLI tool such as Firn. I want/ed Firn to be an easily distributable binary; and from that I found that I was challenged by the use of GraalVM. I was originally excited at the idea of being able to build native-binaries in clojure (it still is very cool), but the workflow for creating and testing artifacts just wasn't optimal. Compile times were long and the system felt complex. The technology is new and there was limited documentation that I could find. Further, I was using Clojure to talk to Rust and embedding all of that in a binary - again, a formidable technological feat but I felt like I was stacking tools on top of tools. Speaking of stacking tools on tools and layers of technology, I am reminded of the talk Preventing the Collapse of Civilization</a> by Jonathan Blow - which was particularly eye-opening for me (not just regarding programming but regarding history and the "losing of history" as a whole). But programming wise, I have been thinking more and more about layers of abstraction and complexity in the tools we use and going forward I'd like to be a bit more careful when I'm walking into a project that involves more layers than I'd like (or are necessary). A part of this discussion deserves its own post, but largely I think that I see this shift as one that simply comes with time and experience. Firn should have been written in Rust from the beginning as the core library that parses org content (Orgize) was written in Rust. All Firn really does is wrap that functionality in a way that 1) reads org files into memory, 2) call to orgize and pull out metadata / content 3) render content/metadata with a templating system (with extra niceties for "prebuilt renderers") and 4) write the output to a file. All of the above can simply be done in Rust. At the time I didn't have the energy to learn Rust when I built Firn. But, switching over now there is plenty of simplification as a result (I think I listed these in a previous post when considering doing the re-write.): using only a single language: not gluing two languages together with some kind of interop.</li> only one set of packages to manage.</li> easier for contributors to pick up.</li> </ul> </li> Faster compile times (2 seconds vs 5 minutes).</li> Easier (read: more documentation) for cross compilation.</li> Smaller binary size.</li> </ul> Another benefit is that I'm learning enough rust that I could fork the Orgize parser and vendor it if I need to have better customization over the tool, or make contributions upstream. I'm sure there are some smaller other benefits that are coming from simplifying Firn that I will discover over time. As for progress, here's where I'm at in development: CLI prompt</li> firn new</code> command built</li> parsing of content, collecting of tags, links and logbooks.</li> implementation of templating system (handlebars)</li> writing to file.</li> Build support for partials</li> Development server</li> Handle movement of attachments (images, etc)</li> Build renderers: sitemap</li> table of contents</li> backlinks</li> Logbook stuff</li> </ul> </li> Figure out cross compilation</li> Update docs</li> </ul> Possible new features I'd consider building: Theme support, as in Hugo</li> A blog/posts feature that better suits chonolgoical content / has it's own tagging system.</li> </ul> Looking at that list - there is still a fair bit of work to do. However, I've become more confident in using Rust. The first 20 hours might have moved me forward 5%, but the next 20 hours will probably move me forward 20%. We'll see in a future update I suppose. See ya, async! 2021-09-17T00:00:00+00:00 The discussion evolves</h2> I'm back with another report on investigating core.async in Trunk. My thread on clojureverse</a> has evolved quite a bit, with interested contributions, including some from the prolific and prodigious… Core Async Returns 2021-09-11T00:00:00+00:00 After fuddling about with Core.async in Trunk</a> I decided it was time to reach out for some input. It was a good thing I did; I had reached a point where I was mostly poking at the functions I thought I understood in core.async, and wasn't really reading their API. Re-writing Firn in Rust - pt. 1 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00 I'm thinking about re-writing my static site generator for Org-mode (Firn) from Clojure to Rust. I'm not sure if I will do it, but I've been thinking about some of the more fundamental design decisions that I want to consider when building software. Firn is built in Clojure, with a touch of Rust for the Org-mode parser, and then is all compiled down to a binary using GraalVM's native-image tool. It's working, so why re-write it? Exploring Core Async 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00 I would really like to better understand Core Async with Clojure; specifically, I want to remove myself from callback hell to see if I can make my Clojurescript backend for a new project a bit clearer.

Ty Sloane

Frontend Performance Tuning

Marvelous Programs: Syncthing

Footnotes</h4> 1</sup> At one point I was able to sync to my Android no problem, but when I switched to iOS, I did not have as much luck using syncthing, and have not been back to check how well it works on mobile since then.</p> </div>

I miss Clojure

Impatienter and Dumberer

Diving into self-hosting

Radio Silence - An Unfinished Playdate Game

Exploring Zellij + Helix

Electrolight Devlog

Pen Plotting Pals

Framing</h2> I wasn't sure what I would do for framing or for the mat. I didn't really want to take it to a frame store because I knew it would be expensive. So I looked around a few thrift stores, but couldn't find anything remotely useful.</p>

The road to Half Marathon

Processing Hack Night

A break from side-project hacking

How should a blog be?

Mark the days when something 'clicks'

How doth I read a technical book?

A sync is a sync, until it's not

A Moment with Helix

Learning About Streams in Elixir

Another quarter rolls in

Summer and Winter

Baby's First Genserver

Some thoughts on imposter syndrome

Refactoring Ecto queries with reduce

First week of professional elixir

Thank you, blog

A naive mini parser

Finishing Galley

Image Uploading in Galley

Conditionals in Ecto Queries

Dynamic Liveview Forms

A few weeks at Alchemy Camp

Brewing Elixirs in the Galley

2021's Picks

2021 - New Year’s Reflections

A few quick thoughts on Swift

A few quick thoughts on Zig

Re-writing Firn in rust - pt. 2

See ya, async!

The discussion evolves</h2> I'm back with another report on investigating core.async in Trunk. My thread on clojureverse</a> has evolved quite a bit, with interested contributions, including some from the prolific and prodigious… </p>

Core Async Returns

Re-writing Firn in Rust - pt. 1

Exploring Core Async

Footnotes</h4>
^{1</sup>
At one point I was able to sync to my Android no problem, but when I switched to iOS, I did not have as much luck using syncthing, and have not been back to check how well it works on mobile since then.</p>
</div>}

The discussion evolves</h2>
I'm back with another report on investigating core.async in Trunk. My thread on clojureverse</a> has evolved quite a bit, with interested contributions, including some from the prolific and prodigious… </p>