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Epiktistes is my home in the Fediverse. It is an instance of Ktistec, a single-user ActivityPub server like Mastodon, but with fewer users and fewer commits. Here's my introduction (last updated early-2025).
I wrote a series of posts about optimizing the performance of the Ktistec server, its build time, and its executable size: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.
Some things I regularly write about, organized by hashtag:
I also wrote some #pointfreeverse.
before it was called "agile programming" it was called "extreme programming". one of the tenets of extreme programming is "merciless refactoring". another is "edgy adjectives".
an often overlooked "freedom" in a free software project is the freedom to refactor, mercilessly. why turn a free software project into a feature factory? you can get that in an office job, right?
anyway, commits 14d22ca to 14fb9af do away with 1860 lines of code, while only adding 880 lines. more importantly, they do away with quite a lot of distracting boilerplate—like explicit identifiers (IRIs) that usually have no bearing on the outcome of a test.
the one big addition was spec_helper/factory.cr (349 lines), which adds lightweight factories that take care of the details of instantiating a valid model instance. i picked up the build/create paradigm from the factory_bot gem, and extended the let/let! pattern used in spectator.
even a few streets in, you forget that manhattan is an island.
are illegal states
unrepresentable?
are illegal states
just detectable?
or are illegal states
lying in wait
waiting to strike
and utterly
unpredictable?
lorenzo barasti does a great job here making up for the lack of official documentation on crystal’s select statement. the article’s a must-read if you are planning on making use of concurrency.
Please, don't panic: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been published on October 12, 1979.
Exactly 42 years ago 🙊
"if there's one thing you don't want to model your adventuring on it's merry and pippin."
in ktistec news, commits 4d2f699 through 4d2f699 include several improvements and bug fixes. highlights:
KTISTEC_DB environment variable overrides the default location for the SQLite database file. i use this during testing. it may be useful for some deployments.TaskWorker now kicks off as soon as a new task is scheduled. the previous implementation polled for new work every five seconds.loading="lazy".i'm also now only one feature away—blocking actors and objects—from tagging the 1.0.0 release.
† the race condition occurs when an activity, like a create, arrives that takes a long time to validate, maybe because ids need to be dereferenced. while it's being validated, an announce activity arrives for the same object. now two activities for the same object are being processed concurrently. being added to a timeline is a side-effect, and collecting all side-effects in one location made it easier to put the duplicate check after validation but before any side-effects, which saved me from having to unwind side-effects if a duplicate was detected.
thinking about this: complexity has to live somewhere
complexity has to live somewhere—the trick is putting it in the right place. modern cpus are incredibly complex: multiple tiers of caching, speculative execution, etc. none of which you ever think about when building a web app, which in turn has its own kind of complexity.
a cpu runs on top of some very complex and speculative physics that we only incompletely understand: neutrino oscillations, quark color confinement... luckily you also don’t need to understand any of that when building a web app. 😀
my 2¢ is, put as much complexity as is necessary inside of a microservice, framework or library—as long as the team that maintains it can understand it. but make its interface as simple as possible, so that the team at large can effectively make use of it.
it’s kind of the opposite of worse is better, but i think the use case is different.
the team at work is talking about the mastodon with guitars and tattoos.
this happened today:
https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/
i don't disagree with their approach at all, but since the change was designed to just work for newer clients, and since older clients are, well, older, and since the change happens on servers but it impacts their clients, it was hard to see this coming until it hit.
in my case the fix was easy—upgrade openssl and rebuild—but reading the threads about this change highlights how disruptive the expiration of a root certificate can be, especially as older clients, which may not be as easy to upgrade, proliferate.