Posts by Erik Cameron
Meet The Gnarnians: Erik
Gnarnian [nahr-nee-uhn] noun: An employee of The Gnar Company In our Meet The Gnarnians series, we unravel the stories, experiences, and passions that drive the folks on our talented team at The Gnar. Through a collection of interview-style questions, you’ll get a sneak peek into daily life on our fully-remote team, some epic origin stories,…
Read MorePractical State Machinery
As abstractions go, finite state machines represent a bit of low hanging fruit when you have real world problems to solve. The jargon can be a little forbidding—MDN leads with “a mathematical abstraction used to design algorithms” and pretty much gets more technical from there—but in reality they represent a simple and practical technique for…
Read MoreWhat Is the Point of Free and Open Source Software? Part 2: Open Source
What is the point of free and open source software (FOSS)? Do we make it for the sake of freedom, or for the sake of expedience? (Or for the sake of our careers?) In Part 1, we suggested an answer might be found in how people assess the health of FOSS as a social institution.…
Read MoreWhat is the point of free and open source software?
At the risk of a big opening: Free and open source software (FOSS hereafter) is utterly pervasive. It is a global, decentralized public resource responsible for astounding economic output. It presents as ideas and ideals, but many (most?) of us have built careers on top of it, and things don’t get much more concrete than…
Read MoreLocal Services with asdf and foreman
Upon learning of asdf plugins for backing services like Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch and others, my first question was whether and to what extent it could replace Docker for providing those services in local development, where asdf already shines for versioning. The first obstacle for most users will be that asdf has no equivalent of docker…
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