Blog

Strong/Weak Reasons to do a PhD in Computer Science

These are the things I wish I had known before deciding to go to grad school. Obviously take these with a grain of salt, as they just represent one man’s opinion.

AutoDapp: a Proposal to Instantly Decentralize Your Existing Web Apps

The AutoDapp project aims to automatically convert any existing web or mobile application into a decentralized application (DApp) by changing just a single line of code, starting with Discourse and MediaWiki. This blog post outlines a high-level approach to instantly decentralize popular applications by interposing on the SQL connection between its web server and database. With the unified effort of the open source community, we can accelerate the advent of the decentralized future for millions of users – this is what we’re calling our “One Million” mission.

Signing Git Commits and SSH Authentication with Yubikey

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to setup a Yubikey with both signing and authentication keys. As a driving example, I’ll describe how to use a Yubikey to sign your git commits and authenticate via SSH with GitHub. Of course you can reuse this guide to authenticate with any other SSH server as well.

Time Management

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” Theophrastus

Docker-based Personal Server

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to configure a Docker-based personal server, running each service in a separate Docker container. Modern devops tools have made it easier than ever to run your own server and for anyone with basic familiarity with Linux, it’s worth a try. In this tutorial, we’ll use Gitlab as a running example.

How to Become an H3 Hang Glider Pilot in the Bay Area

After a long 2.5 years of training to get to our H3 rating, we thought it would help to share our journey and what we wished we knew when we first started; advice that could have helped us finish in <1 year. Of course this is our limited opinion, so take it all with a grain of salt and get advice from other pilots you trust.

Strong/Weak Reasons to do a PhD in Computer Science

These are the things I wish I had known before deciding to go to grad school. Obviously take these with a grain of salt, as they just represent one man’s opinion.

Iron Blogger SF

I love writing. I miss that aspect of working in research. You see the slightest thread of an insight, and then just keep pulling on it through reading related work, writing, and iterating, until you’ve formed a coherent thought to share with the world. Not everything I write is equally insightful (or coherent) to others, but I always enjoy the writing process nonetheless. In academia, writing took the form of technical papers that might only see the light of day on Arxiv. Nowadays, my preferred medium is blogging, but without dedicating time to writing, it just doesn’t happen.

A Path to Opening Up Twitter

Key Takeaways

• Centralized proprietary recommendation algorithms are hard to get right. Social media platforms are failing us as sole arbiters of truth on their platforms.
• Let’s open up the ability for 3rd party developers to create recommendation algorithms on Twitter services.
• Instead of jumping straight into a fully decentralized protocol, which is risky and takes a lot of work, let’s test the underlying assumptions on production Twitter first.
• If decentralization is the ultimate goal, any work we do here will be useful on the path.

Time Management

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” Theophrastus

How much longer until you graduate?

Have you ever had that awkward moment with a PhD student, where someone asks:

Welcome!

For years, my website was a single gigantic HTML file. Adding content and making edits felt a lot like stacking Jenga blocks a mile high. While that was fun in many ways, it is 2015 and it is time to move to some form of automated system like Jekyll.

A/B Testing with Next.js middleware

In this blog post we will show you how to implement A/B testing using Next.js middleware, first introduced in Next.js 12. When compared to other A/B testing frameworks, this method more easily fits into your existing developer workflows and inherits all of the performance benefits of Next.js, including static site generation (SSG). You’ll see that A/B tests don’t have to be onerous for either your users or your developers — every Next.js site can easily make measurable progress this way!

Build a Netflix clone in Next.js with a visual app builder

In this guide, we will show you how to build a video player web application with Plasmic, a visual builder for React. While many Plasmic users use it to build landing and content pages, Plasmic is actually a powerful UI builder for apps of any complexity, allowing you or your design team to rapidly iterate on rich web applications.

Building a Pokedex with Plasmic + Supabase

In this guide, we will show you how to build a crowd-sourced Pokemon Pokedex, by connecting Supabase, an open source Firebase backend alternative, with Plasmic, a visual builder for the web. While many users leverage Plasmic to quickly launch and iterate on landing pages, in this tutorial we’ll show just how powerful Plasmic can be as a general-purpose visual builder for React, which can be used to design and implement fully featured read-write applications.

AutoDapp: a Proposal to Instantly Decentralize Your Existing Web Apps

The AutoDapp project aims to automatically convert any existing web or mobile application into a decentralized application (DApp) by changing just a single line of code, starting with Discourse and MediaWiki. This blog post outlines a high-level approach to instantly decentralize popular applications by interposing on the SQL connection between its web server and database. With the unified effort of the open source community, we can accelerate the advent of the decentralized future for millions of users – this is what we’re calling our “One Million” mission.

Signing Git Commits and SSH Authentication with Yubikey

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to setup a Yubikey with both signing and authentication keys. As a driving example, I’ll describe how to use a Yubikey to sign your git commits and authenticate via SSH with GitHub. Of course you can reuse this guide to authenticate with any other SSH server as well.

Docker-based Personal Server

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to configure a Docker-based personal server, running each service in a separate Docker container. Modern devops tools have made it easier than ever to run your own server and for anyone with basic familiarity with Linux, it’s worth a try. In this tutorial, we’ll use Gitlab as a running example.

Retrospective: Solar Printer

One of my first projects at MIT was at the Media Lab, where we were exploring self-sufficient technologies. My advisor, Richard Fletcher, and I wanted to build a completely self-sufficient printer for use in developing countries.

AutoDapp: a Proposal to Instantly Decentralize Your Existing Web Apps

The AutoDapp project aims to automatically convert any existing web or mobile application into a decentralized application (DApp) by changing just a single line of code, starting with Discourse and MediaWiki. This blog post outlines a high-level approach to instantly decentralize popular applications by interposing on the SQL connection between its web server and database. With the unified effort of the open source community, we can accelerate the advent of the decentralized future for millions of users – this is what we’re calling our “One Million” mission.

A Path to Opening Up Twitter

Key Takeaways

• Centralized proprietary recommendation algorithms are hard to get right. Social media platforms are failing us as sole arbiters of truth on their platforms.
• Let’s open up the ability for 3rd party developers to create recommendation algorithms on Twitter services.
• Instead of jumping straight into a fully decentralized protocol, which is risky and takes a lot of work, let’s test the underlying assumptions on production Twitter first.
• If decentralization is the ultimate goal, any work we do here will be useful on the path.

Chinese New Year Cake (Nian Gao)

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