Blog
Maven's First Point
Maven pointed her first bird today. I cried.
2022 in Review: Pure (And I Cannot Stress This Enough) Michigan
It was a big, heavy year, but I can't in good faith say that it was trash (see 2021, 2020). I'm stepping out of 2022 feeling proud, happy, hopeful, and loved, which is a major improvement on how I felt one year ago.
A Fond Farewell to Beaker
The Beaker Browser project has officially been archived. If you're interested in learning more about the project's backstory, successes, and failures, I recommend reading Paul Frazee's post-mortem.
Maven
Meet Maven. Maven is a nine-week-old German Wirehaired Pointer. Eventually she'll be my hunting partner in the grouse woods, but for now she gets to just be a puppy.
Honk
Today I shot and killed an animal for the first time. I've been looking forward to this moment for so long that it almost feels uneventful. Certainly overdue.
2021 in Review
This post has a soundtrack. Like 2020, 2021 was trash. But a different kind of trash? It was also big and transformative and important. I'm still grateful to be alive, housed, and fed.
2020 in Review
2020 was trash. I don't have much to say about it. I'm just thankful to be alive, housed, and fed.
I'm Joining Glitch!
Here’s the news: I’m joining Glitch!
I'm Leaving Beaker!
I’m leaving Beaker! You might be expecting this post to expose a controversy or detail complaints about working on the project, but there is no controversy, and the complaints I do have will be familiar to anyone who’s formed a company or maintained an open-source project.
Organizing My Kitchen with Airtable
My kitchen is by no means a shipwreck, but there’s definitely room for improvement. I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Airtable which proclaims to help you “organize anything”, so I thought “hey some organization can’t hurt” and spent Sunday inventorying my entire kitchen.
How I Publish taravancil.com on the Peer-to-Peer Web
Updated August 31, 2018. Originally published on January 4, 2018. I publish this website on
dat://andhttps://. As of August 31, 2018, my publishing workflow involves three tools:2017: Year in Review
2017 was my most productive year yet. Not because I achieved superhuman levels of productivity, but because I made the transition between figuring out what to do with my life and doing something with my life. It feels damn good.
The Beaker Team's Response to Dat Organizational Changes
Today Code for Science and Society (CSS) announced that its Executive Director, Max Ogden, will step down from all leadership activities related to CSS and the Dat Project.
Book Review: On Writing by Stephen King
On Writing is part-autobiography and part-styleguide, and much less tactical writing guide than one might expect from a book about writing.
Introducing Hashbase
We’re Blue Link Labs, the creators of Beaker, a peer-to-peer Web browser. Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve launched Hashbase, a fungible hosting service for the peer-to-peer Web.
Forking Websites on the Peer-to-Peer Web
One of the most interesting phenomena on the Web is the popularity of services like GitHub, CodePen, and Glitch, which provide tools for sharing, duplicating, and remixing other people’s projects. The practice of learning from and using existing code as boilerplate is a critical piece of what’s made innovation on the Web platform so open...
View Source on the Peer-to-Peer Web
The spirit of openness has been baked into the Web since its formation. The Web was built to share documents written in plain text that could be downloaded and viewed transparently...
Building Markdown Sites with Beaker
We’re big fans of Markdown, so we’ve built in support for Markdown formatting to Beaker...
Recurse Center Day 9: A Peer-To-Peer Chat System
Today I worked on a fun 'lil set of p2p exercises written by mafintosh. I wrote a very basic p2p chat tool, which at the moment requires that the network be fully connected, or rather that each node in the system is connected to every other node.
Recurse Center Day 8: Hamming Weight: I Am So Confused
I'm reimplementing my cryptopals solutions in Python, and today I worked a challenge that required me to calculate the Hamming distance between two equal-length strings.
Recurse Center Day 7: I Moved Fast and Broke Things
Today I moved fast and broke things -- this site to be specific -- but it's all OK because I know what went wrong and (I think) I know how to fix it!
Recurse Center Day 6: Raft's Safety Argument and Cryptopals Round 2
Today I read a lot. Per the recommendation of Mike Nielsen, I'm working through The TCP/IP Guide and practicing working with Wireshark along the way.
Time Complexity and Logarithms
I've been practicing evaluating time complexity with Big O notation, and while I can intuitively recognize when an algorithm runs in linear time, constant time, or quadratic time, I've not been able to intuit why and when a runtime is O(log n) or O(n log n).
Recurse Center Day 5: Heaps, Logarithms, and Interviews
Today was great. Something I'd been trying and failing to understand for days finally clicked, and it feels so good. Basically I didn't intuitively understand why an algorithm is O(log n) or O(n log n), but now I do!
Recurse Center Day 4: Tara Learns to Sort
I don't have a formal CS education, so one thing I'm focusing on at RC is filling in the gaps in my knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Today I focused on sorting algorithms.
Recurse Center Day 3: Asking for Help
Today was marked by the realization that when one asks for help at the Recurse Center, amazing things happen.
Recurse Center Day 2: Pairing Is Great
Today was the first "regular day" of RC, wherein the schedule was structured as it will be for the remainder of the batch. I started the day with two goals:
Recurse Center Day 1: New Faces and W-Shingling
Today was the first day of the Recurse Center. I've understood for a while that RC is a special place that attracts special people, but experiencing it firsthand was better than I could have imagined. I met so many smart, curious, and kind people and I can barely believe I have the opportunity to be colocated with these folks for three whole months!