Brian Hicks @b@recurse.social

send me: sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations (especially by authors from underrepresented groups), mind-expanding conference talks, recommendations for different ways of doing things

ask me about: Elm, generative art, Esperanto, website accessibility, Nix, design

things I enjoy: programming, going on adventures with my family, chocolate, pluralizing words incorrectly, open-ended questions, kindness.

my answer: Merkle Patricia trees! They can store keys/values efficiently and have a reliable hashing mechanism, which lets you sync them between multiple computers really efficiently.

Ethereum uses them, apparently, but I'm more interested in making P2P web apps with CRDTs. 🤓

I'm trying to implement one and it's a little tricky to get right but I am really enjoying the challenge.

Recursey experiment: what's a computer thing you've been super excited recently?

very proud of some tiny things I've done at work recently… one thing is creating an rspec tag so that we can snooze flakey tests. E.g. today our CI system (running UTC) is giving weird results for leap year (today + a week.) Some colleagues just applied the snooze tag to the test so the failures will be ignored today, but it'll come back into rotation tomorrow. 👍

They say that life is like a hurricane here in duckburg. I think I wanna visit anyway.

I do love working with unicode. Where else is it reasonable (and necessary!) to work with a range "ringed planet..banjo"?

tired: computers are a rock that we tricked into thinking

wired: socks are a plant we tricked into being socks

are we still doing the jorts meme on here?

'cause jam jar: jean am in a jean ar.

whenever I update git.bytes.zone I get really happy how easy Nix makes maintenance 😁

(that was a lie, I do not love it)

love when a composer's top tracks on Spotify are half stuff that's really my jam and half screechy distressing operatic horror music.