Xander Cesari

College replacement accelerators are morally equivalent to marketing gambling to teenagers

Does anyone have strong opinions on Matrix vs Zulip for open-source community platforms?

Creating word clouds of slang from each era then embedding their meanings in a vector space would be a really interesting way to visualize and contextualize the ephemeral priorities of a moment in time.

Adjectives like moxie and gumption are great and we should bring them back. The lack of good modern alternatives may speak to changing generational values and my nostalgia for American ingenuity and industrial spirit requires that energy as fuel.

A secret third recording?? Y'all have come a long way from the days of using an Android emulator to record audio to a computer.

A few years ago I found a website that was basically a scavenger hunt for photographers to go shoot needed photos for Wikimedia. It was great! I wish I could remember the name.

I really hope that their approach - integration with the community, existing tooling and ecosystem, and openness - sets the standard for future hardware vendor's HAL efforts!

I have breakfast, make coffee, then write until I'm hungry again 🙂 I like to think I use as many words as I need to get the point across. I write for myself more than anyone else and no one has emailed saying "tl;dr" so I'm just going to keep following my heart until I need to learn brevity!

Thanks for the reshare! There's so much we could say about both these topics; security of open vs closed source and how we would drive adoption across an entire industry. But I had to cut myself off around 3000 words 😁

Like compound interest, economies of scale are the immutably powerful force multiplier that dominate the limits of any function. Open source is the mechanism by which software supercharges the entire industry with collaboration at the broadest scale.

merriman.industries/open-source-...

This is the clearest high level architecture explanation/diagram I've found, maybe I'm missing something in my search-fu?

red.implrust.com/rtc/rtc-hal/...

I would lovvve a good blog post on the idiomatic way to implement Rust embedded_hal 1.0.0 errors in a driver crate 👀 I'm muddling through it but the combination of traits and kinds feels like I'm missing the design intent.

@diondokter.nl? @jamesmunns.com? @theembeddedrust.bsky.social Any takers?

If you wouldn't build software with it then we won't build hardware with it

merriman.industries/how-to-make-...

WALL-E vs The World

PSA: @zen-browser.app is getting really good these days! The UI is getting more streamlined with every release and they've moved beyond just being an Ark-clone into their own opinion of browsing. Just good, clean, simple UI with the power user tools you need and no fluff.

I could only get that working using Davincibox but it made it a lot easier!

If you enjoy the piece, please subscribe! I'll be trying to post every 1-2 weeks on topics about engineering, software, technical culture, and how we build complicated things.

merriman.industries

After refreshing my blog recently I was reflecting on an appropriate topic for a first post, a statement of purpose. Then I wrote about 5000 words on a topic at work and spent much of the day thinking "see this is why I still write". So this is why I think literature is more important than ever.

I'm Long on Literature and Bullish on Writing

merriman.industries/why-im-long-...

YouTube video by Better Software Conference Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

If you saw this video from @cmuratori.bsky.social and thought "surely a 2.5 hour long tech talk can't be a good use of my time" then I have to strenuously emphasize that there is absolutely no fluff in this one. It's a banger start to finish.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84...

I feel that I have a monthly allowance of how hard I can push family and friends technologically. I'm getting ready for the next big project: moving the family group chat to Signal. Apple services might be next!

Due to recent news, we decided to start with my interview with Jan David Nose on the Rust Infrastructure team. The Infra team is responsible for both CI/CD tools and serving crates.io to the community. We touched on many relevant topics of security and traffic!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7i-...

In one of my many Rust-themed side quests, I'm now a charter member of The Rust Project's new official Content Team! We're creating content with and about the Rust Project. We assembled a crack team to conduct a series of interviews at @rustconf.com last week and we're looking forward to publishing.

A picture to a talk about why the Rust programming language makes sense in Automotive.

tfw you get asked "why Rust in Automotive" and you have the recorded talk ready to go

link to talk in thread

I don't even like mushrooms (for culinary or psychedelic purposes) but now I want to become a mushroom expert so I can nail a project name that well!

GitHub - jamesmunns/ergot: Eloquence in Messaging Eloquence in Messaging. Contribute to jamesmunns/ergot development by creating an account on GitHub.

This was inspired by the README in @jamesmunns.com' ergot, which is a mushroom name adjacent to the mycelium project.

github.com/jamesmunns/e...

Python was not named after a snake but Monty Python, yet the ecosystem has adopted snake names (mamba, anaconda, etc). Similarly, Rust was not named after oxidation but mushrooms, yet the ecosystem has adopted corrosion names. Maybe we should switch to more mushroom names?

Who ain't a sucker for a well-written, extensive, and thoughtful \DESIGN.md or \ARCHITECTURE.md file.

github.com/littlefs-pro...

What's your process for finding dead code? I ask because there are static code analyzers in the safety-critical software domain that specialize in this for certification reasons. Wondering if a tool like that would have value even outside of certification.

YouTube video by 2swap Graph Theory in State-Space

Game theory, graph theory, AND state space?? This is Xandernip

youtu.be/YGLNyHd2w10?...