NoCruft

No matter how old I get, I think I'll always be tinkering with technology.

Here's what I've been looking at over the past few months:

keras

theano

kaggle

tl;dr - Years ago, I helped start a Makerspace in Honolulu, HI. This is one perspective of its origin story.

I haven't written about the history of HICapacity because I've always felt that there's a disproportionate amount of weight given to people who start things. Having had several experience starting things, I'd like to argue (for another day) that starting is actually the easy part; it's sustaining that's difficult and admirable.

I've decided to document what I can remember of its beginnings because to be completely honest, I'm getting old and don't remember all the details from events that occurred more than 5 years ago. In my old age, I also recognize that there were so many people that are a part of this story that by not writing it, I'm minimizing their contribution in helping shape a small portion of Hawaii's technology community.

2011

This was the year it all started.

If I were to pinpoint the seminal event in HICapacity's history, I'd have to say that it was Jerry Isdale's post on TechHui. What seemed like an innocuous dinner gathering at Los Chapporos brought together 7 people on Oahu that would provide HICapacity's early foundations. These seven included:

Jerry Isdale

Matthew Badeau

Sonya Eick

Gorm Lai

Jeremy Taylor

Paul Lowndes

myself

We don't remember what we discussed, but we do know that Paul would go on to organize our second meeting at Murphy's where Jeremy coined the name 'HICapacity' as a form of homage to the NYC Resistor.

The second most important event was the 2011 Unconferenz. We all had a feeling that there was enough community support for a Makerspace, but we didn't fully understand how large that support would be. We'd meet with others interested in growing the collaborative community including:

Rechung Fujihira from Box Jelly

John Garcia

This was also around the time where I met Ian Kitajima. Most people don't know this, but Ian immediately opened Oceanit's doors to us when nobody else in downtown would. Suffice to say, there were many, many doubters on island that informed me this concept wouldn't / couldn't work. Ian definitely wasn't one of them.

Lastly, I feel that the third most important event in HICapacity's history was meeting every weekend at Petals and Beans. I still remember the advice that Jerry and Gorm gave - "to just be consistent." When we first started, there were only a handful of us who would come down to hang out, but something interesting happened along the way - word got out and we consistently started occupying the entire coffee shop.

I just knew that we were onto something.

2012 and beyond

As much as I'd love to say that I was part of the community that took HICapacity to the next level, I was already entrenched in NYC finance. Before leaving the islands, a young fellow named Austen Ito would become a part of the core team. Austen would play an instrumental role in getting HICapacity its own physical space. He and the next group of technologists would lead the organization to frontiers that I had only ever dreamed about.

These technologists included:

Austen Ito

Matthew Badeau

Jeremy Taylor

James Wang

Julie Sakuda

Marian Ano

Alan Solidum

Jason Axelson

Edward Kim

Noah Haffner

Jesse Thompson

Bob Matcuk

One of the primary reasons I decided to write this history is to help everyone understand that HICapacity didn't come about from the heroic effort of the original seven - nor was it solely based on my or Austen's effort.

It was built by a community who shared the singular belief that a technology-focused, communal space would benefit Hawaii. When looking back at it, I'd do it all over again.

Thanks

Thanks to Jerry, Matt, Gorm, and Paul for helping distill what happened in HICapacity's early days. Thanks to all the past and current leaders of HICapacity for providing leadership and helping realize an idea that sprung from a message board. Lastly, to everyone who has passed through the space - for sharing knowledge and making for a better technical community in Hawaii.

Save the best for last

Doh!

I know I haven't blogged in almost 8 months, but I swear that I'm still in the technology game. As much as I love Docker, I think that Amazon has nearly nailed the serverless abstraction with Lambda.

So without further ado, these are the technologies that I've been staring at for the past few months:

lambda

cloud functions

azure functions

openwhisk

I'm still around and still playing with technology.

Here's what I've been looking at over the past few months:

terraform

coreos

runc

I'm fascinated with continuously deploying immutable infrastructures based on fast, deployable application stacks. Hopefully, with the Rise of the Unikernels, we'll see these become a bit more secure.

Since I'm currently unemployed, I'm really going to try to stick to these quarterly entries of technologies that have piqued my interest.

So without further adieu, here's what I've been looking at over the past few months:

kafka

spark

samza

After an incredible 3½ years of building, growing, and managing a closed-source platform at a NYC investment bank, I'm heading home.

Last year, I was going to write a quarterly entry about all the technologies I've been playing with. Since it's been about a year since that last post, I figured I'm due for another.

In no particular order, here’s what I’ve been looking at over the past few months:

docker

mesos

kubernetes

azure

chatops

Last year, I set a personal goal to commit something (anything) meaningful every day for an entire year.

Yesterday, I completed that goal.

Special thanks to this special someone who supported and reminded me if I had "checked in" for the day. <3

As developers, we’re constantly tinkering and refactoring code to arrive at the tidiest and most maintainable piece of software. I’m still often surprised by how few of us optimize our working environments via shortcuts, aliases, and habits - especially considering the large time investment we often commit as software engineers.

Inspired by @hmason's Command-line Fu session at OrdCamp, I realized that there’s a lot of snippets I’ve written and accumulated over the years that could be useful to a young developer.

So without further adieu, I’ll try to post some of my more useful snippets at least once or twice a month beginning with one of my personal favs: tmux

https://gist.github.com/ryankanno/9244195

One of these days, I'll get this blogging thing down, but until then, you'll just have to bear with my yearly updates me.

The other day, someone suggested I write a quarterly entry about all the technologies I've been playing with. Not only should it spawn current discussion, but in retrospect, should provide some insight into what I was doing at certain points in my career.

So without further adieu, in no particular order, here's what I've been looking at over the past few months:

golang

ansible

docker

chroot amis - (I think they're finally making an appearance in packer.io)

ipython notebook

For those Vimmers using Pathogen to manage your runtime path, you'll find that Pathogen creates tags files in the bundle's doc folder.

Thanks to this Stack Overflow post, all you need is Git 1.7.2 and the following command:

for s in `git submodule --quiet foreach 'echo $name'`; do git config submodule.$s.ignore untracked; done

-- Update

Thanks to @pgr0ss for the tip, you can use -k instead of --block-size!

On my cloud servers, I'm always asking myself:

Where the !@#$% did all my disk space go?

And I know somewhere, sometime down the road, future self will be thanking present self for blogging this as a reminder.

To get the top <n> offending directories on your filesystem (replace <n> with a number):

<![CDATA[// <![CDATA[ // <![CDATA[ // <![CDATA[ // <![CDATA[ // ]]]]]]]]]]><![CDATA[><![CDATA[><![CDATA[><![CDATA[> // ]]]]]]]]><![CDATA[><![CDATA[><![CDATA[> // ]]]]]]><![CDATA[><![CDATA[> // ]]]]><![CDATA[>]]>

If you're having trouble accessing pbcopy/pbpaste from tmux and/or an unpatched screen, check out https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard.git

tl;dr

Clone repo

Run makefile

Add to path (or add symlink on path)

Add set-option -g default-command "reattach-to-user-namespace -l zsh" or whatever your favorite shell is in your .tmux.conf

A few weeks ago, I wanted to install uWSGI on my Ubuntu 11.10 box for http://allb.us.  After having gone through the standard aptitude/pip installs to get uwsgi installed, I noticed after running the init.d scripts, absolutely nothing would happen. 

zip. nada. zilch.

No log file + no uwsgi process == a lot of sad pandas.

After having searched stackoverflow, it was quite apparent that I wasn't the only unlucky soul to encounter this error.  To debug the uwsgi init.d script, I used the trusty set -xv trick atop to see the omgwtfbbqs.

Here's a few things I realized:

The configuration file in /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled must contain one of the recognized uwsgi configuration file extensions.  Initially, I symlinked my configuration file from the apps-available directory as allbus.  It didn't like that at all.  I renamed the symlink to allbus.xml.

The start-stop-daemon in the init.d script is being passed the location to the pid file via --pid-file instead of being told to create the pid file via the --make-pid-file option.  Thus, you need to make sure your uwsgi configuration file contains a directive to create the file at the same location the init.d script is looking for it.  *Note*: Take a look at the <pidfile> configuration.

Thank you, #lazyweb.

After years of using ssh-copy-id to drop public keys into a remote machine's authorized keys, I finally found a post showing how to use the script to connect to a remote machine running on a custom port.

http://it-ride.blogspot.com/2009/11/use-ssh-copy-id-on-different-port.html