icco @icco@merveilles.town

#introductions

I'm Nat, or icco. I've been building software since the early 2000s. I love building cli and web tools, and spend a lot of time #datahoarding. I try to do everything in the open, so all of my personal code in FOSS, and most of my thoughts are public on subdomains of https://natwelch.com.

When I'm not writing code, I like hiking, fly fishing, reading, writing, and listening to and making music.

Finally finished my year in review post: https://writing.natwelch.com/post/717

Always love seeing peoples time logging tools: https://chaidarun.com/ten-years-of-logging-my-life

Oh, and if you want to follow along, the source is at https://github.com/icco/locative.garden

I'm putting together a book of fiction short stories based on location, technology, nature and art. It'll be available for free at https://locative.garden, but if you want a physical copy, you can back the project at http://kck.st/3Ft2AHf

This work is inspired by all of the amazing things folks have posted on Merveilles over the past two years. I know I'm not the most active user, but you all inspire me constantly. #theWorkshop

I use jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) alot. Today I learned about mlr, which is just as cool (https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

I learned about the amazing proquints (an easy to pronounce UUID) a few years ago, but today took the time to write out a simplified version of the algorithm: https://github.com/icco/proquint #theWorkshop

https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/ - very reminiscent of stuff folks are doing here

Gave a talk at work yesterday to inspire folks about the project we're working on to the whole company. Never done a hype talk like that before, but it seems it was well received! Yay!

Anyways, code for Cron is at https://github.com/icco/cron and code for code.natwelch.com is at https://github.com/icco/code.natwelch.com

But! I did finally write some common Go libraries for me to use, as I saw some consistent problems: https://github.com/icco/gutil

I also migrated all of my Go apps from Logrus to Zap, which has provided much better logs.

The real pain though was I also moved from a hand rolled k8s cluster to using Google's new Autopilot GKE k8s cluster, and I ran into so many undocumented hard edges. Part of this caused me to have to rewrite my entire CD pipeline... which still isn't quite done.

#theWorkshop I rewrote https://code.natwelch.com over the weekend. Moved from ruby I wrote in 2011 to Go, and updated the d3 to v6 from v3.

Better viz and a little faster now which is nice.

Whelp, my wife and I just spent most of March sick with covid. Finally recovering.

One symptom that surprised me was the confusion. The complete inability to think clearly was super weird.

I love slat flip and dot flip displays. https://hackaday.io/project/18541-dot-flippers is a fun look into a dot flip display

Took Friday and Monday off. Normally I'd take these days off for my birthday and go to a museum or something. Instead I'm trying to get my second book out the door.

... Taking time off of work to do work is something I always feel weird about.