Amboy is centered around a collection of interfaces: queues to describe "collections of offline work," jobs for "units of work", runners for "task executors." There's also a notion of a "remote queue" which has some additional abstraction around non-local persistence of work. Then, if you can define your applications core work (e.g. "business logic") in terms of discrete units of work, then you can use these workers and the infrastructure around them to manage most of the work of your application.…

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This spring and summer I worked on a new Go library called Amboy that provides a few useful (to my mind!) abstractions and tools around worker pools and job queues, and as its stabilized a bit, I wanted to take a chance to write more about it. Amboy is really just a side effect of my main project over this time period. I was working on a project to automate the way that we generate Linux package repositories for our software.…

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The subtitle of this post should be "or, how the internet learned about intersectionality," but while I love a good pretentious academic title, I don't think that's particularly representative of my intent here. Sometime in the last 5 or 10 years, the popular discourse on justice on the internet learned about intersectionality. Which is great. Intersectionality, generally is the notion that a single identity isn't sufficient to explain an individuals social experience particularly vis a vis privilege.…

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Twice this fall I've worked on code that takes a group of files and ensures that the total size of the files are less than a given size. The operation is pretty simple: identify all the files and their size (recursively, or not but accounting for the size of directories,) sort them, and and delete files from the front or back of the populated list. When you've reached the desired size.…

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Following the 2016 election my father, who is a much more active participant in Facebook than I, said something to the effect of "don't mourn; organize. I had a long winded post on the topic of 'don't celebrate; organize', but the bottom line is the same: organize." I'd append to this just to make clear that I'm of the opinion that self care, survival and the care for and survival of our communities is crucial.…

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I've been reading, two books non-fiction intermittently in the last little bit: Andy Grove's High Output Management and Deleuze and Guatteri's What is Philosophy?. Not only is reading non-fiction somewhat novel for me, but I'm sorting delighting in the juxtaposition. And I'm finding both books pretty compelling. These are fundamentally materialist works. Grove's writing from his experience as a manager, but it's a book about organizing that focuses on personal and organizational effectiveness, with a lot of corporate high-tech company examples.…

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In an effort to relaunch tychoish with a more contemporary theme and a publishing tool that (hopefully) will support a more regular posting schedule, I also wrote a nifty go library for dealing with reStructuredText, which may be useful and I think illustrates something about build systems. In my (apparently still) usual style, there's some narrative lead in that that takes a bit to get through. Over the past couple of weeks, I redesigned and redeployed my blog.…

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