Underjord has some capacity coming up. One of my lovely colleagues is wrapping up an engagement mid-December and I'd like them to be working with someone early next year. If you need someone to work on a Phoenix app, let me know and we can have a conversation.

Recent stuff:

FLOSS Weekly had me guest and talk about Elixir & Nerves. Share it around if you think I did a decent job.
My Nerves talk from Sweden's largest developer conference has been released. I think it makes for a decent tasting-menu of what Nerves can bring you. If you know someone who would enjoy Nerves, maybe throw this at them and see if they like it.
In my never-ending exploration of "how can new people pick up all the context" we talked about Licenses on Regular Programming. Do you grok open source licenses?
I did a blog where I outlined my thought process for stringing together a bunch of GenServers and making a device do cooler things.
I then caused more blog and showed some of the stuff I wanted working, actually working, And also a show-stopper in terms of getting it onto the hardware. Rust cross-compile no happy.

Continuous learning

This week I've been fairly proactive about sharing what I've been learning or hacking on. Getting the VAD code chunk out there to help people do it usefully outside of Livebook. I've also written up the GenServer post which is not a deeply researched piece on how to perfectly craft things together. It is more about sharing thought process, ideas and creative process.

I think posting in the style of TIL (Today I Learned) is very useful. For most people it might not be feasible or comfortable to write some reflections every day. Perhaps every week is more achievable. I have a varied job and a lot of practice writing, I could probably do daily but it might be a bit much for some people, some roles. Consider weekly. Summarize what you've consumed in terms of relevant input, shared some of your synthesis or simply share a satisfying hack.

Most of my serious work this week has been turning a Figma design into a new UI on the web. Figma is very well-developed for this. Dev Mode and all that. The process is nice but I wish I had three monitors right now, one for code, one for Figma in full screen and one for the full screen browser. I could share more thoughts on that work as well and on the challenge of not knowing whether to flip all the CSS style definitions Figma gives me into Tailwind classes or to make classes with a mix of Tailwind and regular CSS. That's a small but long-term important balance.

I overall like Tailwind (CSS, also like UI, but talking about Tailwind CSS) but with such a precise design already defined I don't have as much benefit from it. The way I use Tailwind is that I can shape things without flipping in and out of the CSS definitions and it is much more convenient than inline styles. And this might just point to that I should actually spend some time extracting common spacings, numbers and whatnot to ensure that we have them as Tailwind classes and check which Tailwind classes already match those particular numbers. I haven't done this frequently or recently enough to have a standard practice.

The very opposite side of my work is digging into dm-verity to enable a signed root file system off of a secure boot process on a Nerves device (Pi CM4 in this case, continuation of this thread). This means figuring out where I should shove a root hash vs the root filesystem metadata and realizing I need to implement a hook in Nerves to do signing after putting together the final root filesystem image. Fun stuff. Radically different from CSS.

People sharing their learning is valuable to their surroundings, to the open web but also just to oneself. Being able to go back because you know you wrote about a thing is helpful. Actively sitting down to synthesize what you've absorbed is helpful.

How do you capture your learning? How do you share? Or if you don't, how come? You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.