so as of a few weeks ago, it's been a full year since i started this blog. which… honestly, doesn't feel like long, and yet is also longer than i've stuck with a lot of things.

initially i said i wasn't gonna commit to a schedule, but i'm glad i changed my mind. it wouldn't be the end of the world if this blog stopped updating, but it's been a convenient excuse to force myself to write. i've published a lot of writing that i'm proud of, and some that i'm ambivalent about but not ashamed of, and some that i definitely am ashamed of, but for wholesome reasons.

instead of looking back, though, let's look forward. my first post a little more than a year ago was vague thoughts about what i might do, but now that i've got my sea writing legs firmly under me, i'm going to be a little more specific.

• abc a1e1: known plaintext attacks is the first proper entry in the "attacking bad crypto" series, describing known plaintext attacks and then demonstrating against a real (but weak) cipher.
• designing for simple code is a sequel to designing for explicit code, namely the "post for another time" mentioned towards the end of it.
• reliability and repeatability and mechanics and interfaces are two more posts about reliability engineering, respectively the interrelated concepts of "success rate" and "automation-ness", and a particular system design approach that i find to be useful.
• in defense of strong typing is a rebuttal to sqlite's justifications for weak typing.
• in defense of the "metaverse" is a rebuttal-ish to dan olson in the vein of what was the "old web"?, where it's less of a rebuttal and more of a hyperfixation on a single sentence.
• methods of async is a review of various methods of parallelism, generally focusing on ones implemented with green threads in major programming languages, though a lot of the same principles apply with os threads.
• flat vs. wide is a discussion about dependencies, and in particular a structured approach i'm trying to develop to decide when you should take a dependency vs. replacing it. (you may have guessed, dear reader, that i despise workarounds posing as fixes; this is an extension of that.)
• miscellaneous book reviews. these are hard because i only want to spend the time for books i sincerely love, but any book i love i have ten million things to say about.
• password managers and pseudosecurity is a very long rant about people's habit of spreading lies to sound smart, specifically dissecting some misinformation around… password managers. sort of a spiritual sequel to the truth about vpns, except that i started writing it first.
• various devlogs, of course. i hope to get b/rb/log 6 out by the end of the month, and fatuilog 3 by the end of the year, but we'll see how much time i actually get to spend on those projects.

…it probably isn't surprising that i have roughly ten quintillion posts in progress. that's honestly the most frustrating part of this whole "blog" idea; i keep having great ideas, structuring a post, starting to research and write it, and then just sort of trailing off as another idea comes in. not unlike my project ideas.

on the plus side, having to get a post out every two weeks has been teaching me to harness my own flightiness a little! i've been using that to get more organized and claw back more free time to write more posts with, so with any luck, by this time next year i'll have an entirely fresh slate of half-finished posts, and all these will be released!

who knows, i might even release some of my fiction by then.

anyway – god has cursed me for my hubris and my work is never finished, so i'm gonna go to sleep.

g'night!