Cryptic – Blog

I've made a backup system I can be proud of, and I'd like to share it with you today. It follows a philosophy I've been fleshing out called The Functional Infra. Concretely it aims to: Be pure. An output should only be a function of its inputs. Be declarative and reproducible. A…

After publishing the last post in the series I walked away from my computer feeling that I was very clever and had made a good post. This was incorrect. To summarize the previous post, it’s not obvious which is the best way to structure conditionals in a graphical programming lan…

In the last ginger post I covered a broad overview of how I envisioned ginger would work as a language, but there were two areas where I felt there was some uncertainty: conditionals and loops. In this post I will be focusing on conditionals, and going over a couple of options fo…

When I last left off with the nebula project I wanted to nix-ify the build process for Cryptic’s mobile_nebula fork. While I’ve made progress on the overall build, one particular bit of it really held me up, so I’m writing about that part here. I’ll finish the full build at a lat…

About 3 years ago I put a lot of effort into a set of golang packages called mediocre-go-lib. The idea was to create a framework around the ideas I had laid out in this blog post around the structure and composability of programs. What I found in using the framework was that it w…

Take a look at this picture: That's a photo of Smalltalk 76 running the prototypical desktop UI. It's taken for granted that this photo will be viewable for the indefinite future (or as long as we keep a PNG viewer around). But when we think about code, maybe the very same Small…

This post is going to be cheating a bit. I want to start working on adding DNS resolver configuration to the mobile nebula app (if you don’t know nebula, check it out, it’s well worth knowing about), but I also need to write a blog post for this week, so I’m combining the two exe…

Slowly but surely I’m working on moving my digital life back to being self-hosted, and this blog was an easy low-hanging fruit to tackle. Previously the blog was hosted on Github Pages, which was easy enough but also in many ways restricting. By self-hosting I’m able to have a lo…

With the recent crisis in the US’s democratic process, there’s been much abuzz in the world about social media’s undoubted role in the whole debacle. The extent to which the algorithms of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok, etc, have played a role in the radicalization of large s…

This post is about a programming language that’s been bouncing around in my head for a long time. I’ve tried to actually implement the language three or more times now, but everytime I get stuck or run out of steam. It doesn’t help that everytime I try again the form of the langu…