As I mentioned in my previous post, the main reason for my travel was a work retreat with Beeper in Montreal. The purpose of the retreat was for all of us to get to work together in person. For most of us (myself included), it was the first time meeting anyone else on the team in person. In fact, the closest person to me in the company lives in Provo, Utah. Read more...

This morning, I met up with Sam, Jo, and Robby and we went to breakfast together at a café. Then, we headed over to the building museum which opened at 11:00. The museum is not part of the Smithsonian, but it was very well done. It is located in a vast building that used to be an administrative office for the Pension Bureau. In the covered "courtyard" of the building, they had an exhibit about the renovation of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Read more...

I woke up this morning around 08:30 with the plan to meet up with Sam, Jo, and Robby at the Air and Space Museum when it opened at 10:00. However, since Robby had gotten in so late, and had flown into Dulles (which is a long way away from DC), they were pretty slow getting up this morning. I decided to go over alone and start looking at the exhibits. Read more...

Next week, Beeper is having a company retreat in Montreal, Canada. Since I haven't really done any sort of leisure travel that requires air travel since the pandemic began, I decided to tack on a weekend getaway to the east coast. I decided to meet up with a few fellow Mines graduates to hang out in DC for the weekend. Today I flew out of Denver to Washington D.C., and I'll be flying to Montreal on Sunday. Read more...

Today I am happy to announce that I have joined Beeper, a startup that is building the future of chat by connecting all of your chat networks together in a single application. I will be primarily working on building bridges to other chat networks to bring more people into the Beeper ecosystem. Beeper is built on top of the Matrix protocol which is an open, decentralized communication protocol. I have been interested in Matrix since college (we used it for computer science club communications), and have been following its development closely for a few years. Read more...

For the last four years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019 and 2020 competitions on this blog. This year, I wrote one of the problems and helped with some of the administrative backend. I also hosted a live broadcast during the competition with another CS@Mines alum, Sam Sartor which you can view on YouTube. Read more...

Today I'm happy to announce Sublime Music to the world! Sublime Music is a feature-packed native GTK client for Subsonic-compatible servers such as Airsonic, Gonic, and Navidrome. Sublime Music is in beta and version 0.11.0 is available on the AUR and PyPi. Hooked already? Check out the website! The Albums tab of Sublime Music. Clicking on an album cover shows the details for that album. See the Sublime Music website for more screenshots. Read more...

For the last three years, the Mines Computer Science Department has hosted a High School Programming Competition modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about last year's competition in this post. This year, although I am no longer a student at Mines, I wrote two of the problems, and I volunteered during the competition. Due to the current COVID-19 lockdown, the competition was held remotely, which meant that we were unable to enforce a no-internet rule as we are able to during on-site competitions. Read more...

You may have noticed that dark themes are becoming more and more common across the computing landscape. Everything from Windows 10, macOS Mojave and later, iOS 13+, and Android 10+ to many Linux desktop environments and many individual browsers are including dark/light theme toggle settings. In addition, you may have noticed that some websites are now starting to respect your OS and browser dark mode settings. For example, StackOverflow now can detect whether your browser or OS has dark mode enabled. Read more...

I use a program called mutt for managing my email. A lot of the time, I want to download all of my messages and use mutt offline (for example, when I'm on the train commuting to work). In these cases, I also want to be able to queue email messages to send once I get back online. Even when I am online, sometimes the process of sending the message can take a while (with a large attachment, for example), and I don't want mutt to freeze while the email is being sent. Read more...