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. One of the biggest factors that has caused me to be interested in the protocol is that it is decentralized by design via federation. That means that anyone can run a Matrix homeserver and federate (communicate) with all of the other Matrix homeservers in the federation. This is very similar to how email servers can communicate with one another (you can email people on Gmail from an Outlook.com email, for example), and you can even run your own email server!

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. In the broadcast, we provided commentary on the competition, hosted interviews with problem authors, and talked to former HSPC and ICPC contestants.

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. Luckily, the problems are all unique, and written by Mines students and Mines alum specifically for the competition which makes it very difficult to search the internet for answers.

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.

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.

I posted last year about my switch from WordPress to a statically generated site generated by Pelican by GitHub Pages in a blog post. Since then, my hosting situation has changed a couple of times. I first migrated to deploy straight to a DigitalOcean Droplet from Travis CI. Then, I migrated to GitLab and used GitLab CI/CD to do the same thing. Now that GitLab Pages has support for automatically handling the Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate on custom domains, I’ve moved to GitLab Pages for hosting as well.

Today was my last day of vacation. I flew back to Denver in the afternoon, and I am starting my job at The Trade Desk on Monday which is just two days away! But, that means that I had most of the morning to be in London. So, I decided to go over to Buckingham Palace and then to the British Museum.

Today we docked in Southampton, England. I disembarked as early as possible so that I could get in to London for as much of the day as possible. I did the “self disembark” which basically just meant that I had to carry my bag off the ship rather than have them take it for me. Mom is staying on the boat to go back the other direction to NYC.

Instead of giving you a day-by-day on what we did on the crossing (I was told that it is not a cruise because only lowly peasants would go on a cruise), I’m going to just talk about some of the highlights and make some observations about my time on board the Queen Mary 2. We didn’t stop in any ports, so it was just what we did on board.