iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 20/07/2026

This account (Tranquil PDS), my Tangled repos (knot), and my Tangled CI runner (spindle) are now hosted on a PC in my living room

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 18/06/2026

I wonder if accountants feel the same way about abacuses as mechies feel about calipers or programmers feel about vintage computers

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/06/2026

Software is great but I missed this kind of engineering

A book stand and a stack of textbooks about gas turbines sitting on a wooden office desk

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 21/04/2026

I love my Framework 13 and I'm definitely getting one of the new 13 Pros but right now I'm having a lot of fun upgrading this old T480S into the ultimate Linux distro hopper!

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 14/04/2026

I really hope these are also hosted on progressively less standard infra, with the last on a Raspberry Pi and a solar panel talking through a modem downdetector.com downdetectorsdowndetector.com downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 23/03/2026

Definitely not me getting distracted from an embedded project then spending weeks building tools for declaratively packing and deploying LittleFS images and all but forgetting the original project I was working on github.com/MerrimanInd/...

github.com

GitHub - MerrimanInd/littlefs-tooling-rs: Tooling for packing and unpacking directories into LittleFS binaries then shipping them to embedded devices

Tooling for packing and unpacking directories into LittleFS binaries then shipping them to embedded devices - MerrimanInd/littlefs-tooling-rs

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 09/03/2026

We can all agree that markdown is excellent

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/03/2026

Do I know anyone who's worked with LittleFS for embedded devices? I'm writing some Rust tooling for building and deploying it and would appreciate hearing about how others have used it!

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/03/2026

I've been in "weird esoteric industry protocol running on RS-232" purgatory for months now. SCPI, VE.Direct, now ProXR. I've implemented them all in Python, some in Rust. I think I have to keep building these until I atone for some kind of sin?

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 27/02/2026

There are three rules of coding with agents: 1. Keep them away from bright sunlight 2. Never get them wet 3. Never feed them after midnight

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 18/02/2026

Building a CLI is just repeatedly naming things, aka the hardest thing in programming

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 06/02/2026

The pile of ethics books discarded on the sidewalk in San Francisco is more foreboding and ominous than I wanted to see

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 01/02/2026

Started at "why is my WiFi so slow?" and now I'm recompiling the Linux kernel

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 19/01/2026

Today's mini deep-dive was into the NTP Pool and now it's a life goal to someday run an NTP server www.ntppool.org/en/join.html

ntppool.org

pool.ntp.org: Join the NTP Pool!

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/01/2026

It's 2026 and I'm not afraid to say it to the whole world. Cancel me if you want, I have to speak my truth. Light mode is good and is the appropriate choice in many times and places.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 04/01/2026

I just switched my desktop environment from GNOME to COSMIC in minutes. Deleted a dozen lines of text, added a half dozen lines of text, and rebooted. NixOS is absolutely overpowered.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 03/01/2026

Happy year of the linux desktop (Like every other time this has been said, this post will age wonderfully I'm sure)

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 28/12/2025

I happened upon this blog post about why mid-century industrial design uses such interesting color palettes. I LOVE mid-century aesthetics and color palettes like this (inspiration behind the Merriman Industries brand) so this was serious Xander-nip. bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man...

bethmathews.substack.com

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/12/2025

A few days of late nights later and now I'm daily driving NixOS

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 07/12/2025

New entry to my Naming Hall of Fame: Electron! Electron was developed by the Atom IDE team and early on they called it 'atom-shell', as in the shell that they ran in. A shell is also the region where electrons can be found in an atom so the project became Electron, an homage to its origin.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/12/2025

Doing Advent of Code in Rust is 60% writing Nom parsers, 30% writing tests for your Nom parsers, and 10% writing algorithms to solve the puzzles

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/12/2025

Happy Advent of Code 2 years ago AoC was one of the first "real" things I tried to do in Rust and boy was it a slog. Returning to the challenge now is a great showcase of how intuitive the language has become. My stretch this year is doing it all in the terminal with Helix! helix-editor.com

helix-editor.com

Helix

A post-modern modal text editor.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 26/11/2025

Love the way New Yorker drivers honk. They don't honk for victory or glory. They don't think for vengeance or justice. They honk for the sheer joy of it. Love of the game. You gotta respect it.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/11/2025

College replacement accelerators are morally equivalent to marketing gambling to teenagers

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/11/2025

Does anyone have strong opinions on Matrix vs Zulip for open-source community platforms?

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 03/11/2025

Adjectives like moxie and gumption are great and we should bring them back. The lack of good modern alternatives may speak to changing generational values and my nostalgia for American ingenuity and industrial spirit requires that energy as fuel.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 27/10/2025

Like compound interest, economies of scale are the immutably powerful force multiplier that dominate the limits of any function. Open source is the mechanism by which software supercharges the entire industry with collaboration at the broadest scale. merriman.industries/open-source-...

merriman.industries

Open Source is an Industry Grade Accelerant

The case for open source software in automotive is not for the developers. It's not even for the companies. The greatest benefits go to the very industry as a whole and automotive needs the leg up. Le...

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 25/10/2025

I would lovvve a good blog post on the idiomatic way to implement Rust embedded_hal 1.0.0 errors in a driver crate 👀 I'm muddling through it but the combination of traits and kinds feels like I'm missing the design intent. @diondokter.nl? @jamesmunns.com? @theembeddedrust.bsky.social Any takers?

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 29/09/2025

PSA: @zen-browser.app is getting really good these days! The UI is getting more streamlined with every release and they've moved beyond just being an Ark-clone into their own opinion of browsing. Just good, clean, simple UI with the power user tools you need and no fluff.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 25/09/2025

If you saw this video from @cmuratori.bsky.social and thought "surely a 2.5 hour long tech talk can't be a good use of my time" then I have to strenuously emphasize that there is absolutely no fluff in this one. It's a banger start to finish. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84...

youtube.com

Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

YouTube video by Better Software Conference

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 16/09/2025

In one of my many Rust-themed side quests, I'm now a charter member of The Rust Project's new official Content Team! We're creating content with and about the Rust Project. We assembled a crack team to conduct a series of interviews at @rustconf.com last week and we're looking forward to publishing.

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Reposted by Xander Cesari

Pete 🙆‍♂️ @petelevasseur.com · 13/09/2025

tfw you get asked "why Rust in Automotive" and you have the recorded talk ready to go link to talk in thread

A picture to a talk about why the Rust programming language makes sense in Automotive.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/09/2025

Python was not named after a snake but Monty Python, yet the ecosystem has adopted snake names (mamba, anaconda, etc). Similarly, Rust was not named after oxidation but mushrooms, yet the ecosystem has adopted corrosion names. Maybe we should switch to more mushroom names?

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/09/2025

Who ain't a sucker for a well-written, extensive, and thoughtful \DESIGN.md or \ARCHITECTURE.md file. github.com/littlefs-pro...

github.com

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 11/09/2025

Game theory, graph theory, AND state space?? This is Xandernip youtu.be/YGLNyHd2w10?...

youtu.be

Graph Theory in State-Space

YouTube video by 2swap

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 06/09/2025

What a whirlwind week at RustConf! I worked with the newly formed Rust Project T-Content team, both behind and in front of the camera, having some amazing convos. We continued the safety-critical Rust discussion at my first Unconf and then finished with a convo about Local First and CRDTs!

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/09/2025

A reboot of The West Wing with Rob Lowe returning as President Sam Seaborn and getting Toby, Josh, CJ, and the whole Bartlett Administration back together to save democracy just might cure me.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 30/08/2025

Software is the only industry where I hear engineers making development choices based on their experience not the customers. It'd be like building a new car with a carburetor because it's more fun to engineer despite worse fuel economy and reliability for the user.

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 13/08/2025

Growth and experience is realizing that there's a time and place for light mode

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Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/08/2025

"Ultimately, the names of everyone who built the Torment Nexus will be engraved on the Torment Nexus, or possibly on a plaque below the Torment Nexus." Just don't build the Torment Nexus. buttondown.com/monteiro/arc...

buttondown.com

How to not build the Torment Nexus

This is No Gods No Masters, 2024, painted by me, in wax. 65x78” Join the $2 Lunch Club! This week’s question comes to us from Will Hopkins: When your job and...

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