Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 20/07/2026This account (Tranquil PDS), my Tangled repos (knot), and my Tangled CI runner (spindle) are now hosted on a PC in my living room 2532
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 10/07/2026I read that's because of the speed of sound being slower than the speed of light we're quite used to seeing something before we hear it, our brain stitches it back together quite well. That explanation made sense to me at least! 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/07/2026I remember it well! But I think I never witnessed it being shot? Maybe there was always a piece missing? 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 18/06/2026I wonder if accountants feel the same way about abacuses as mechies feel about calipers or programmers feel about vintage computers 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 16/06/2026Yeah there's a light-moderate level of AI usage in the tooling, particularly in trying not to design a dumb API that will fall apart immediately. But code deployed to controls hardware is at the extreme end of the "own every line of code no matter how it was written" spectrum. 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 15/06/2026Also meet Flyball Labs! Most of my OSS projects are about building open tooling for hardware engineering. I gave the effort a name. Hopefully more to come soon! github.com/flyball-labsgithub.comFlyball LabsOpen source tools for control system design. Flyball Labs has 2 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 15/06/2026All of my projects are just a node, a port, and an edge wearing a trenchcoat crates.io/crates/npe-g...crates.iocrates.io: Rust Package Registrycrates.io serves as a central registry for sharing crates, which are packages or libraries written in Rust that you can use to enhance your projects 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 10/06/2026My Python SCPI library was for a mfg test library where I was using OpenHTF and that got painful. I'd like to write a Rust based hardware test framework that'll be similar, not sure how much overlap to test stand work. But it's all instrument control one way or another! 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 10/06/2026I'll take another read through your blog post and see if I have any thoughts but at first glance it seems directionally correct! My immediate need is more of a LabVIEW use case in which I like the yaq model of using IPC as the API surface and getting cross language support that way. 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 10/06/2026Very neat! I wrote a Python SCPI library recently and I'll need to write a Rust test stand control and visualization tool in the next 6mo. I've been assessing that ecosystem, looking at projects like yaq.fyi. I'd be stoked to collab in the ecosystem on this.yaq.fyiyaq 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/06/2026Software is great but I missed this kind of engineering 021
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 25/04/2026I totally agree with your point. But I can't imagine anyone who sees a list like this and thinks "Rust is slopware" was ever going to be particularly valuable to the community anyway tbh. 0130
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 21/04/2026I 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! 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 14/04/2026I 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 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 11/04/2026I've never played with Nix on a Mac so not sure what integrating there looks like but should be quite straightforward. I ran a similar path (modules > flakes+home-manager) so I suppose I recommend it! Don't let the experimental label on Flakes scare you off, they're quite standard now. 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 11/04/2026It's quite nice because I don't much care for the Nix language itself and it hasn't much grown on me, so a little help there is quite welcome. Heck yeah! Flakes and home manager? Vanilla Nix? 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 11/04/2026Do it! I use NixOS for my server/laptop combo as well as at work. LLMs have taken a bite out of the annoying learning curve. 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 05/04/2026"No equity because we have no investors and don't plan to sell the company" is a pretty baller mic drop as well 0140
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 27/03/2026I worked on an automotive project where we were seeing >20C differences in coolant temp sensors buried in batteries and air temp sensors exposed to sunload and ambient after overnight cold soaks. It was triggering all kinds of sensor rationality faults. 030
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/03/2026This whole project was a new business area for them so to be charitable I guess they were just out of their depth. I assumed maybe they were good at IT but bad at this. But the way they operated was all red flags and your screenshot definitely brought back a trauma response! 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/03/2026Most of their team was operating a HIL in India but they hired one engineer in the US to do the vehicle testing. They gave him a laptop and nothing else. No CAN sniffers, none of the software he needed, no hardware. He was a nice guy so I was lending him my stuff but absolutely set up for failure. 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/03/2026They volunteered to build an engine HIL model, which is a massive undertaking. There was an entire week where every day they sent a different person to ask me to do all of the reverse engineering work. I would tell the person no then the next day they would have asked someone else to come ask me. 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/03/2026I was on a call where their "senior ABS and brakes expert" declared that because he could only find a Boolean CAN signal for the brake light switch the entire braking system would be binary, full brakes or nothing. I couldn't convince him that the physical hydraulics handle that part. 110
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 24/03/2026They're a big Indian IT consulting firm. I worked with them on an automotive software project (HIL and V&V stuff) and it was a disaster. Incompetence, dishonesty to cover the incompetence, evasiveness, and eventually they got the whole contract yanked. 110
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 23/03/2026Definitely 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.comGitHub - MerrimanInd/littlefs-tooling-rs: Tooling for packing and unpacking directories into LittleFS binaries then shipping them to embedded devicesTooling for packing and unpacking directories into LittleFS binaries then shipping them to embedded devices - MerrimanInd/littlefs-tooling-rs 020
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 12/03/2026'nix run' is the only version of this that ever works for me 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 11/03/2026Congrats James!! I'm in the Bay Area these days so if you have any work trips over here we can have a mini Rust meetup 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 09/03/2026Follow up rec for my current favorite terminal markdown renderer github.com/benjajaja/md...github.comGitHub - benjajaja/mdfried: A markdown viewer for the terminal that renders images and big headersA markdown viewer for the terminal that renders images and big headers - benjajaja/mdfried 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/03/2026Do 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! 021
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/03/2026I did the exact same project - comms library, business logic, and UI - in Python/Qt6 then rewrote it in Rust/egui and it was a very fun and educational A/B experiment! 020
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 02/03/2026I'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? 130
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 01/03/2026I think about this a lot when I see vandalism in public spaces. Someone's little lending library got smashed. It's just so much easier to destroy the thing for a laugh than it is to rebuild it. Yet rebuild it they will. 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 27/02/2026There 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 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 18/02/2026AI isn't the thing. It's the thing that gets you to the thing. youtu.be/QeY_5n75zPM?...youtu.beComputers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing.YouTube video by Learning computer stuff 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 18/02/2026Building a CLI is just repeatedly naming things, aka the hardest thing in programming 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 06/02/2026The pile of ethics books discarded on the sidewalk in San Francisco is more foreboding and ominous than I wanted to see 110
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 01/02/2026Started at "why is my WiFi so slow?" and now I'm recompiling the Linux kernel 120
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 19/01/2026Today'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.htmlntppool.orgpool.ntp.org: Join the NTP Pool! 000
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 19/01/2026That's the advantage that I was referring to, easy to roll back or easy to get your system back to the same state if you have to reformat boot partitions or the like. 010
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 19/01/2026This seems like a good time to pitch NixOS for servers! 100
Xander Cesari @merriman.industries · 19/01/2026It's become critical infra for me! You can also split multiple web pages into a single tab. Glance is one of my favorite features: previewing a link in a pop up web view that can then be opened into a full tab. 110
