Jeremy Dormitzer’s blog
State of unifyDB: 2021
Posted on November 10, 2021
2021 is almost over! And it's been over a year since I've written anything about my work-in-progress graph database unifyDB. BUT just because I'm bad at blogging doesn't mean I haven't made any progress. In fact, a bunch of exciting stuff happened for unifyDB in 2021, and I'm going to info-dump it all on you 🙃.
Building a purely-functional static site generator
Posted on December 27, 2020
Ok, I know. That was kind of a lie. No static site generator can ever really be purely functional, since the side effects are the whole point. But I think I found a way to build a site generator that retains all the benefits of a purely functional architecture - simplicity, flexibility, and hackability.
unifyDB Dev Diary 1: the query system
Posted on October 2, 2020
This is the first development diary for the database I'm writing, unifyDB. I wrote a brief introduction to the project here. In this post I'm going to talk about unifyDB's query system: what it does and how it works.
unifyDB Dev Diary 0: I’m building a database!
Posted on August 8, 2020
Phew, it’s been a while! Over a year, in fact. And what a wild year! Lots of good things happened: I got married, got a new job that I love, moved to a nice new apartment. Also some not-so-nice things, but since you are all living through 2020 just like me I don’t think I need to go into those. But I have still found some side-project time, and I’d like to start talking about what I’m building.
More than JSON: ActivityPub and JSON-LD
Posted on April 22, 2019
In which our hero discovers the power of normalization and JSON-LD
ActivityPub: Good enough for jazz
Posted on January 6, 2019
Kaniini, one of the lead developers of Pleroma, recently published a blog post called ActivityPub: The “Worse is Better” Approach to Federated Social Networking. It’s a critique of the security and safety of the ActivityPub protocol. They make some good points:
Announcing Pterotype
Posted on November 14, 2018
In my last post, I wrote about an emerging web standard called ActivityPub that lets web services interoperate and form a federated, open social network. I made an argument about how important this new standard is – how it tears down walled gardens, discourages monopolies and centralization, and encourages user freedom.
What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?
Posted on September 14, 2018
There’s a new social network in town. It’s called Mastodon. You might have even heard of it. On the surface, Mastodon feels a lot like Twitter: you post “toots” up to 500 characters; you follow other users who say interesting things; you can favorite a toot or re-post it to your own followers. But Mastodon is different from Twitter in some fundamental ways. It offers many more ways for users to control the posts they see. It fosters awareness of the effect your posts have on others through a…
A DSL for music
Posted on August 4, 2018
I recently discovered Haskell School of Music. It’s a book about algorithmic music, which is awesome because: a) I’ve been obsessed with procedural generation for years and b) I like music as much as I like programming. So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered that someone had written a textbook combining my favorite areas of study.