Robert Chiniquy

Suddenly, and as if in play
Mademoiselle who wished to hear
some of the wood of my array
of varied flutes appear

I feel this trial which took place
in a pictorial vista tended
to have some value when I ended
and looked upon your face

yes this vain breath limited as
it was even in its final state
by my poor crippled fingers has
no power to imitate

your crystalline utterly care-
less childlike laugh that charms the air

From Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore.

These cacti used to bloom only every 5-10 years. For the last 8 years or so though I have been seeing many, many blooms, almost every year, sometimes multiple times a year. I wish I had more time to spend in gardens.

ScaleFT was an infrastructure identity / security company some friends and I started in 2015; the work beginning long before 2015 of course. We became part of Okta in 2018. This image is from one of our engineering blog posts, illustrated by angelblue05. It reminds me of all our moments along the way.

I miss the freedom to just read book after book, and reflect.

• Fault Injection for Complete Branch Coverage
• Proving Equivalence with E-Graphs
• Every Branch Condition Compiles to a DFA
• One Mock Server, Twelve Protocols
• Formally Verifying Two Hundred Identity Connectors
• Six Shapes of Authorization

In early 2003, a friend and I wrote some code to design 18 piece Burr puzzles. This puzzle was one of our favorites due to certain properties of the design which made them good physical puzzles to build. For example, to remove the first piece takes 17 steps, which means the puzzle is not going to fall apart in your hands or even if you just shake it randomly.

We built about 5 or 6 of them with a table saw and router in the backyard of my apartment, along with dozens of 6 piece Burrs. It took a lot of tries, measuring, cutting jigs, and thinking, to make the pieces precisely enough. I miss that kind of leisure, the freedom to just chase ideas.

Hold'em, seven-card stud, and deuces wild at four to six players: how often a hand shows up, how often it takes the pot, and whether it holds up.

Lessons, launches, wind sites, and which months blow at Berkeley, Alameda, Coyote Point, and Sherman Island.