Paul Carleton's blog

Embedding Observable notebooks into a blog (ghost.org)

Observable is the coolest. It has: the best things about a coding notebook interface, like iPython or Jupyter The editability and reactivity of a spreadsheet the customizability and beauty of javascript and html a massive library of examples

Do it Live! with ObservableHQ, a platform by the creator of D3.js

presentation by Paul Carleton from Stripe for EventLoop in Mexico City on September 4th 2019 Do it Live! with ObservableHQ, a platform by the creator of D3.jsAn Observable notebook by Paul Carleton.Paul CarletonObservable

CLI for the Moon

After trudging through the grossness of trying to add to $PS1 from a script, I got to thinking it would be fun to have the phase of the moon on my shell prompt.

PS1: The shell prompt variable and the tricky parts about setting it

I wanted to add some information to the shell prompt from a script recently and learned some things about bash, PS1 and shell variables along the way. What is a

Telnet

An exchange I had a few months ago went something like this: Me: Weird, my requests aren't getting through, but I can ping the server just fine. Coworker: I can't telnet to the port... the firewall is probably blocking your traffic. <later>

Reflections on TIL posts

TL;DR Here are things I found helpful the past few days: Set goals, set time limits, enforce with timers Outline, outline, outline Be genuine The Experiment Last Wednesday, I

linux networking

Why does TCP even need a 3-way handshake?

The 3-way handshake. It's inevitable in any TCP discussion that you mention the TCP connection establishment three-way handshake. After writing about QUIC and how it aims to have 0-RTT connection establishment cost, I started wondering why TCP needed that 1-RTT 3-way handshake in the first place.

linux networking

TIL: QUIC is like TLS over UDP

QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new(ish) protocol for developing applications on the internet. It aims to provide TLS-like encryption without the overhead of TCP.

linux networking

TIL: The difference between netstat and ss

Motivation In this post, I'm going to go over two tools for inspecting the socket states (netstat and ss), and why to choose one over the other (spoiler: you can

linux networking

TIL: There are 16 T1 Internet Service Providers

I've been collecting information for a "Practical Guide to Linux Networking" by reading material I can find. Two things I've been reading recently are: A Practical Guide to

TIL

New Format: Today I Learned

I am going to try a new format where I write about something I learned. My goals with this format are: Increase the amount of writing I do Increase the

rust

Dumb dig clone in Rust

Why write a DNS client When I started digging in to DNS, I thought it would be interesting to try implementing a very simple DNS client similar to dig, but

linux networking

Starting to figure out SSL

Introduction I've been slowly working towards a personal finance app, but before I can actually put it on the open web, I want to be reasonably confident that I am

linux networking

Meandering History of DNS Authority

As a follow up to my DNS post, I started trying to answer "Who's in charge of all this?". Basically, I wanted to know what keeps me from

Wifi

Wifi Woes resolved with Ubiquiti

Fast Wifi is possible! I have declared my Ubiquiti experiment a success! I am consistently measuring internet speeds over 100 MB/s with the lowest I've seen around 40 MB/

Wifi

Debugging Slow Wifi

Introduction I ran into the ever common problem of slow WiFi recently. In this post I want to detail the experiments I ran and what I gleaned from the results.

linux networking

DNS End to End

Domain Name System: End to End We all interact with the Domain Name System (DNS) every day. Every time we load a web page, or click a link, our software

Linux

What does mount do?

Background As I mentioned in my [post about containers][container-post], I want to write a container tool in rust to learn more about rust and containers. I started doing that with my friend Kevin, and our (humble) progress so far is on Github in

Running a Single Page App in Docker - Part 2

Introduction In my [last post][last-post], I left off with 2 docker containers: one running the Go server back-end and one running the Nginx front-end serving the JavaScript for the site. In this post, I will describe how I got the whole app running

Running a Single Page App in Docker - Part 1

Setting the Stage Recently, I've [posted][container-post] about what the high level of what a container does, how [sessions][sessions-post], how a [JWT][jwt-post] works, and how [Google Sign-in works][google-post]. I've been exploring these topics through a simple personal finance application that I

JWT's From Third Party Authentication Providers

JWT’s in Google Sign-in Last time [I wrote about Google Sign-In][last-post], I discussed the details of why you would want google-sign-in vs. using OAuth to grant you access to a person’s account. I also discussed robot-accounts vs. using individual access tokens.

Understanding Authentication and Sessions

Motivation In [my post about using Google Sign-In][signin-post], I walked through some pieces of authenticating using Google as an identity provider. In the example I used [Flask-Login][flask-login] to manage sessions. Since then, I tried implementing something similar in Go and went down

Containers - How do they work?

Motivation I hear the word "container" in the software context a lot but I do not really know it means. To quote Tim Urban ([again][first-post]), I get the "ugh it’s that icky term again nah go away" feeling.

Google Sign In and Google Sheets: Step by Step in Python

Motivation As part of my CashCoach project, I want to share and update spending reports with a user using Google Sheets. It turns out there a lot of different options for interacting with the Google API's likely because people want to interact with them

Morse Code to Emoji: A Brief history of character encodings

Introduction I found myself wondering what Unicode symbols looked like at the bit level. In the ASCII world, a single byte is a single character, so the encoding is relatively