A build log about a smaller project that took my mind off of everything.| Roborooter.com
I wanted to make a "CLI Tool" for orchestrating a "Website" deployment to a web host and I wanted to build and use this CLI tool in GitHub actions. GitHub has a...| Roborooter.com
My various avatars and profile pics over the years. ## The original (2001) ## Vectorized (2010) ## Commissioned (2015) ## Pixel Drawn (2018) ## Smiling Pho...| Roborooter.com
Hi, I'm Francis! I spend my days building engineering teams and my nights hacking on software or electronics projects. This is my blog. You can dig back to 200...| Roborooter.com
TIL is a weekly learning event that I like to run with my teams. Every friday for 30-45 minutes we share 5 minute presentations on something we learned that wee...| Roborooter.com
To celebrate my grandfather Francesco Gulotta's birthday, I am sharing a translation of his autobiography. It's a incredible story of his escape from fascism in...| Roborooter.com
A friend of mine turned me on to Home Assistant which is a wonderful open source home automation platform. It's privacy forward (a hard requirement for me) and ...| Roborooter.com
This past April Roborooter turned 21 years old. (First Post!) I started it as a fork of a friends blog and it was a place for my group of friends to post updat...| Roborooter.com
I've been softly recommending people start using `1Password` for the past 5-10 years. I'm no longer going to be soft about it, you have to stop using passwords,...| Roborooter.com
(Cross posted from our Open Collective Page.) This past year has brought a lot of really good change to Node Serialport. First and foremost we have a new maint...| Roborooter.com
This video dates back to around 2010 from an unknown source but remains my favorite. I give a version of this talk at every company I join. It's nothing new, bu...| Roborooter.com
I nerdsniped myself and made a handy async utility that turns Promises and AsyncGenerators inside out. This is very handy for testing and useful if you're done ...| Roborooter.com
I'm building a library to be used on Amazon Lambda and the hardest part of testing a library designed to run in a serverless environment is having a local envir...| Roborooter.com
I met Connor Hicks through work. We both work on webassembly powered projects in our day job and he builds a really cool platform called Suborbital. Which you...| Roborooter.com
My friend with Gregor Martynus asked on twitter if anyone needed help with github actions. "There are no unworthy ideas" he said. So I raised my hand. I need he...| Roborooter.com
I'm building a small project with architect a lightweight framework to manage AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and few other services to make serveless web apps. I wanted ...| Roborooter.com
This year I took some time around the holidays to do some learning. Like last year I dove into rust but I didn't go into it cold this time. I was gifted a "live...| Roborooter.com
My Product Manager Skylar asked me today to recap how our product team righted themselves after a year of hardship and they’ve been so good for so long I had fo...| Roborooter.com
For the second year in a row, for my birthday, I took some time off work to learn some new things. This year it was Rust. (Last year it was the DHT Kademlia) I ...| Roborooter.com
As of today you can read this website without a web server by visiting dat://roborooter.com. If that link doesn't work for you, you'll need a DAT capable browse...| Roborooter.com
I wrote this for a 5 minute lightening talk at a local tech leadership meetup. I code. At my previous jobs I coded 30-50% of my time. I would take non mission ...| Roborooter.com
I decided to build a toy for my son. Buttons lights, the works. I’m far from done.| Roborooter.com
I spent a few weeks making an old Serial Mouse work. I've been tweeting a log of what I've done so far and I already wrote a piece on the serial mouse protocols...| Roborooter.com
Love and pain and war, all things I missed. Since the vats became standard in all low income housing I haven’t needed any of them. We’re all fed, we’re all heal...| Roborooter.com
I remembered there was such a thing as a serial mouse and I wondered how they worked. A bit of googling found me this link (which as of this posting has an SSL ...| Roborooter.com
I asked people on the internet for help choosing a linux laptop. People had opinions. The laptops people suggested; * The Purism librem-13 * System76 Gala...| Roborooter.com
Serialport turns 9 this year. Back when it started NodeJS was a different environment than it is now. JavaScript was a different programming language than it is...| Roborooter.com
This week I'm at the Recurse Center as part of the "Mini 2 Batch". I'll be spending my time researching and implementing the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table. DH...| Roborooter.com
The Firmata protocol is used for a variety of uses, from home automation to robots. Any time a computer needs to control a low-power device you might find it be...| Roborooter.com
There's so much about this tv show that I enjoyed. The 1980s futurism, the fact they didn't force a love interest, how every device talks or has music, even the...| Roborooter.com
Someone asked me on a mailing list if I worry about reaching my team's limit in our ability to manage Redis. I wrote a bit about why I think our architecture he...| Roborooter.com
I started `streaming-iterables` a few months ago to learn how to use `async-generators` and it was hard. The concepts all sound very simi...| Roborooter.com
(This is part of a talk I gave at ManhattanJS of the same name which you can find at github.) Oh happy day! I'm getting read! My day had come! So many times th...| Roborooter.com
God help me if any of these have a serialport. **Update**: They do have serialports! I noticed this document about the "findings from the Defcon 25 Voting Mac...| Roborooter.com
I got a new work laptop so it was time to bikeshed about my setup. I've switched to zsh (oh-my-zsh), iTerm2 (I finally get why you all like it!) and my colors a...| Roborooter.com
I've got a few commits around Node.js's related projects. One or two on npm, countless on node-serialport, a few on node-pre-gyp, many others. It's been a nice ...| Roborooter.com
Last year Bocoup offered me my dream job. I was trepidatious at first, my company had just gone under, I felt disconnceted from my personal life and I wasn't ab...| Roborooter.com
I wrote a little blog post over at the Sparkfun Blog about how our work on the Johnny-Five inventors kit was guided by our love of the NodeBots community. I'm ...| Roborooter.com
A few weeks ago I started maintaining node serialport after a long hiatus. We hadn't had a release in about a year and we had some outstanding bugs that I wante...| Roborooter.com
I made a little presentation, a hack, a spike into the world of the unknown. I wanted to see if I could power a johnny-five robot with redux a powerful state ma...| Roborooter.com
Tonight I gave a talk at QueensJS. It was my first time speaking there and it completes my trifecta of "borojs" speaking events. (I've now spoken at BrooklynJS,...| Roborooter.com
"Why is the light in the refrigerator purple? It looks like I'm making a breakfast for zombies!" I grab the makings for a mushroom cheddar omelet. We're runnin...| Roborooter.com
I hung up my phone and started typing. "Jason just called me, ideas for dinner before the movie?" and sent it to Sara. My phone know's a lot about Sara and wher...| Roborooter.com
I was working on one of our projects when I happened to run across some code that set off my rubber ducky detector. It's a page that displays the days productio...| Roborooter.com
`FactoryGirl` the oddly named testing tool for database models is something we use a lot at Wizard Development. If you're unfamiliar with how it works, I strong...| Roborooter.com
It's been around six months since I quit my job as a PSI Analyst. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, it's pretty much a glorified title for an Ex...| Roborooter.com
We recently added an API to The Winnower to support our new Wordpress Plugin. It was a great experience in both product and software design. Wordpress support i...| Roborooter.com
\ Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach the Intro to HTML and CSS course with Girl Develop It, a non profit organization that welcomes all, but focuses on...| Roborooter.com
While working on my pet project for matching tennis partners I decided to make a match history page. It displays a player's recent matches and some information ...| Roborooter.com
My home has radiators that are 70ish years old. I'm going to guess the air vents are 10-30 years old. It's supposed to let the air out while the pipe fills with...| Roborooter.com
I was expressing frustration with moving money around the other day and was asked to share what I knew. This is an incomplete list of ways to move money, and th...| Roborooter.com
Lately most of my writing has been over at Wizard Development's blog. Some of it (about building the business) might be interesting to you. Some of it (about bu...| Roborooter.com
Earlier this week we had this year's first NodeBots NYC event! Andrew and Myself were happy to host. We need to thank About.com for giving us food, space and he...| Roborooter.com
In 2014 our plan was twofold; Help small business's dreams come true and to be a model for how we'd like our industry to operate. In 9 months we came close to a...| Roborooter.com
Rick was driving north on I-95, he had to find an uplink or this whole trip had been for nothing. "Rose, scan the vehicles ahead." His onboard computer sprang i...| Roborooter.com
I was recently helping Sara debug an issue with a project for an upcoming book she's writing a chapter in. She was using Johnny-Five and a Spark Core to remotel...| Roborooter.com
I have a video of my talk at RobotsConf 2013! I've also got a video of my informal session at JSCONF 2014! And lastly (and most excitingly) I have a video Sa...| Roborooter.com
There are lots of ways to host, deploy and maintain applications. We often use Heroku because the tradeoff of control gives you a lot of operational benefits th...| Roborooter.com
I've been reviewing a lot of projects lately and I thought I should share what I look for when evaluating the code quality and maturity of a project. My team is...| Roborooter.com
Any sufficiently mature development team eventually has someone who makes a build status indicator. This one is ours. The WizardDev StatusBot shows us the curr...| Roborooter.com
I had the absolute pleasure to join the people at Ghostalk the other day for their last episode of the season. They let me talk aboutrobots, Wizard Development,...| Roborooter.com
I got into a conversation with someone about their development team. They specifically are hiring a 50/50 mix of senior and junior developers, to help with cost...| Roborooter.com
We're Wizard Development. We'll be posting about software development, robotics, workflow, and how technology changes our lives. Talk to you soon.| Roborooter.com
I've been making my way through this presentation by Maciej Cegłowski > Some kinds of services are just crying out for decentralization. Fifty years from now, ...| Roborooter.com
Yesterday at JSConf 2014 we had a nodebots event. (We also had noderockets, nodeboats and nodecopters.) One of my favorite bots is below. We have a lot of diff...| Roborooter.com
I've been doing a lot of outward thinking\* lately about Wizard Development's vision. "Vision" means a lot of things to a lot of people, so I should specify. To...| Roborooter.com
> This post was written in 2014 and it's advice is absolutely less relevant today, nevertheless it's one of the top search results for this problem. At One Mon...| Roborooter.com
If you saw me talk at ManhattanJS you know I have a dream about a decentralized mesh network that supports decentralized applications that cater to our decentra...| Roborooter.com
I don't write a ton of nodejs modules. I work on a few\*, and I don't even work on them as much as I like. However I do end up using a ton of them. Here are som...| Roborooter.com
On the NY Hack and Tell mailing list we've been discussing the recent news of Netflix paying Comcast for bandwidth. The two sides of the debate seem to be such;...| Roborooter.com
Protip: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing headers are sent slightly different between Firefox and Chrome when hosts have a non standard port.| Roborooter.com
Today is my birthday. Last year you, my friends, helped me donate almost $4000 to both the Brooklyn Free School and Room To Read. It was amazing. I've never bee...| Roborooter.com
I gave a quick lightening talk last night at Brooklyn Internets. In fact I sponsored the event. It's the ...| Roborooter.com
A while back I was hiring for a junior spot on my team at a largish company. I had been at it for over two months. There had been lots of recruiters, tons of re...| Roborooter.com
I gave a talk at BrooklynJS last night on making a decentralized chat server in JS. It's similar and compatible with my ruby talk. We didn't get to play with it...| Roborooter.com
I've been asked a few times what to buy when starting with electronics, especially when it comes to micro-controllers and sensors. You're going to end up buying...| Roborooter.com
Yesterday I gave a talk at Robots Conference called "Electrical Engineering Excitement" or EEE!. You can download my talk in PDF or Keynote (for fancy animatio...| Roborooter.com
Tonight I gave a talk at General Assembly on making a decentralized chat server in Ruby. I wanted to talk on something that wasn't web development as we webdevs...| Roborooter.com
Yesterday marked the end of a several week sprint to improve tests around Johnny-Five. My goal started with fixing an inconstantly failing test, innocent enough...| Roborooter.com
For some reason tonight all I want to do is figure out how to answer the question "Where is my power coming from?" from the following nyiso market data. It does...| Roborooter.com
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I was part of a hack weekend recently that Levo League hosted. During the event I made us Dorby a door answering robot. We had a problem at the Levo League wit...| Roborooter.com
Meraki is a "100 Percent Cloud Managed" switch, this means you have less control in the long run but possibly more options and everything should be easier use. ...| Roborooter.com
My favorite "exclusive nine-part dialogue with an imaginary eBay Architect" on REST architectures. The Rest Dialogs| Roborooter.com
Recently I won a trip to NodeConf (a conference about nodeJS) by making a cool little game called "You Laugh You Lose". It was created in 17 hours at NodeJitsu'...| Roborooter.com
"Technology breaks, it aint good, we don't look forward to it, but technology breaks. What happens next is what matters, how you escalate it." - Thomas Joyce K...| Roborooter.com
This is really cool. Shows how different sorting algorithms work. Visualising Sorting Algorithms\| Roborooter.com
This post has been a long time coming. Its intent is to convey an idea. The idea is that we need investigative journalism to have a productive government. The p...| Roborooter.com
> The value of a piece of information is proportional to the chance that you will act on it times the benefit of acting on it.\ > \-ejames| Roborooter.com
> I split my week into 3 kinds of days - intention, attention and ascension - purpose, focus and the climb.\ > \-John Jantsch| Roborooter.com
I'm going to be cross posting my tech related posts over at rbrt.com. On one hand I want a separate place for my advertised work in the tech community and on th...| Roborooter.com
Recently I discovered Room to Read. It's a global non profit started by an ex-marketing director of Microsoft that creates schools and libraries in third world ...| Roborooter.com
> Freelancers Blues: The thought that at any given moment, at any given day, you could be working.\ > \-Francis Gulotta| Roborooter.com
"Design is about supplying Intent." -John Hockenberry's Dad This short talk has h...| Roborooter.com
I can't imagine that the big screens are that helpful, but they are cool.| Roborooter.com
A friend of mine recently made some really nice personal business cards on moo.com. Crazy nice printing, nice thick stock, large high quality photo, double side...| Roborooter.com
From my few years of working in a NOC I've seen a lot of stupid behaviors from devices in regards to monitoring and notifications. Here's my current list of gri...| Roborooter.com
As you may know I work in a Network Operation Center or as my business card says "THE NOC". What is life like in the NOC? My team is responsible for monitoring...| Roborooter.com
Go watch Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" based off the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick. Don't however watch any trailers or pay attention to any ...| Roborooter.com
I read a wonderful twitter thead about CGI and the birth of the web and this triggered a thought I've been kicking around. > Wasm is the new CGI And to be cle...| Roborooter.com