For those who don't know, I gave birth to my daughter, Willow Jean, in August 2024. I had an entirely uneventful pregnancy, even playing in a 36-hole, two-day men's golf tournament five days before she was born. She arrived via spontaneous unmedicated labor, and I was lucky that her delivery was uncomplicated and moved along reasonably quickly.| Tara Vancil
On August 1st, the Tribal Board of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians voted to open the membership rolls for the first time in decades. This is a huge moment for me, because although I am a direct descendant of somebody listed on the Durant Roll, I am not officially a member of the tribe.| Tara Vancil
I have maintained this website, taravancil.com, since 2014. It was my final year of college, and I had been waiting years for the taravancil.com domain to become available.| taravancil.com
Maven's first bird was a funny one. I don't recall the details leading up to the moment "dead bird!" rang out, but I'll never forget the heart thumping moment when I realized that my puppy, just weeks from her first birthday had done it—that she had found a grouse and held steady through the shot.| Tara Vancil
Maven pointed her first bird today. I cried.| Tara Vancil
A running list of Maven's nicknames in no particular order.| Tara Vancil
It was a big, heavy year, but I can't in good faith say that it was trash (see 2021, 2020).| Tara Vancil
The Beaker Browser project has officially been archived. If you're interested in learning more about the project's backstory, successes, and failures, I recommend reading Paul Frazee's post-mortem.| Tara Vancil
Meet Maven.| Tara Vancil
This post has a soundtrack.| Tara Vancil
2020 was trash. I don't have much to say about it. I'm just thankful to be alive, housed, and fed.| Tara Vancil
Here’s the news: I’m joining Glitch!| Tara Vancil
I’m leaving Beaker! You might be expecting this post to expose a controversy or detail complaints about working on the project, but there is no controversy, and the complaints I do have will be familiar to anyone who’s formed a company or maintained an open-source project.| Tara Vancil
My kitchen is by no means a shipwreck, but there’s definitely room for improvement. I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Airtable which proclaims to help you “organize anything”, so I thought “hey some organization can’t hurt” and spent Sunday inventorying my entire kitchen.| Tara Vancil
Updated August 31, 2018. Originally published on January 4, 2018.| Tara Vancil
2017 was my most productive year yet. Not because I achieved superhuman levels of productivity, but because I made the transition between figuring out what to do with my life and doing something with my life. It feels damn good.| Tara Vancil
Today Code for Science and Society (CSS) announced| Tara Vancil
On Writing is part-autobiography and part-styleguide, and much less tactical writing guide| Tara Vancil
We’re Blue Link Labs, the creators of Beaker, a peer-to-peer Web browser. Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve launched Hashbase, a fungible hosting service for the peer-to-peer Web.| Tara Vancil
One of the most interesting phenomena on the Web is the popularity of services like GitHub, CodePen, and Glitch, which provide tools for sharing, duplicating, and remixing other people’s projects. The practice of learning from and using existing code as boilerplate is a critical piece of what’s made innovation on the Web platform so open...| Tara Vancil
The spirit of openness has been baked into the Web since its formation. The Web was built to share documents written in plain text that could be downloaded and viewed transparently...| Tara Vancil
Earlier this month, I spoke at bangbangcon about how Merkle trees are the backbone of nearly all decentralized technologies. Here is a summary of my presentation:| Tara Vancil
We’re big fans of Markdown, so we’ve built in support for Markdown formatting to Beaker...| Tara Vancil
Today I worked on a fun 'lil set of p2p exercises| Tara Vancil
Today I moved fast and broke things -- this site to be specific -- but it's all| Tara Vancil
Today I read a lot. Per the recommendation of Mike| Tara Vancil
Today was great. Something I'd been trying and failing to understand| Tara Vancil
I don't have a formal CS education, so one thing I'm focusing on at RC| Tara Vancil
Today was marked by the realization that when one asks for help at the Recurse| Tara Vancil
Today was the first day of the Recurse Center. I've understood for a| Tara Vancil
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Today I shot and killed an animal for the first time. I've been looking forward to this moment for so long that it almost feels uneventful. Certainly overdue.| taravancil.com
I'm reimplementing my cryptopals solutions in Python, and today I worked a challenge that required me to calculate the Hamming distance between two equal-length strings.| taravancil.com
I've been practicing evaluating time complexity with Big O notation, and while I can intuitively recognize when an algorithm runs in linear time, constant time, or quadratic time, I've not been able to intuit why and when a runtime is O(log n) or O(n log n).| taravancil.com
Today was the first "regular day" of RC, wherein the schedule was structured as it will be for the remainder of the batch. I started the day with two goals:| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com
Tara Vancil is a software engineer living in Northern Michigan, where she operates Northwoods Digital, a small software consultancy.| taravancil.com