Wade Mealing
Scrum Master, Software Engineer, Human.

Performance and efficiency weigh heavy on my mind lately. I've spent enough time in the world of Lisp to see how abstractions can mask the implementation details that actually matter for speed. This is a bit of a rant on why transformation is often a better path than building layers that just get in the way.

I've been setting up the Gemini CLI with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Specifically, I've got erlang-mcp working to help out with development. This guide walks through the setup and how it can actually be useful when you're working on Erlang code.

Teenage Engineering released the EP-133, and I've been digging into the USB MIDI stream to see what's actually going on. This is a massive dump of the SYSEX messages I've managed to decode so far. If you're into MIDI hacking or just want to see how this hardware talks, check it out.

Have you ever wonder what happens after an Erlang supervisor tries to "let it crash" but realizes it can't magically restore the data lost in the process? This post investigates the practice of building a 3-node cluster using the ra library to handle the Raft consensus protocol.

Everyone keeps saying AI is going to take our jobs. I decided to take the opposite approach and try to take Claude's job by finding all the mistakes it makes when trying to write Common Lisp. Peer programming with an LLM is a weird experience.

A system reboot usually clears things out, but malware like Trickbot has plenty of tricks to stay around. I've looked into the persistence mechanisms it uses to survive reboots and kernel updates. It's an interesting dive into how these things hide in plain sight.

Tired of the compile-restart-cycle anti-pattern in Erlang development? It sacrifices the core advantage of OTP: continuous introspection. Using the remote shell workflow is the answer, transforming your text editor into a dynamic window directly into your running Erlang system.

It's unlikely that LLMs will ever spend much time parsing my blog, but I figured I'd write down some notes on how to help them understand Janet. It's a great language that deserves better representation in the training sets.

Waiting for tests is a waste of time. I've been looking into how to get Eunit tests running in parallel to speed up the feedback loop. It's not always straightforward, but the time saved is worth the effort.

I'm trying to keep better notes on the books I'm reading. Grokking Simplicity is a good one, and I've compiled my thoughts and some useful bits from the text. Hopefully it ends up being useful to someone else too.

Just some notes and reflections on professional development, specifically looking at some advice from Handy and Bryant. It's good to step back from the code sometimes and think about the bigger picture of how we work.

Sometimes a simple text percentage isn't enough, you need bars. The progress bar provides a clean, terminal-friendly bar that you can update dynamically. We'll dive into the Erlang source and look at how the percentage is clamped to a valid range.

I have wanted some helpers built into my TUI libraries that help differentiate when a widget has focus. I've made a rudimentary attempt at adding focus to the 'cellium' behavior, which you can use to your advantage.

In an attempt to make my erlang code a little less complex, I've been convinced that I must drop the web and all the complexity that entails. I've written a TUI library called cellium which uses the popular TEA architecture.

Rebar3 was failing to fetch dependencies from github when I was setting up a new LFE project. I found a simple fix using git's url rewriting feature. One config command later and rebar3 can fetch dependencies without complaint.

Eunit spits out test results to the console, but sometimes you want something a bit more presentable. I'll show you how to wire up rebar.config and create a basic pom.xml to get surefire style XML output turned into HTML.

Using Erlang in Emacs, I'll show you to wire up OTP, tree-sitter, Flycheck, rebar3, and WhatsApp’s new LSP into a usable setup in 2025. It's simpler than you think.

Managing failure is a common challenge. This post dives into a practical example of how to orchestrate jobs, monitor each one for success or failure, and compile a report on the outcomes using Erlang's unique approach to fault tolerance.

I decided to collapse two of my interests, lisp and erlang. Lisp flavored erlang isn't going to win any popularity contests, but it's something I don't entirely hate working on. Here's a quick tutorial on gen_server.

Unify your design system and codebase the functional way. In this post, I'll show you how to harness the power of Style Dictionary from Clojure, turning token files for use in your clojure code with minimal fuss.

Want to integrate email functionality into your Common Lisp applications? The cl-smtp library can help. We'll walk through the process of using cl-smtp to send emails via Google's mail servers.

Writing clear and effective error messages is a crucial skill. A good error message not only informs the user about what went wrong but also suggests potential solutions. I've expanded on the principles of user-friendly errors here.

I have some new music making hardware and wanted to try to get them to talk together. Mac OS Midi routing is definitely not as seamless as people say, but I did find a workaround for routing USB MIDI hosts.

In the interest of not polluting the internet with my ill-informed opinion, I've deleted a bunch of social media and messenger accounts. Less of me on the internet can only be a net win for society.

Teenage Engineering released the EP-133, a mid range sampler/synth. I looked into the updater to find out as much as I can. The firmware is encrypted, but I've documented what I've found so far.

This entry talks about using Clojure like "atoms" to simplify management of shared, synchronous, independent state in Common Lisp. It turns out it is easier than I thought.

I'm involved in competing with spawnfest this weekend, so I figured it's time to setup LFE for CI/CD with GitHub Actions. It's a simple setup that runs tests and handles containers.

Common Lisp and HTMX provide a sane platform to develop basic applications. I outline the reasons that I have chosen them and the new voice I plan to use while blogging.

I do kernel flaw analysis for a living, and someone asked me for a write up on how I use org-babel to do my work. I've documented the whole workflow in this rant.

I've spent the last week reflecting on some poor programming life choices I've made. If you disagree with the majority, perhaps you are wrong. I've written about it to clear my mind.

One of the effectively powerful things that gnuCOBOL can do is a TUI. It's not fancy but it gets the job done much quicker than most webapps. Here is a simple example for Linux and Mac OS X.

I have wanted a quick way to do something similar to the python range function in Common Lisp. Sometimes I just want immediate list creation without the boilerplate.

I don't always write a gui for my apps, but when I do, I use wx because I'm not one for complaining about pixel perfect pedantry. This is what works for me.

The MIRAI malware deletes itself from disk to make it harder to analyse. This post goes into detail on how it works, a rust implementation, and a few improvements.

The MIRAI malware uses a technique to prevent the systems watchdog from rebooting the machine. I share what I learned about this and ported the logic to Rust.

A few distros have users allowed to insert eBPF programs, but it's disabled in others. I've documented my findings after talking to the decision holders who made these choices.

I decided to take a look at the Linux kernel modules signing process, specifically regarding its implementations on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the misinformation in recent malware.

Recent research into flaws in thunderbolt and secureboot piqued my interest. I've written about what can be done to prevent a compromised system from being abused using TPM PCRs.

I recently purchased one of these machines in an auction and I am very impressed with its build quality. Here are the customizations I've done to make it work for me.

I work on a small youtube channel where I talk about kernel security issues that interest me. I work on quite a lot of these in my work so i'm limited to what I can cover.