I left Twitter before it became X. Not in some grand, principled exit — no manifesto post, no “see you on Mastodon” farewell thread. I just quietly stopped opening the app one day, and never really went back. By the time Elon Musk’s name was on the masthead, I was already gone. So when people ask if I miss “old Twitter,” I have to clarify: I don’t miss what it became right before the sale. I miss what it was years before that — a smaller, weirder, more sincere place.
There’s a command line in the gofi post I wrote ten days ago that has been quietly bugging me ever since I hit publish:
gofips -H 10.20.30.1 -k --get > hosts.conf
Look at that -k. That’s me telling the tool “don’t bother checking the TLS certificate.” And the part you can’t see is worse: my UniFi admin username and password, sitting in environment variables. Both of those were compromises I made to get the thing working. Neither of them sat well.
Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
Here’s a thing I’ve quietly hated for years: managing static IP assignments and DNS names for the little fleet of gear on my network. Every homelab has it — the Pi in the garage, the shop printer, the sensor node in the attic, the pool controller. You want them at known addresses with known names. And the “old-school” way to get that is to stand up a DHCP server and a DNS server and keep them in sync. Since my network has tens of BrightSign devices in addition to my hobby robotics devices, this becomes actual work.
I’ve been teasing this for a while. Time to stop teasing. Meet Gorai — a modern, open-source robotics framework written in Go.
Open source is about to get a lot messier. Not because the code is getting worse – because AI agents just changed the economics of “fork it and fix it yourself.”