A few weeks ago my friends hosted a Passover Seder. Calling upon the Goldman family tradition, I embarked upon my first attempt to cook my mother’s brisket. A staple of many Passovers and even the occasional Thanksgiving, the tender slices of meat smothered in a bright tomato gravy evoke childhood memories of holidays and family, the recipe and the aromas as familiar as the cracks on the sidewalk on the way home from school....
Raytracing with Optimizations
This past weekend I decided to go through Peter Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend, after which I made a few optimizations of my own. I never took a graphics course in college, so this was my first real exposure to the mathematics and C++ wizardry involved in harnessing the power of light to render cool 3D scenes like this: I highly recommend checking out the book yourself. I enjoyed seeing the image slowly come together as the author assembled pieces of geometry and physics to bounce rays across the scene....
Web Bundles
Web Bundles, more formally known as Bundled HTTP Exchanges, are part of the Web Packaging proposal. This is an interesting change to the web platform based around the idea of packaging websites into a self-contained binary file. Much has been said already about the specifications and potential use cases, this post focuses on my early experience hacking on the feature. Bundling Hugo Sites Hugo is one of the most popular static site generators....
jacobgoldman.dev Outage
This began as a tongue-in-cheek internal document I wrote on a plane for work. Background I maintain a blog at jacogoldman.dev “monetized” via GPT (check out the ad featuring my dog below). It offers a quick and simple method for verifying production GPT as opposed to visiting cluttered publisher sites that slow devtools to a crawl (cough CNN cough). It also has some writing on it to supplement the ads....
Grampy's Movies
My grandfather loved movies. In his house on the beach in Hull, he would record dozens of films on DVR. He called them “pictures” (pronounced pitch-ya) as in “motion pictures”. I fondly remember visiting the beach house in my youth and seeing him, comfortable in his great brown leather chair, with a movie playing in the background and waves crashing quietly in the distance. A few weeks before he passed in March 2021, I wrote down all the films he had recorded....
MBTA Ride Tracker: Part 1
Living in Cambridge, MA without a car, I have learned to ride the T, Boston’s subway system operated by the MBTA. This has been a pleasant experience overall and I have enjoyed the relative flexibility and independence brought by public transit. Recently I became curious about the characteristics and history of the passenger cars I rode. Every transit system has a “rolling stock” representing all the active train cars. As of November, 2016 the New York City Subway’s rolling stock includes 6418 cars on the roster....
GitHub Copilot and Childlike Wonder
Around 9 months ago I was impressed when GitHub Copilot was making the rounds on HN and Reddit, so I decided to enroll in the technical preview on my personal computer. I suppose my application finally came to term as I was finally able to see auto-completions for the first time today while fiddling with some JavaScript. Given that my personal projects have generated an embarrassing amount of dust in the last few months (new project idea: dustoff, a tool that will periodically send you friendly reminders to work on personal stuff ideally without pointing a blunderbuss at you… hmm yes on second thought I think I know why these projects gather dust), I’m not exactly sure when the access kicked in....
Hello World
console.log('Hello world!'); Welcome to my new blog! I am still playing around with the layout and [writing | design] styles, so please bear with me if things get weird and change around a bunch. Behind the Scenes I use Hugo to generate a static site from source controlled Markdown files. nginx then serves the outputted public directory. I am writing this post from within VSCode, which has been nice and familiar as I tinkered with various config files and CSS....