Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

How to manage or eliminate React state without Redux

Blogs on Monica Lent's Website
When I started writing React – I made a big mess. Many of my components took too many props, or my component had an immense amount of state. Doing simple things required a lot of data manipulation, and ultimately led to a lot of bugs. It didn’t take long for simple tasks to become extremely tedious. I think this happens to a lot of people who start out with React. It’s almost too easy to write a lot of code, when in reality, the answer may be that less is more.

GreenPiThumb: A Raspberry Pi Gardening Bot

mtlynch.io

Introduction

This is the story of GreenPiThumb: a gardening bot that automatically waters houseplants, but also sometimes kills them.

GreenPiThumb full system

The story begins about a year ago, when I was struck by a sudden desire to own a houseplant. A plant would look nice, supply me with much needed oxygen, and imply to guests that I’m a responsible grown-up, capable of caring for a living thing.

How I Stole Your Siacoin

mtlynch.io

A seedy reddit post

The night was June 9th, 2017. It was a typical Friday night for me. I was watching Netflix and checking reddit partying with cool kids.

Suddenly, I saw this post on the “New” tab of the /r/siacoin subreddit:

Reddit screenshot

If you’re not familiar with Siacoin, it’s a cryptocurrency that allows you to rent out your spare hard disk space or buy space from others. I’ve written about this technology a couple times previously (mining guide, NAS guide).

A Beginner's Guide to Mining Siacoin

mtlynch.io

This guide is out of date.

This post describes mining Sia with a desktop graphics card (GPU), but custom mining hardware is now available for Sia. The custom hardware has made Sia GPU mining non-viable. This guide will still work, but you may never reach payout, even with a high-end GPU.

Overview

Sia is a decentralized, peer-to-peer network for buying and selling computer storage space.

Users pay for transactions within Sia using a cryptocurrency called Siacoin. Like Bitcoin, Sia relies on “miners” to supply computing power to the network. These miners are paid for their contributions in Siacoin.

Building a Homelab VM Server

mtlynch.io

Note: This article describes a VM build in 2017.

For the 2020 version, see, “Building a Homelab VM Server (2020 Edition).”

Overview

I do the bulk of my home development work in virtual machines (VMs). My main desktop PC is a Windows 10 machine, so I had always run my VMs from within VirtualBox.

This setup worked fine, but I was starting to become aware of the increasing pain points. I searched and found a post by Brian Moses where he describes building a dedicated “homelab” server for running VMs. I really liked this idea and was inspired to do the same.