Kayla McArthur

[[NSChickenFilletRoll alloc] initWithFlavor:NSChickenFilletFlavorPlain mayo:YES butter:YES toppings:NSChickenFilletToppingTomato | NSChickenFilletToppingPickle]];

sorry if I seem weird and intense now, it’s because I’m now weird and intense

I've been having a rough time recently, so I've been doing more art and music. It's hard work and exhausting but also lets me focus and get out of my anxiety loops. It's still very rough, but an early draft of a trance track I'm creating: on.soundcloud.com/sMkmdINzlp4t...

Nothing like jumping in the North Atlantic for a few minutes until you start laughing from the cold to calm the nerves.

I wish more people talked about their everyday struggles in life. It's been odd to watch so many of my friends and I get more senior and people look up to us and think we have it all together, but we still have struggles with partners, fights with friends, etc. I think being humanized is good.

I love/hate that moment you have this big breakthrough and realize everyone you value in your life has been trying to hint or outright tell you for years that you had this problem. It is both such a relief and you simultaneously feel like such an idiot.

I love my team at work, seriously some of the best humans I know. Every time we all (or even most of us) get together I’m so happy.

Overheard; “Yuzu tastes like the comic sans of citrus”

I miss web rings. I want to join a web ring for a special interest topic that I dive into way too much detail on. Where is the Apple dev web ring?

A junior engineer recently asked me about my career. I obliged and told them my previous work and how I got here. They then nodded and said it’s amazing how long I’ve been in the industry. I died a little inside.

This is how to get past the waitlist for SiriAI with three easy steps: 1. Go to settings and turn off Siri 2. Go to social media and post your mother’s maiden name, social security number and the street you grew up on. 3. Go to settings and turn on Siri.

Visiting Canada while living in Europe: Host: Sorry the fridge in your unit is so small Me: This fridge is larger than the one for my entire house in Ireland. No heated towel rack though, so cold towels for me </3

Dang ol' Cork, man, talking bout got them King of the Hill murals, man, they pretty damn cool, I'll tell you what.

Reflecting on what the fact I can say "Where is smoked salmon please?" in more languages than I can ask where the bathroom is says about my priorities.

Me at my most European: I will be off work hiking for the next few weeks. Me at my most American: …but if it’s really urgent here’s how to get in touch via Iridium satellite.

How I send up on side quests: Time to take a shower But first I should work out But I should watch that informative video while I work out But if I use my laptop for the video, I might as well finish the code change I was making last night Which is why I'm doing a large refactor before my shower.

The nice thing about living rurally is I can run down the street screaming to get out stress and no one cares.

Achievement Unlocked: I used a chainsaw for the first time and the only limbs I cut off were on a tree! Bonus: It was even the correct tree!

Spending my Sunday diving into GDPR rules to make sure an app I'm about to release for free for others complies. It turns out when I have no plans to monetize the app at all and have essentially no metrics besides "app crashed" it makes it much easier to be compliant :).

Tick bites are the worst.

Tomgreg

It's simultaneously surprising and unsurprising how much safety and trust impact productivity.

Being able to seem calm while totally panicking is perhaps one of the most useful skills.

Turning up at sniper training school and announcing that I put my AirPods on the wireless charger correctly first time every time and graduating immediately.

This AI template is evergreen btw, a few years ago I would have had deep learning instead.

Today I am thinking on the ephemeral nature of all wonderful experiences, and how that is one of the things about them that makes them so incredibly impactful. The best of these experiences leave a mark though, be it a love bite or just a faint taste, something you can hide in, even in hard times.

For me, my anxiety is 99% of the time the least helpful thing - it almost always holds me back from doing things that are positive and impactful when I eventually do them. ...that 1% of the time where it saves me makes it hard for me to entirely write off. I understand expected value, but still.

Today I forgot how old I was - somehow the fact that I am actually younger than I thought only makes me feel older

I don't know why, but I feel compelled to add theme support to any personal project I'm making. Even CLI stuff.

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players ssh snakes.run to join!

1. What

So glad we finally have drafts here. My brain has so many ideas and keeping them in a separate app has not been cutting it for me. I kept waking up to check my notes app and was like “well this is funny but why is it here? Delete.”

One of the hardest lessons I've ever had to learn was how finite my time is, and how to focus on everything is to focus on nothing.

Finished my second article on Apple code signing, digging into corner cases and how to investigate failures for both iOS and macOS bundles. Benefit from my many years of misery! kayla.is/posts/codesi... In Part III I'll discuss supply chain security considerations and code signing in large infra.

LLMs keep getting better at coding, we have to get better at determining where it’s more and less safe to apply them. I saw someone vibe code a personal project that used a crypto library and accidentally create a side channel exploit. I worry it’ll take high profile mistakes for us to learn.

Me: I'm kinda tired from all the chores yesterday, I don't think I have energy for yard work, but I can hang out with you outside -- Five minutes later -- Me: <starts cutting apart downed tree> Spouse: Please be careful Me: I'm really good with sharp things Spouse: You last cut yourself yesterday

91 is the first number that looks prime but isn’t

I made a web ADHD tool for myself. I'll put it somewhere soon. It's been working well for me. My favorite part is habits list that has easy, normal, and hard mode for the day you're having. It stores data locally. I'm lazy, but let's call it data sovereignty. I'll put it up free somewhere soon.

Having to re-upload my spouse and my ongoing DM into Synapse from Discord, the convo was too long for my API import solution, so we're doing straight to DB. Over a million messages between just the two of us. I have no idea if I should be proud or confused that we used Discord and talk this much.

Alright, and a few hours later I have imported my entire discord server history into a new Synapse instance using a cobbled together export/import script, preserving history, avatars, media, etc. I can now move my entire discord server over to E2EE.