This week I finished the first version of the barcode scanning flow I’ve been working on for Noisebridge. It’s a very simple Rust CLI that listens for input from a specified input device, and outputs only valid ISBN13 codes that it receives. Today I’ll work on a small Go program to take the ISBN numbers, looks them up and records the books in a PostgreSQL database. The next step after that is a small web service which allows people to search the books and see what we have at Noisebridge.

I’ve been neglecting my weekly blog post the last few weeks, but I’m back! The last few weeks and weekends have been busy with fun stuff. The workshop I gave on Data Security for Journalists at the CPJ conference was really wonderful fun. It was great to meet Cyrus and Micah and hang out with them teaching journalists how to use security tools to protect both themselves and their sources. The workshop itself was a great success, with all attendees walking away with both a working knowledge and a suite of tools to help them in their daily work.

As I write this I’m back in Dublin having been at 31C3 these last few days. It was a fantastic time meeting a whole range of new interesting people, as well as getting to know better the wonderful friends that I’ve made this year. Running into the end of the year I was feeling a little burnt out, mostly due to fire-fighting interpersonal drama in Noisebridge. I was very much looking forward to the break from SF and the commitments I have there in the hopes that I’d be re-energised, and as it turns out it has done exactly that.