2026-17

2 min·40 sentences·43.18 cm·28.04.2026

Joining Cambridge

I am thrilled to announce that I have joined Cambridge as a Research Associate working under Anil Madhavapeddy. I thank the EE group for the warm welcome (or cold?).

My immidiate areas of focus are to customize knots to make them more amenable to scientific workloads (LFS or LOPs), and also towards building a subset-appview of the Tangled network, which first requires total appview independence.

Towards appview independence

This week, I finally finished off my work on "atprotation" of pull-requests on Tangled. It is now possible to open PRs (stacked or otherwise) on a Tangled repository using just atproto records. This brings us one step closer to a totally self-hostable Tangled.

Presently, to use some parts of Tangled, you will need to log into the website. The parts of Tangled that are usable without the existing appview are:

  • setting up knots, pushing/pulling from them
  • setting up spindles, executing CI jobs
  • opening issues, commenting on them
  • (new) opening PRs, resubmitting them etc.
  • social bits: follows, stars

However repository operations are dependent, they have to go through the appview in order to be transacted safely, but there is work in progress to solve that as well.

Vouching on Tangled

I've also finalized my work on building a web-of-trust on Tangled using atproto this week. It largely builds on the vouch project. Some considerations:

  • all ops are public, much like the original vouch project
  • you can vouch/denounce anybody, along with a reason
  • vouching/denouncing does not block interactions, it only serves as a marker on the interface, to inform descisions, this may change down the line

Things I want to add to this:

  • decay over time: vouch/denounce records could decay over time, and require re-attestation after a while, credits to Anil for this brilliant idea
  • evidence based vouching: vouching for a user after merging their PR would automagically add a piece of evidence to their vouch record

OCaml hacking

I have been poking at the site a bit more. Surprisingly, more than one person reached out to me to tell me that my RSS feed was missing! The RSS feed has now been reinstated, there is one for the weeklies and another for my musings, and a secret third one for my art.

I've also quickly whipped up an interpreter for Modal, to showcase my bruit fork that operates on the web. It does include a web-repl and a terminal-repl, but they do require some polish.

Life

I have started packing up my flat to move to a new place, leaving several houseplants behind.