A blog by Maho Pacheco
Breaking the Cycle of Fear: How We Can Spread a Better Kind of Story A few months back, I received a free book at a Microsoft event: Infectious Generosity by Chris Anderson. It sat on my bookshelf for a couple of weeks until one day, out of sheer boredom, I grabbed the shiniest cover one (a deep yellow) and started flipping through it. To my surprise, it’s written by the Head of TED (I love TED!
You can find the index and other parts of this series here. We are almost done! Thank you for coming all the way into this journey. In this part we will learn how to broadcast (aka federate) your site posts to your folowers. Overview The federation of your posts (aka. sending your posts to live infitely in the fediverse) is pretty straighforward: sequenceDiagram BroadcastTool-Storage: Retrieve followers (actor uris) BroadcastTool-Follower-instance: Get actor info (including inbox uri) BroadcastTool-Filesystem: Get note json (post) BroadcastTool-Follower-inbox: Send a create action (wrapper of note) In a few words, you will iterate your list of followers, get their inbox url, and send a request to such url to create an fediverse object (note, article, etc.
Back in May, while commuting the few miles from the rural area where I was staying in Mexico to the city for virtual meetings, I listened to a podcast episode about whales. It focused specifically on how scientists are leveraging technological advancements to understand and decode the complex language of certain whale species. The ultimate goal is to create a translator that would allow humans to communicate with these creatures. However, the most challenging aspect lies in grasping the context of their communication — in other words, their world.
My relationship with coffee probably began in my mother’s womb. She may deny it, but I am pretty sure she drank more coffee than was advised or allowed in the 1980s. My mother is from a very small town in the middle of the mountains on the Pacific side of Mexico, very close to a semi-active volcano. My memories of visiting my grandmother are actually memories of smells: the smell of ashes and burnt food cooked with wood, ashes in the meat and the tortillas, and coffee.
I am incredibly grateful to the people who have helped shape me into who I am today. Their support and guidance have been invaluable. But advice, like wisdom, can be tricky. It’s not always suitable for everyone, and any phrase can become wisdom with the right context. Generic advice from sources like LinkedIn can often be too broad or superficial, and should be taken with a grain of salt. While I have a wealth of wisdom to share, I will save that for my one-on-one conversations.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," I often say when someone tells me they’re mad because someone stole their idea or post. It’s a poor consolation, I know. There’s real anger when you pour effort into something, and someone else takes credit. I’ve felt that anger many times. Just a few weeks ago, I saw someone on LinkedIn lamenting that another person had stolen their idea, got 40k likes, and then blocked the original author.
Technical post incoming! On the last project I needed to deploy a multi-node kubernetes cluster as a proof of concept in Azure. Now, we use k3s, a lightweight kubernetes distribution over ubuntu vms deployed in Azure. This is to simulate an edge environment, so this is not something you would do in production, this is for dev/test purposes or just learning/upskilling. You can find deep explanations about what is a multi-node kubernetes cluster, and how to deploy one for k3s.
I used to write a lot when I was younger, even as a kid. There was no Gen-AI, no Grammarly, no advanced tools to assist with spelling or grammar. It was just me, a pen, and paper, pouring out my thoughts. I would lose myself in the worlds I created, and I would revisit some of them. I used to write speeches, poems, and essays. Words were my world, a tiny one-person world.
Today was a historic day for Mexico, as the country elected its first woman president. I love Mexico—the culture, food, friends, and family—but it has always been a country with deep-rooted toxic masculinity. This event is truly historic and unexpected. I don’t expect much to change immediately in terms of politics, although I hope for significant progress. It won’t erase machismo overnight. Women all over Mexico are not only still underpaid and undervalued but also face violence and disappearances.
You can find the index and other parts of this series here. Let’s dig in into the most controversial part of my guide: the inbox. As far as I know, there is no way to make this inbox static. However, thanks to the fact that ActivityPub does not require the inbox to share the same domain as the other elements, we can host it anywhere. I believe it could be controversial for two reasons.