Xander Cesari
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merriman.industries
Xander Cesari
@merriman.industries
Car enthusiast, software enthusiast, software on cars enthusiast
The pile of ethics books discarded on the sidewalk in San Francisco is more foreboding and ominous than I wanted to see
February 6, 2026 at 3:50 AM
Reposted by Xander Cesari
February 1, 2026 at 11:48 PM
Started at "why is my WiFi so slow?" and now I'm recompiling the Linux kernel
February 1, 2026 at 2:56 AM
Today's mini deep-dive was into the NTP Pool and now it's a life goal to someday run an NTP server

www.ntppool.org/en/join.html
pool.ntp.org: Join the NTP Pool!
www.ntppool.org
January 19, 2026 at 9:51 PM
Chipping away at language tooling for the most annoying and esoteric config files I hate to love and love to hate

github.com/MerrimanInd/...
GitHub - MerrimanInd/tree-sitter-dbc: A CAN DBC grammar for tree-sitter
A CAN DBC grammar for tree-sitter. Contribute to MerrimanInd/tree-sitter-dbc development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
January 14, 2026 at 4:45 PM
One release is all you need
January 7, 2026 at 5:05 AM
It's 2026 and I'm not afraid to say it to the whole world. Cancel me if you want, I have to speak my truth.

Light mode is good and is the appropriate choice in many times and places.
January 5, 2026 at 7:10 PM
I just switched my desktop environment from GNOME to COSMIC in minutes. Deleted a dozen lines of text, added a half dozen lines of text, and rebooted. NixOS is absolutely overpowered.
January 4, 2026 at 2:34 AM
Happy year of the linux desktop

(Like every other time this has been said, this post will age wonderfully I'm sure)
January 3, 2026 at 9:32 PM
I happened upon this blog post about why mid-century industrial design uses such interesting color palettes. I LOVE mid-century aesthetics and color palettes like this (inspiration behind the Merriman Industries brand) so this was serious Xander-nip.

bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man...
Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
bethmathews.substack.com
December 28, 2025 at 7:28 AM
A few days of late nights later and now I'm daily driving NixOS
December 24, 2025 at 7:45 PM
New entry to my Naming Hall of Fame: Electron!

Electron was developed by the Atom IDE team and early on they called it 'atom-shell', as in the shell that they ran in. A shell is also the region where electrons can be found in an atom so the project became Electron, an homage to its origin.
December 7, 2025 at 10:25 PM
Doing Advent of Code in Rust is 60% writing Nom parsers, 30% writing tests for your Nom parsers, and 10% writing algorithms to solve the puzzles
December 5, 2025 at 1:56 AM
Happy Advent of Code 2 years ago AoC was one of the first "real" things I tried to do in Rust and boy was it a slog. Returning to the challenge now is a great showcase of how intuitive the language has become. My stretch this year is doing it all in the terminal with Helix!

helix-editor.com
Helix
A post-modern modal text editor.
helix-editor.com
December 2, 2025 at 3:22 PM
Love the way New Yorker drivers honk. They don't honk for victory or glory. They don't think for vengeance or justice. They honk for the sheer joy of it. Love of the game. You gotta respect it.
November 26, 2025 at 4:27 AM
College replacement accelerators are morally equivalent to marketing gambling to teenagers
November 12, 2025 at 2:46 AM
Does anyone have strong opinions on Matrix vs Zulip for open-source community platforms?
November 12, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Adjectives like moxie and gumption are great and we should bring them back. The lack of good modern alternatives may speak to changing generational values and my nostalgia for American ingenuity and industrial spirit requires that energy as fuel.
November 3, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Like compound interest, economies of scale are the immutably powerful force multiplier that dominate the limits of any function. Open source is the mechanism by which software supercharges the entire industry with collaboration at the broadest scale.

merriman.industries/open-source-...
Open Source is an Industry Grade Accelerant
The case for open source software in automotive is not for the developers. It's not even for the companies. The greatest benefits go to the very industry as a whole and automotive needs the leg up. Le...
merriman.industries
October 27, 2025 at 1:02 PM
I would lovvve a good blog post on the idiomatic way to implement Rust embedded_hal 1.0.0 errors in a driver crate 👀 I'm muddling through it but the combination of traits and kinds feels like I'm missing the design intent.

@diondokter.nl? @jamesmunns.com? @theembeddedrust.bsky.social Any takers?
October 24, 2025 at 11:05 PM
If you wouldn't build software with it then we won't build hardware with it

merriman.industries/how-to-make-...
How to Make Software for Hardware Engineering
The singular passion of my career has been increasing the broad competency of engineering hardware-based systems. My degree in mechanical engineering - though seemingly less relevant to my daily activ...
merriman.industries
October 22, 2025 at 2:06 PM
WALL-E vs The World
October 13, 2025 at 3:26 PM
PSA: @zen-browser.app is getting really good these days! The UI is getting more streamlined with every release and they've moved beyond just being an Ark-clone into their own opinion of browsing. Just good, clean, simple UI with the power user tools you need and no fluff.
September 29, 2025 at 3:26 AM