Daniel Oaks

Making Diagrams with Mermaid 14 Nov 2023

Mermaid.js lets you create flowcharts, graphs, and other kinds of diagrams, and uses a custom language to define how they look. It turns text into diagrams!

You can customise all kinds of ...

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Where is a VPN actually useful? 27 Jul 2023

What do VPN services always say? “Being on the internet means you’re under threat, hackers are out to get you and steal your private data, we can help.” I’ve worked at some VPN companies and even written taglines like that. W...

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Negativity and Burnout in Standards Communities 10 May 2019

Standards communities are weird places. There aren’t many communities where people can hone in on a single sentence and have arguments about it that span years or months.

Or maybe it’s not so weird to do that. When rules need ...

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IRC Server Protocols and Standardisation 27 Mar 2017

Why do IRC servers not communicate with a standard protocol, and can we introduce a standard protocol to talk between them?

Having a multitude of custom S2S protocols was inevitable given how IRC networks ended up being contro...

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Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and Standards 28 Dec 2016

IRC is very strange from a standardisation perspective, and where it’s gonna end up isn’t clear.

IRC is a weird beast… really weird. It’s like 30 years old, there’s no controlling body, and the protocol has been randomly exten...

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