https://moll.dev/Recent content on moll.devHugoen-usSat, 13 Sep 2025 15:54:04 +0200https://moll.dev/notes/friction/Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:54:04 +0200https://moll.dev/notes/friction/I was struggling with something on a recent walk back from the pet store. Despite living in Amsterdam for nearly 2 years, I do not have a regular bike. I have a road bike that I store off the street, but to use it requires me to carry it down several flights of stairs. I walked past at least two bike shops on my way to the pet store, and every time, for months, I think “I should just walk into that store and buy a bike finally”.https://moll.dev/notes/justwrite/Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://moll.dev/notes/justwrite/EDIT: In the interest of transparency, I did have to edit this post. I originally mistyped “2025-05-17” as “202-05-17” in the post metadata which broke the timestamp, mea culpa. Just write, that’s the thesis. I’m writing this in the github web IDE because I can’t be bothered to reclone my blog repo. I’m probably not going to edit this or even spell check it, but it really doesn’t matter. You’re smart and you’ll know what I mean even if I have a few mispellings.https://moll.dev/notes/popcorn-recipe/Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:37:44 +0000https://moll.dev/notes/popcorn-recipe/This is a great recipe for making homemade popcorn that tastes like movie theater popcorn. I honed this recipe back in 2021 after not being able to go to the movies for a year. I use a WhirleyPop, but any thin walled pot (wok, etc.) with a foil lid with a few vent holes will work. Ingredients 1/3 cup popcorn kernels 1.5 tbsp ghee 1.5 tbsp coconut oil 1/2 tsp powdered salt Note: butter CANNOT be substituted here, ghee has a much higher smoke point and less moisture content.https://moll.dev/slides/magic/Tue, 12 Nov 2024 17:47:02 +0100https://moll.dev/slides/magic/At Home Recording Presentation Slides Jupyter Notebook Youtube: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch Thanks for coming to my talk! If you’d like to connect: Follow me on LinkedIn Follow me on BlueSkyhttps://moll.dev/notes/cardboard/Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://moll.dev/notes/cardboard/I wrote my Thoughts on 2023 post a bit too soon. It’s been a rollercoaster since I published that on November 4th. On November 8th, we got the keys to our new place near Sarphatipark. A lovely top floor unit with a great private deck, recently renovated too. No elevator, but you get used to the stairs quickly enough. When we showed up to get the keys, we noticed there was scaffolding cladding the entire outside of our building.https://moll.dev/notes/amsterdam2/Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://moll.dev/notes/amsterdam2/Whew. It’s been a busy year. Last year at this time, my wife and I were getting married at the court house in San Jose. We also started on our plans to move to Amsterdam, a little scheme that we hatched back in 2020. I took a month to prep for interviews, and started the interview process with Booking.com. I didn’t realize at the time, but due to the timezone, headcount issues, and generally slower cadence that this process would end up taking months.https://moll.dev/projects/micro-grad-pt1/Mon, 25 Sep 2023 16:10:14 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/micro-grad-pt1/This past weekend I set aside some time to do a deep dive into neural networks, specifically the smallest components, building a ground up neural network from scratch in Julia. This article will roughly cover the first episode of Andrej Karpathy’s “Zero to Hero” series. Also, you can find his implementation of micrograd on github. I’ll be building writing our own;with a compute graph, basic neural network, and training functionality.https://moll.dev/notes/moving-to-amsterdam/Wed, 20 Sep 2023 12:36:25 -0700https://moll.dev/notes/moving-to-amsterdam/After 6 years at LinkedIn, I’m leaving. My wife and I are going to be moving overseas to Amsterdam in October. I’ll be joining Booking.com in November. What started as a joke in early 2020, when my wife and I were talking about moving up to San Francisco. We would say, “either SF or Amsterdam” half jokingly. COVID happened, and the more we got stir crazy the less crazy the idea of moving there seemed.https://moll.dev/projects/nas-build/Tue, 08 Aug 2023 11:26:54 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/nas-build/Table of contents Parts List Build Steps Addendum - Modifications For someone in Site Reliability Engineering, my job is all about creating scalable, reliable, large scale systems. I worked on LinkedIn’s Hadoop team helping to scale our HDFS capacity to over an exabyte!. You would think that my home storage setup would be highly-available, redundant and geographically distributed. Unfortunately, my only homelab equipment is a Raspberry PI “colocated” in a cardboard box with an Nvidia Jetson hooked up to a USB hard drive.https://moll.dev/projects/hydroponics/Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:02:51 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/hydroponics/I’ve always thought of the humble gardener as some sort of wizard. They plant a seed, watch it sprout, then carefully assist the plant until it’s ready to harvest. I had previously tried to keep a couple of succulents alive, with almost all of them rotting or dying out due to a lack of water, growing food seemed even further out of the question. My adventure into hydroponics started out of this frustration: “how the hell do other people grow plants so well?https://moll.dev/notes/rae-lakes-2021/Fri, 07 Jan 2022 21:42:59 -0800https://moll.dev/notes/rae-lakes-2021/The following piece will be edited from a collection of journal entries I wrote during my second time out on the Rae Lakes Loop trail in 2021. We started from “Road’s End” (left side of map), and completed the route counter clockwise. The total loop is around 52 miles. Zero Day After driving 4 hours, we were pretty beat, fortunately Gena’s has a diner attached. It’s another hour drive into the park, so waking up early is necessary.https://moll.dev/projects/physarum/Tue, 23 Feb 2021 01:25:54 -0800https://moll.dev/projects/physarum/Scroll through the entire post for more neat animations! Computer graphics have been an interest of mine for as long as I’ve used a computer. The ability to create life like renderings has always held my captivation in one way or another. I grew up using open source graphics software like GIMP and later Blender3D. I fondly remember letting the family laptop run all night rendering frames for a 3D animation I had made in Blender for school.https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-2020/Sat, 02 Jan 2021 14:40:22 -0800https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-2020/The “Cool Zone” a phrase to describe a period of history that’s cool to learn about but absolute shit to live through. Personally, I’ve spent way too much time sitting at my desk, either working from home, playing games with friends, or working on side projects. My partner and I are fortunate enough to be able to work from home, limiting our trips out of the house to once a week for groceries.https://moll.dev/notes/consumption/Sun, 12 Jul 2020 12:36:25 -0700https://moll.dev/notes/consumption/Boredom is something we all experience, it’s universal. In this post I explore my recent experience with extreme boredom, examine modern consumer culture and how that influences our sense of freedom, autonomy and discuss their ramifications in an ever increasing virtual world amid a global pandemic. Recently, I've had the pleasure of experiencing a week of vacation. The company I work for has two week-long shutdowns, once over the 4th of July and another over Christmas.https://moll.dev/notes/simulation-alienation/Thu, 28 May 2020 11:27:19 -0700https://moll.dev/notes/simulation-alienation/I’m writing this a couple of days before my 25th birthday. It’ll be my first, but hopefully last, birthday during a global pandemic. A pandemic which has stripped the fat off the bone of our society. Mass unemployment, a largely ineffective government, and no end in sight. Fortunately, I am able to work from home, allowing me to continue to live at relatively the same level of comfort I enjoyed pre-pandemic.https://moll.dev/projects/reaction-diffusion-julia/Thu, 27 Feb 2020 15:07:37 -0800https://moll.dev/projects/reaction-diffusion-julia/A few months ago I happened upon a Wikipedia article about Turing Patterns. These are complex patterns which arise from a uniform and homogenous initial state. Turing’s paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis suggested an explanation based on chemical reagents in a cycle of generation and consumption. The giant puffer fish above displays some of the patterns Turing describes. I was fascinated by the idea that a complex pattern could arise from a simple set of equations.https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-2019/Tue, 31 Dec 2019 16:17:42 -0800https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-2019/All things considered; I’ve had a pretty good 2019 Here’s a bulleted list of some of the good things: Climbed Mt. Whitney in September. Continued to build my cooking skills with Cassady. Got promoted to Senior Site Reliability Engineer. Started writing more, see: [moll.dev] Continued to hone my generative art skills. Finally finished a V7 bouldering route. Here’s to another year of pushing myself, learning more, loving more, reading more and writing more.https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-hiking-mt-whitney/Thu, 31 Oct 2019 15:28:21 -0700https://moll.dev/notes/thoughts-on-hiking-mt-whitney/Looking up at Mount Whitney's Peak (Right) along with the fingers (Left). Taken at Iceberg Lake before the last climb. Anxiety I did a thing recently, which I think is personally remarkable. I hiked one of the tallest peaks in the US, via a difficult trail. This hike was the culmination of a few years of personal betterment, taking some newfound hobbies and putting them to good use. This is a journey that began my senior year of college.https://moll.dev/about/Sun, 18 Aug 2019 22:44:54 -0700https://moll.dev/about/You’ve reached the home page of Thomas Moll I’m a Senior Site Reliability Engineer living and working in Amsterdam. I’m currently helping Booking.com scale their database platform. A brief overview of my professional career: Previously: working as a Senior SRE on LinkedIn’s Search Platform, writing services in GoLang / Python focused on observability, monitoring, and cluster orchestration. Worked as Senior SRE on LinkedIn’s Hadoop team, owned their $75 million+ GPU cluster for offline Machine Learning.https://moll.dev/notes/minecraft/Sun, 18 Aug 2019 15:58:49 -0700https://moll.dev/notes/minecraft/If I were to rank the hours invested in something so far in my life, first is Computer Engineering, second is Minecraft. Unfortunately, I don’t play much since college; Minecraft is a game which tends to draw you into the early hours of the morning. Something I would regularly do in high school, eschewing my homework and exploring virtual worlds built by other kids just like me, making friends, and learning digitial logic on accident.https://moll.dev/projects/effective-multi-dispatch/Sun, 18 Aug 2019 15:58:49 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/effective-multi-dispatch/These days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used within various languages: I/O, looping, branching, etc. And there’s an understanding that if you needed to write some computation, given enough time, you could probably write it in any language I gave you.https://moll.dev/projects/trapped-knights/Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:33:58 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/trapped-knights/A few days ago, I came across a math video that perplexed me. This video, published by the great YouTube channel Numberphile, featured Neil Sloane, the creator and maintainer of OEIS, the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. I love watching Numperhile’s channel, they always introduce me to some math puzzle. These puzzles usually have rational explaination, packaged nicely by the video’s presenter. The problem presented consisted of a few steps, tracing out the path of a knight on a special chess board, however, the results of this procession was a surprise, leaving me with more questions than answers.https://moll.dev/projects/q-bit-keyboard/Fri, 05 Jun 2015 15:23:31 -0700https://moll.dev/projects/q-bit-keyboard/Disclaimer: This post is a retrospective. I originally wrote about this on thomasmoll.co, which is now defunct. Q-bit | Custom 60% Keyboard build The Setup I started this project after my sophomore year of college at Iowa State University. I was a few weeks in to my second internship at Garmin on the Automotive OEM team and I was getting more and more into mechanical keyboards. I had seen some people designing and building their own from scratch, so I decided to try my hand at it.