Alex Reid

Excel can be used for ... what? Things like Kafka Streams and Flink are a hell of an investment for the remit of "watching some numbers, doing some arithmetic and publishing the results..". Coupled with @nats_io this is an interesting way to prototype. alexjreid.dev/posts/excel-th…

The underlying framework got an upgrade - Lua functions! It provides the basis for easily creating custom function add-ins and RTD servers in one miniature package. github.com/AlexJReid/zigx… alexjreid.dev/posts/zigxll/

@d_i92090 ありがとうございます！どういたしまして。 (Hope the translation worked as intended 🤔🤣)

ZigでExcelアドインとか珍しい組み合わせだな！リアルタイムデータ処理でリソース軽いのマジで重要だし、トレーディングみたいな高速更新が必要な場面では超使えそう。オープンソース化ありがたい

Added windowed subscriptions - useful for when you want a rolling window of recently accumulated values. This is useful for visualizing rolling statistics over sensor data, tracking price movements. Look, spark lines! #natssubwin--natssubwinvals---windowed-subscriptions" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/AlexJReid/zigx…

I've open sourced something: zigxll-connectors-nats is an XLL add-in that lets you subscribe to @nats_io subjects from Excel. It is written in Zig. It is tiny and fast, with low resource utilization - ideal for fast moving data. github.com/AlexJReid/zigx… #excel #rtd #trading

I've done it. I finally understand pointers. I know it may not seem like a huge achievement to others but I get pointers in C now.

@nats_io Fixed TLS and passes some config to nats.c. Can now connect to NGS! github.com/AlexJReid/zigx…

@nats_io Introductory blog post alexjreid.dev/posts/zigxll/

This dates back from when these were called tweets! But I've open-sourced a tiny, high performance add-in, built in Zig, that adds =NATS.SUB("subject") to Excel. alexjreid.dev/posts/zigxll/

Excel ❤️ @nats_io (Excel is boring, of course. Boring tech is good. More of the world runs on it than we'd admit sometimes!)

Why xllify uses Luau as its scripting language Luau is the scripting language behind Roblox. It sounds like a left-field choice for Excel add-ins, but the optimisations that make games fast turn out to benefit spreadsheets too. xllify.com/blog/posts/why… #excel #luau #ROBLOX

xllify uses Luau as a simple, fast way of Excel custom functions. Here's a quick primer on the language. Of course, using xllify.com/web or through Claude Code means you can generate functions without writing code. xllify.com/luau-cheat-she… #excel #addin #luau #lua

We love @ziglang too github.com/AlexJReid/zigx…

Some background on xllify, what it is and how it works xllify.com/blog #spreadsheets #Excel #customfunctions

xllify has a standard library: a growing collection of ready-made Excel functions you can drop into any xllify add-in, no wheel reinvention required. We introduce it here: xllify.com/blog/posts/std… #excel #addin #customfunctions #luau #lua

We just released local editing support for xllify with Claude Code support. You can now build an Excel add-in (both web based and native) from your command line. xllify.com #excel #ai #spreadsheet

Introducing xllify.com - coming soon An AI assistant for @msexcel. Paste formulas, VBA, or describe what you need in plain English. Get back a native XLL or Office.js add-in which runs locally and never transmits your data anywhere. #excel #ai #customfunctions

I wanted to see if it was possible to use Zig's C interop and comptime to make the Excel C SDK slightly nicer to build high-performance custom functions. Turns out it is! github.com/AlexJReid/zigx… Example repo that uses the package: github.com/AlexJReid/zigx… #excel #ziglang

@rqobela coldfusion, clojure (taught me a lot), pascal

Programming language you learnd but never used again is...?

@ibuildthecloud Rancher and k3s = god tier to be honest

If I look back at my career I've had basically two "successes" and countless, like over a hundred, "failures." I tried so many ideas that went nowhere. I've burnt out people around me trying to convince them, "oh no, this one is gonna work." And of course it doesn't. After decades of doing this it finally broke me. I deeply felt I was a failure. Not like years ago I felt this way, I mean like 3 months ago. Because every idea I'd try went nowhere, and to make it so much worse I convinced myself that everyone around me knew that, and had lost faith in me. Why listen to crazy Darren, his crazy idea won't work and in a month he'll just move to something else. And they were right. But here I am looking back at my career from a more positive lense. And holy crap, I built Rancher and k3s. I also worked on some lesser known projects that still exist. But not many people get to do that and I experienced it. It's not as cool as you'd think, but that's sorta the point. "I" achieved something many people would love to do. I can be happy I experienced that. But the let down I feel about it points to the fact that those external "successes" are not what's important. And I realize now all of those "failures" that started to haunt me are of so much more value. But before I get into that, the people and relationships I've formed I've completely overlooked. I always say, "I have no friends." But I do have friends, maybe it's lame because it's the people I work with, but I've worked with some of them for over 15 years. I've made great relationships. People who put up with me. You have no idea how difficult I am and how amazing it is to have people that support me. Maybe they just tolerate my obnoxious behaviors, but in reality that really gives me strength in that through all my bad behaviors they've stuck with me. That's greater than gold. To be able to work on something and see that you're helping other people have a job, support their family, and better their lives is amazing. I realized yesterday that my only real goal at the moment I have for a company is to ensure we can work on something that creates an environment for all our employees to be paid well and enjoy what they do. (And if you're a VC reading this, yes, make you money so I can keep doing this. 😅) But back to those failures. We all know the cliche. You learn from failure. If you glorify failure, I don't think you've really experienced it. It stings, it's hard. But yes you learn. But my problem has been even classifying these things as failures. Somewhat of the value that I bring is I have crazy ideas. I try things. Obviously not everything's going to work. And I've managed to pick myself up every time it didn't work. And as a result, I've learned so much. I haven't failed. To the contrary, I've had several successes. But I think the knowledge that I've gained from so many unsuccessful attempts is so much more valuable. I honestly don't know what the knowledge I've gained will be good for. But that's where I have faith that I know it will. I've had the opportunity to bless the lives of some people around me through my experience. That I happen to know the right thing at the right time. That's an amazing feeling to be able to help somebody else.