Nate Schmoll

SCRU128: my new favorite way to do IDs

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently switched a bunch of my projects over to SCRU128 (Sortable, Clock and Random number-based Unique identifier), replacing UUIDv4 and earlier experiments with ULID and KSUID, and it’s been one of those small changes that quietly improves everything.

Rationale #

Traditional UUIDv4 provides strong uniqueness but lacks temporal ordering, leading to index fragmentation and poor locality for time-based database queries. There are alternatives like ULID which offer millisecond timestamps and basic monotonicity, but their 80-bit randomness can result in non-strict ordering under high-frequency generation. KSUID, originally authored in 2017 by Segment, provides 128 random bits but uses 160 bits altogether, has relatively poor timestamp resolution, and is longer with its 27-character strings.

New projects on GitHub

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent some time on personal coding projects lately and have finally brought a few items to some level of completion. Here are some CLI-based tools that are now in a “1.0” state, so I’m releasing them on GitHub.

Each project provides binary releases for multiple popular operating systems with amd64 and arm64 architectures. Everything is written in Go.

PRs welcome! Here are the projects…

naterator/lambda-deploy-log-compare #

Tool for taking snapshots of AWS Lambda logs and comparing them across deployments.

Explaining generative AI accuracy

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Explaining Generative AI (GAI) to people and how it “magically” produces content/output is sometimes difficult to do in a concise, understandable way, but the best way I’ve figured out how to do it is to communicate that everything produced by GAI is “made up”. Here’s a quick example of how I explain it.

Hallucinating #

GAI, like large language models (LLMs), often produces outputs that may seem true at first glance, but can be completely made up. This is known as “hallucinating”.

AirPods observation

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a theory about why one AirPod’s battery seems to consistently drain slightly faster in a given pair of #AirPods. This is in the case of listening to music, where the audio processing and output would be fairly balanced (ie, unlike a case where only one AirPod is being used for a phone call).

Here it goes… #

Each AirPod is an independent Bluetooth device working in coordination and presenting themselves to the source as a single device (MAC address). This means that only one of them (“primary”) is actually transmitting data to and from the source device, and is then passing data over to the “secondary” AirPod. This extra overhead means one drains slightly faster than the other.

First thought

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to my new web site… for the 20th time!

Greetings! I’ve gone through dozens of revisions on my web site over the years, and this is the latest-yet-greatest one! It uses Hugo, Markdown, and is very easy to maintain, which I’m excited about. That is because the aforementioned means my web site will be… updated regularly!

We’ll see how this goes…

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! I’m Nate and also:

a dad
a husband
a Christian
a Site Reliability Engineer
an aspiring music producer
an entrepreneur
a big-time breakfast fiend

When I’m not busy being one or more of the above, I like to:

read
find good, new music
study financial markets
learn about the latest tax code changes
catch up on news
play golf
shoot guns
contemplate the nature of the world
learn more about people

E-Mail

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

To get in touch, please e-mail me at:

I read every e-mail received.

Resume

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Available in PDF format

Infrastructure, Production, DevOps, Site Reliability, and Cloud Security Engineer

Overview #

Versatile engineer with over 15 years of relevant experience optimizing secure, scalable, and cloud-native infrastructure. Expert in coding for software and infrastructure deployment using modern AI tooling, on-the-fly incident troubleshooting across network, system, and application layers, and mentoring team members to drive operational excellence. Proven success automating deployments for FedRAMP and PCI-DSS compliant environments, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), and fostering cross-functional collaboration to deliver robust systems.