Yesterday was 1 year since Papa died. I have been slacking on writing up these lessons but I wanted to pick it up again since I’ve been thinking about him a lot more than usual.

When I was growing up one of my favorite things to do was to visit my cousins’ houses. Was it because I enjoyed the adventures we would go on together? Because of their companionship? Because of the camaraderie of being amongst my closest family? No, it’s because they all had game consoles at their houses and I wasn’t allowed to have any. Papa made the conscious (and contentious, to me) decision that my brother and I were not going to have those distraction machines in our house.

It was also contentious decision in his mind (as I found out later when I asked him about it) because he was worried that he might be depriving us of something that a lot of the other kids around us had. I was allowed to play whenever I was at a friend’s or cousin’s house but I would never have one in our house.

As it turns out, this was a much better idea than he thought even if he wasn’t sure of it at at the time. Instead of an NES, SNES, N64, or PlayStation, in 1993 he bought us our very first PC. It had a then screaming 1st-generation 60 MHz Pentium processor, 8MB of RAM, and, crucially, a 9600-baud modem. We had Windows 3.1 installed, but still had the computer boot by default into a DOS prompt and you would have to run the win command to get into Windows. This, unbeknownst to me at that time, would prove to be a defining decision of my life.

When I protested and insisted that I wanted a gaming console he told me to learn how to use the PC and try to make my own fun out of it. And boy, did I. I spent a huge chunk of my time playing classics like Wing Commander, F-15 Strike Eagle, Sim City, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Commander Keen, and basically any other shareware I could get my hands on. Despite Papa’s best efforts I was still rotting my brain playing video games. But, there were many more learning opportunities than there would have been with any gaming console. PC gaming was how I was introduced to the wonderful world of troubleshooting. Games wouldn’t alway run as expected and at the tender age of 6 I was already poking around to try to tweak things to get them to run more smoothly. And Papa was right there with me in the struggle.

One time in my haste trying to create more space on our 200MB hard drive I deleted the config.sys file. Those who know can predict what happened next. The next time I tried to boot I was greeted with a cryptic error message and I was stumped. Papa, being ever resourceful, enlisted the help of a long-haired metalhead who worked at CompUSA who was a regular customer at the restaurant. He generously spent an afternoon guiding me through the recovery and got me up and running again.

Finally, we made good use of that 9600-baud modem. In 1993 we were definitely early adopters of the internet. By my estimation we were among the first 10M people surfing the web. We of course got our start with AOL using their infamous “free trial” floppies that we received (and still have) dozens of. I spent hours playing Neverwinter Nights, trolling anyone who would listen to me in chat rooms, and eventually goofing off with friends on AIM once it was launched.

This fun hobby would continue for my entire childhood into adulthood as Papa and I would build several computers together. We would scour local PC magazines for sales, drive way too far to dingy little computer parts stores in far-flung strip malls, make countless trips to Fry’s, spend late nights and endless hours tweaking and troubleshooting when things would go wrong.

All of this would also eventually lead to me learning how to build websites (RIP Geocities) and how to program. So I guess I have to thank Papa’s deprivation for my career.

The lesson I took from Papa in all of this is to stay curious and don’t follow the crowd. You’ll find value where everyone else isn’t looking.

If you’re confused who Papa is, Papa is my late father, Rolando Vergel de Dios, who passed away on November 29th, 2024. If you want to know more about the kind of Dad that Papa was to me, you can read about the lessons he taught me here.

Los Angeles is my home. It’s the only home I’ve really known (except for some fleeting memories of Chicago when I was very young). What’s happening here now is something I can’t stay silent about. ICE has stepped up raids in my hometown, snatching high school kids on their way to graduation, snatching parents away from their children, snatching workers out of parking lots at Home Depot. The people of my city are, understandably, pissed. Los Angeles is a wildly diverse, vibrant city of dreamers, hustlers, and creators. That doesn’t mean we’re meek or don’t know how to show out when we feel like we’re being attacked. Protestors admirably showed up at the Federal building to send the message that ICE isn’t welcome here.

I can only speculate about the motivations behind the White House’s next move. There were a couple hundred people who showed up to shout at ICE at the Federal Building downtown. A couple of them got rambunctious and threw some stuff. And then it was over. Apparently, that was enough warrant co-opting the CA National Guard and sending in the Marines, which Governor Newsom, Mayor Bass, and LAPD Chief McDonnell all said was unnecessary. Regardless of the motivation, this is a bright red line. Predictably, things got more tense with this escalation.

That brings me back to Papa. Papa is Filipino. He and my mom met in Manila in the 1970s and moved together to Canada after getting married. The official reason was that my mom’s assignment with the French Trade Commission in Manila was ending and her new assignment was in Calgary. The unofficial reason was that they needed to get away from stifling conditions of martial law in the Philippines. They fled.

If you’re not up-to-date on your Filipino history, I’d encourage you to read up on this period. Ferdinand Marcos was the President of the Philippines and was democratically elected in 1965. In 1972, as he was approaching the end of his second term (which was the term limit in the 1935 constitution), he signed Proclamation No. 1081. The proclamation declared martial law in the Philippines, suspended democratic elections, and consolidated power for himself as the sole dictator of the country. The ensuing years were not a nice time to live in the Philippines. Cronyism, kleptocracy, imprisonment without due process, and extrajudicial killings were the norm.

Papa had stories from this time. As a young man on a night out with his brothers or his friends he said you would always know when Marcos’ cronies would enter an establishment. Generally people would rush for the door to avoid inadvertently catching their ire. He recalled the time that guns that my grandfather had kept from the war were confiscated by the Barangay Self Defense Units, Marcos thugs who went door-to-door ensuring that the wrong people couldn’t defend themselves from the regime. He talked about the checkpoints on the roads during curfew hours that, as a movie producer, he had cleverly figured out how to get permits to allow him to be out after hours for film shoots.

I’m sharing this part of his life because of what is happening here in the US. Papa’s siblings who still live in the Philippines (which is still very much not a stable democracy itself) check in on us regularly with concern. They’re checking on us because they know the signs. They lived it. And they’re telling us that it’s happening.

We’re quickly reaching a point of no return. We already have National Guard deployed and Marines on the way. What they want is for us to back down and be afraid. To obey. We can’t let them do it. Papa came here because this country promised him that what happened in the Philippines couldn’t happen here. He dreamed of life in sunny California. He left behind a whole life he could have lived alongside his siblings because he dreamed of (and achieved!) something better. I can’t let that dream die, not without a fight.

See y’all on the streets.

When I was about 5-6 years old I was an incredibly curious child. One weird thing that caught my curiosity was broken glass. Papa had let me watch far too many movies that a 6 year old had no business watching. Think Terminator 2, Robocop, Jurassic Park. Classic action movies of the 90s. These movies all featured jaw-dropping action scenes where bottles were broken over people’s heads or people were thrown through plate-glass windows. I wanted to see broken glass in real life.

So I hatched a plan. There is a French drink called Orangina that I still love to this day that comes in a potion-like glass bottle. We had some in the fridge, so I would grab one and down the delicious orange fizzy goodness. I would then take the bottle out the side door of the house and pretend to trip so I could smash the bottle into the ground and see all of the shards fly in all directions. Still being a well-behaved child, though, I knew I would have to clean it up and I decided that I had to bring a broom and dustpan along with me. The plot was obvious perfection to my 6-year-old brain.

It was execution time. I went to the fridge. I drank my French nectar of the Gods. I went to the side door, glass bottle in one hand, dustpan and broom in the other. I proceeded to perform what could best be described as the most contrived pratfall imaginable. Boom. Glass rained from the heavens. It was glorious.

Almost instantly Papa was at the door with a scowl.

“What happened?”

I explained that I was on my way to take the empty bottle to the recycling and I tripped and dropped it, of course. He then looked to the side of the house and pointed at the broom and dustpan and asked: “why are the broom and dustpan there, then?”

I replied nonchalantly: “oh I brought those just in case I dropped the bottle.” I really thought I cooking.

To my surprise he didn’t buy it. Papa was a fun dad, but when he needed to be he was a strict disciplinarian. We spent the entire day going back and forth with me digging my heels in and insisting that I had so much forethought that I had brought out the broom and dustpan in anticipation of an accident and him not buying it for a second. He wore me down and after a lot of frustration and crying I finally broke and admitted that I had lied around dinnertime. I got an appropriate sentence of 1 week of no TV and no computer.

The lesson I learned from Papa that day: your integrity must be unquestionable. Or at least try to come up with better lies.

This is one of the core issues that Decentralized Identifiers (otherwise known as DIDs) attempt to address, and it’s a subtle one that often doesn’t get very well explained in the foundational literature of Self-Sovereign Identity.

Why are email addresses poor identifiers?

Email addresses are identifiers within the SMTP protocol. They are now quite ubiquitous with a very familiar user@example.com format where the segment preceding the @ symbol is the username and the segment following the @ symbol is the host or domain where the user resides. Unsurprisingly, given the name “email,” it was designed primarily as a messaging protocol and these addresses mapped to “mailboxes.”

The SMTP protocol makes no prescriptions for verifying the authenticity of a sender, how to authenticate a user when they’re logging in to check their email, or any other authentication mechanisms whatsoever. It is purely a messaging protocol and transport specification. But they are identifiers of some kind and provide the developers of web services with something relatively unique that they can tie to a user and establish accounts. The conflation of the original intended purpose of email addresses as message routing identifiers with authentication identifiers is where the problem arises.

One problem is that email addresses are more ephemeral than we’d like to think. There are countless stories of people who lose access to their email address either because they were banned from one of the major providers (e.g. Google, Yahoo), or they graduated from university and any accounts tied to their university-provided address are no longer accessible, or they simply forgot their password and don’t have a way to recover it. Even owning your own domain and maintaining your own email address can’t fully solve this problem. There are plenty of stories of domains getting sniped when they expire, or people maliciously buying domains of defunct companies to get access to their accounts. And when that happens your whole online persona goes with it.

Several problems arise specifically from the conflation of the communication channel with the authentication channel. Because authentication mechanisms via email identifier are largely undefined by any spec, implementers are left to figure things out on their own. This has led to a number of mechanisms with varying issues. Passwords are still pervasive in 2025 despite the recent introduction of passkeys. Passwords have a number of well documented issues.

“Magic link” is a particularly popular mechanism for logging people in via email. The flow is relatively simple. You prove your ownership of an email address by receiving a link that only you and the service you’re logging into should have. You click the link, and it re-routes you to the service that you’re logging into.

One issue is primarily a UX one: the deliverability of the authentication email requires the user to be online and for all of the email plumbing to work flawlessly. Email deliverability is a dark art similar to SEO thanks to Google’s blackbox spam filtering, so unless you’re already on a high-authority domain that Google allows fast delivery for, or you pay a provider that has such infrastructure in place, you may be out-of-luck as an independent provider.

Phishing is another issue. One of the only reasons that phishing is even a viable attack is because of the conflation between authentication and communication. When a “reset password” email or magic link hits your inbox, you’re receiving both a communication and a request to authenticate. This dual-channel is exactly the vulnerability that phishing exploits.

Are there any alternatives?

To reiterate the problems we are trying to address, we need an identifier that:

1. Is globally unique
2. Is distinct from a communication identifier
3. Is decoupled from its authentication mechanism
4. Is fully in the control of the owner of the identifier

One solution that checks all of those boxes is Decentralized Identifiers or DIDs. You can read the spec for yourself for a complete overview, but basically they:

1. Prescribe a format for a globally unique identifier string
2. Resolve to a document that is controlled by the owner that contains details such as preferred authentication mechanisms
3. Allow multiple implementations to be identified via “methods” that prescribe how to perform actions such as creating, resolving, updating, or deleting a DID and its document
4. Is completely independent of any other purpose besides itself being an identifier

There are also multiple specs being developed for end-user flows that allow for using a DID for things such as logging into websites, or receiving and presenting verifiable data in the form of Verifiable Credentials (VCs, the subject of a future post).

There are several implementations of DID methods that employ different mechanisms for storage and resolution of DID documents. Some are very simple and do 1:1 mapping of an identity to a single cryptographic key (did:key), some rely on DNS (did:web), and some rely on some form of decentralized storage such as a blockchain (did:ethr). Each method has tradeoffs for usability and security. Obviously the DNS based methods have similar drawbacks to email domains.

While I do believe that ultimately a blockchain is one of the best approaches to guarantee resolution availability and security of writes to the DID document, the ecosystem does sometimes suffer from the usual crypto nonsense.

Where do we go from here?

I’m not even making the argument that DIDs are the ultimate solution for this problem. They haven’t been deployed widely enough or have seen enough real-world usage to make any such proclamation. Most development has been entirely theoretical at the spec level with very few live deployments. I am however making the argment that the status-quo is untenable and will continue to cause harm to end users and service providers. DIDs provide an alternative that at least try to address some of these fundamental issues and provide us with a testing ground to play with these ideas meaningfully. This was part of what we were trying to achieve at Heirloom.

My uncles, my cousins, and several of Papa’s friends all described him as effortlessly cool. Whether it was stories of him dancing the night away at the famous club that was the epicenter of Manila’s 70s disco culture known as Cocobanana. Or donning a helmet and carving his way through the snarled gridlock of Manila’s roadways on his Honda Scrambler motorcycle. Or his Tom Selleck of Manila mustache. They all idolized him for his ability to exude this maverick persona.

Part of that devil-may-care air-of-cool was always having a cigarette in hand. From what I remember by the early 90s, about the time he was going to turn 40, he had been a pack-a-day guy for almost 20 years. The 90s is also when big tobacco was finally coming clean about what cigarettes could do to you and how much damage they could do to not just you, but the people around you inhaling your secondhand smoke.

By this time, I had also already started showing signs of childhood asthma. It was clear to Papa that the cigarettes had to go. But, knowing that kicking the habit would be a high-effort endeavor, he figured out that he could use the occasion to extract a little more value out of his son. He decided he would make me a deal: you get straight As on your next report card and I’ll quit smoking. A heavy burden to put on a 1st grader.

It was the beginning of the school year and it would be six weeks before my next report card. I desperately wanted Papa to be healthier and I knew that the cigarettes weren’t good for my breathing either, so I worked diligently for that 6 weeks and got my straight As. The day after I presented him with my report card he quit cold turkey.

His methods may have been questionable, but I can’t argue that they weren’t effective.

The lesson I learned from Papa that day: people will run through brick walls for you if you figure out what motivates them.

• Manage content entirely via git
• Static pages only (no backend rendering pages dynamically)
• Deploy to Github Pages or equivalent
• RSS feed compatibility
• SEO best practices implemented automatically
• Accessibility best practices implemented automatically

I’m a Rubyist at heart, so Jekyll seemed to be the most logical choice. It checks a lot of the boxes above by default, with others being supported by plugins. I followed the quickstart and in short order had a basic Jekyll dev instance set up with the default Minima theme.

While an excellently flexible tool, the base install leaves a lot to be desired. Minima isn’t bad but it left a lot of things for me to do myself and I wanted a little bit more of a full package included. I started searching for themes that would fulfill what I wanted while being minimalist and content focused. That’s when I found al-folio. It definitely benefitted from the phonebook effect of showing up first in an alphabetical list, but it had pretty much the rest of the list that I wanted and a few other bonuses. Weird quirk: it’s designed for academics to share their CV, projects, and publications, which I don’t currently need, but could come in handy in the future I guess.

I did run into a few issues getting the Github Actions to run without errors as well as having to dig into issues and other places to get some customizations that I wanted, so I’m documenting what I found here to hopefully save other people time.

Github Actions errors

I kept getting broken link errors when building my pages which didn’t prevent the site from deploying but were annoyingly sending failure emails with every push. Interestingly the main things causing errors were actually the default documentation markdown files for al-folio. After I deleted README.md, INSTALL.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, and CUSTOMIZE.md those errors all went away.

Hiding Pages

I didn’t need most of the pages that were included in the default al-folio installation, but didn’t exactly know how to remove them without literally deleting them from the template (which I didn’t want to do if I needed to bring them back). The answer was in this Github question: https://github.com/alshedivat/al-folio/discussions/2031

In the frontmatter for any of the pages there is an optional nav variable that you can set to false if you want to omit it from the nav bar. Here is my cv.md file’s frontmatter:

---
layout: cv
permalink: /cv/
title: cv
nav: false # <---- this is what you want to change
nav_order: 5
---

Post Metadata

There were a few pieces of metadata that aren’t directly documented that I had to figure out:

• author: I assumed this would be inferred from the name in _config.yml but it has to be explicitly set per post
• og_image: I assumed that this could be automatically pulled from the first image in the post body, but this also needs to be explicitly set

My father, Rolando “Roly” Vergel de Dios, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on November 29th, 2024. Many of his friends and family know him as Rolando, Roly, or Diko, but my brother Gabriel and I know him as Papa. To say this has upended my life and the lives of everyone in my family would be an understatement. It’s been 3 weeks and I still have the disorienting feeling that none of this is real and that I will wake from the nightmare soon. Sadly that day isn’t coming, so I’m left to try and make sense of something that will never make sense to me. That my father is gone and that I’ll never again be able to speak with him or ask him for advice. I’ll never again be able to call him to share my good news or my sorrows. It’s cliché but I truly didn’t understand how large a loss this would be until it happened, despite spending a good deal of time worrying about it for both of my parents.

I decided to search his name on Google after he passed and was kind of sad to find that there really isn’t much of a digital footprint for him out there. The only thing is the generic obituary page that the mortuary created for us automatically with nothing other than his photo and dates of birth and death. In my life and in my family he is a larger than life presence. A booming voice, thunderous laughter, and always the life of the party wherever he goes. Part of this exercise is me grieving, but I also feel strongly that such a presence should have a place here, some marker of his existence.

As a Filipino family, we did the traditional 9 night novena prayer for him over Zoom, with family and friends signing in from all over the world. Each night a different group of people offered a eulogy with memories of times that they shared with him. It was amazing to hear how many lives he’d touched. I was the last to do mine on night 9, and I’m sharing an expanded version of that here. This will be a series of posts that offer up a different lesson that I learned from him depicted as little vignettes from my life growing up as his son.

I love you, Papa. I miss you, and I will every day for the rest of my life.

Hold your loved ones close, you really never know when they’re going to go.

I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles in the 90s. I still live in the same neighborhood to this day. It’s basically the ideal of post-WW2 United States. Cute minimal traditional style homes with manicured lawns on comfortably large lots with big back yards. They once upon a time housed factory workers for the booming LA aerospace industry.

I took full advantage of the big back yard. One glorious Christmas morning I awoke to a very large wrapped present in that very yard. After tearing it open what I found was a PowerWheels Army Jeep. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a child-sized, plastic, battery-powered, motorized replica of a WW2 Willys Jeep. It was slow but man was it badass. I would imagine missions to clear mines out from behind the garage, slowly making my way into enemy territory. If Gabriel and I were getting along I would let him ride shotgun, or if I was really in a generous mood he would get to drive it. I loved that thing.

I went to a preschool nearby the house, close enough to walk or bike, although given that this is Los Angeles my parents still drove to pick me up and drop me off. Papa was who was usually charged with that duty.

I’ll never forget this one time at the end of the school day. Just as we were about to let out, something unusual was brewing outside. Papa and my French grandfather, Papy (who was visiting from across the Atlantic), had hatched a delightfully mischievous plan. They’d quietly maneuvered the Jeep into position on the sidewalk next to the gate alongside the regular line of minivans and sedans in the pickup lane.

As I shuffled out with my classmates, tummy rumbling for an afternoon snack, I spotted them first – two grown men wearing matching conspiratorial grins, standing proudly beside the tan and camo colored Jeep. My heart leapt. Whatever was happening, I knew it would be good.

I waved goodbye hurriedly to my friends, already breaking into a run. Their confused expressions turned to pure amazement as I scrambled behind the wheel. With Papa’s encouraging nod and Papy’s twinkling eyes watching, I slammed my foot on the accelerator. The look on my classmates’ faces was priceless – a mix of disbelief and envy as I, a mere preschooler, drove myself home that day. I felt like the star of my own movie, rolling away from school in perhaps the most spectacular exit of my young life.

The lesson I learned from Papa that day: you can find fun in even the most mundane everyday activities.