I’m certainly not a person who has strong opinions about programming languages. My personal and professional decision graph around language choice is:
flowchart TD A[What language<br/>are you most familiar with?] --> B{Will it get<br/>the job done?} B -->|Yes| C[Use that language.] B -->|No| D[Repeat.] D --> A
That said, I do break out languages according to the task:
— The rubber hits the road on ColabFold! I hope that's rubber I'm smelling — although it may be the computer. A replication attempt of a protein fold figure in K. Pedram et al (2023).
— Amaze (or bore) your friends and family by picking up on a hot new hobby that's all the rage — protein folding! An annotated starter to the 2021 paper "ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to all"
— I killed 4 of my blogs trying to implement MDX support. Will this one be next?
Using MDX with Quartz to create interactive graphs, diagrams, and demos — clear as day.
— An engineer-focused primer on the mechanisms that drive Large Language Models. Basics on how we got here,
how they work, and how to use them without feeling an apocalyptic dread.
— Building a Raycast plugin to schedule website blocks — because checking news "just one more time" destroys flow.
Automate SelfControl and self control: take your laptop back.
— Why I stopped hoarding 60%-done drafts and started publishing messy thoughts instead.
Embracing digital gardening, from-chaos-to-cultivated, and a healthy dose of imperfection.
— How over-engineering killed a 3-month remaster of an old ROBLOX game.
Looking back at the depth of Dunning-Kruger, and how good code doesn't make a good game.
— Stop reprocessing your entire dataset every time new data arrives.
A practical guide to Spark Structured Streaming with code examples and cost logic.
— Efficiency: spending six hours building a web scraper to avoid five minutes of daily work.
Automating a business simulation because checking in is for chumps.
— Being famous online in 2009 is the highest high I'll ever reach. A love letter to the coolest dork I know, hatemail for client-side exploits, and a limitless supply of Monopoly dollars.
— My college presentation on the Gale-Shapley paper, recorded on an iPad, like a true professional.
Non-market environments, matchmaking lattices, and gratitude for good professors.
— A first foray into network visualization: messy graphs, abject terror.
Early data viz experiments searching for supply loops. Bad graphs; interesting questions.