1 min read
One of my many hopes from maintaining this site is to improve my own writing and develop a distinct voice. One, preferably, that doesn’t make me sound absolutely insane.
As a general rule, I’ll despite anything I’ve written older than roughly a year. Readers, beware.
— Annotations on Maggie Appleton's 2026 talk about Boundary Objects
— Some quick thoughts on Ana Rodrigues's post "Tell the speakers that you liked their talks", and a general initial test for web-based annotations.
— Some quick notes on the Union type addition in C# 15, and how I can use it to make Flowthru fail-fast(er)
— A few notes on a very important, but hidden, part of the Cucumber and Gherkin documentation around Behavior Driven Development
— Come with me and explore an invisible social network: IndieWeb, where the cowboy can-do attitude of Web 1.0 is alive and a-thrivin'.
— A bit of self-reflection on dashes in my writing to decide if LLMs have rotted my brain, or if my brain was already beyond saving from the start.
— To understand why OpenAI completely upended the world of mathematics with its proof that Navier-Stokes is not smooth in three dimensions, you must first understand that cucumbers of any size can be properly pickled.
— The kickoff post for my Season of Stamps: exploring new places, meeting new people, and putting the final stamp of approval on a back catalog of projects worth publishing.
— A brief side-rant about the (former) burrito-style economics of junior-level software engineering
— Garden-inspired development as a non-sinister, people-centric way to think about post-LLM software development
— I think I’ve found a pretty large CVE that has gone without a formal report, despite absolutely saturating the field of software engineering. It’s subtle and…
— Notes on the prelude chapters of Lean Software Development (2003)
— Many an engineer has heard tales of Valve's "flat" organization structure — what is fact, what is fiction, and how does it actually work? An annotated copy of the 2012 First Edition of Valve's Employee Handbook.
— Our lives are all dominated by a little graph in our hearts — and sometimes, that graph gets wacky. A review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Theory of Stupidity", part of his larger ~1943-1945 work "Letters and Papers from Prison."
— 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"
— Do humans have a role in software development anymore? Absolutely — but we need to rethink what it means to program. An modern review of Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"
— Urban development has the high ground over agricultural and ecological preservation — and it should! *A Pattern Language* annotations on Pattern 4: Agricultural Valleys
— How dense is too dense? How sparse is too sparse? Annotations for A Pattern Language's proposals for the density of metro-adjacent country streets for agriculture, recreation, and preservation.
— Home isn't where the heart is — it's a single node on a very, very large graph. Annotations for the "Independent Regions" pattern of *A Pattern Language*.
— How close is too close? How far is too far? *A Pattern Language* annotations related to the statistical, economic, and ecologic concerns in balancing how dense human habitats ought to be.
— City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years.
— Can graphs be libertarian? Authoritarian? Annotations for the introductory portion of the 1977 book A Pattern Language.
— When it comes to collecting data, there's a fine line between making a good site and making an invasive product. To make this site more useful, I want to collect enough data to improve, but never enough to undermine anybody's privacy.
— Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures.
— The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself.
— Annotations for Greiner's 1972 paper "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow", about the structural composition of organizations at different sizes and requirements.
— Annoyed by Obsidian Live Preview over-padding headers and aggressively indenting? Some snippets to help keep your notes from jumping around, so you can focus on actually writing them.
— The ultimate CAPTCHA: proof that I am a human, and how to get in contact with me!
— Discover the probability distributions of different dice roll combinations
— What *is* the advantage of rolling with advantage? Exploring dice roll combinations and probability convolutions.
— 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.
— LLMs: Are we doomed to die, or born to garden? I'd like to make the case that AI is less like Terminator, and more like tomatoes.
— Notes from learning Event Storming for domain-driven design. Thoughts on phases, color-coded chaos, and how to transition from fast pitches to full products.
— I may not have any control about how AI affects me, but I can at least make a policy for how I use it.
— I'm learning to live with the systems that stole my beloved em-dash. A season dedicated to negotiating how to live with the agentic models that have turned my career upside-down.
— Looking back at my year-long attempt to build up long-lasting habits. A retrospective on routines, remote work transitions, and learning the art of slow-and-steady.
— 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.
— $70/mo/seat? Just using live AWS may be cheaper. An evaluation of LocalStack as a testbed for Account Factory Terraform.
— Why do we do what we do? "Egoboo." Exploring economic models of OSS contributions beyond altruism and ego.
— A dive into the hottest algorithm of the 1960s: Gale-Shapley matchmaking. Who knew that the mysteries of the heart could be solved with a matrix?
— Classifying opinions as "strong" or "weak" to stop wasting hours in fruitless engineering debates. How consensus can beat being "right", and an open letter for the tactically apathetic.
— PSA: Check if your laptop needs an LCD for POST before removing the screen. Learned this the hard way after 5 hours and a fried motherboard. Learn from my dumb mistakes.
— The only market crashing is the market for sanitized language. Stay human. Embrace typos.
— 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.
— I'm embracing being wrong on the internet in an effort to learn in public. A disclaimer on digital gardening, dead pixels, and the fear of terminal online-ness.
— Initial thoughts on using tools like Apple Shortcuts and Timery/Toggle for tracking how I spend my time -- every minute of every day.
— My life devolves into sleep-eat-procrastinate cycles without structure—I call this "The Goblin." Productivity tools, hating on hustle culture, and a new definition for horticulture.
— My time at the University of Utah was longer than I'd planned, cut shorter than expected by COVID-19. I was very lucky to have mentorship to push me across the finish line.
— 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.
— "Fight or flight" is a rough way to treat white-collar life. My Season of Rhythm is dedicated to transitioning from constant sprints to slow-and-steady.
— I've learned so much in my career — so why do I finish fewer projects than I used to? Over-engineering: it's easier to be bad at something on accident than on purpose.
— Stop reprocessing your entire dataset every time new data arrives. A practical guide to Spark Structured Streaming with code examples and cost logic.
— A beginner-friendly and guided resume starter for Typst users! Great for anybody looking to easily maintain and adapt their resume to new applications.
— 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.
— Set up continuous integration to auto-update your resume everywhere. Overleaf, GitHub, and LaTeX automation for the perpetually disorganized.
— The obligatory "Hello!" post to suss out what this site will be. Python examples as unnecessary as the post itself.
— Stable matching, optimal stopping, and Bachelor analysis - visualized with some care.
— People problems are the hardest engineering problems. A consult on thinking out-of-the-box to explain morale problems in small companies.
— 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 HackTheU 2019 project for real-time live captioning using remote microphones.
— A first foray into network visualization: messy graphs, abject terror. Early data viz experiments searching for supply loops. Bad graphs; interesting questions.
— Implementing QuickSort in Scratch. Its only real-world accomplishment? Wearing out my mouse's scroll bar.
— An educational waveform visualizer written in everybody's favorite programming language: Scratch.
— Garden-inspired development as a non-sinister, people-centric way to think about post-LLM software development
— 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.
— LLMs: Are we doomed to die, or born to garden? I'd like to make the case that AI is less like Terminator, and more like tomatoes.
— Do humans have a role in software development anymore? Absolutely — but we need to rethink what it means to program. An modern review of Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"
— The ultimate CAPTCHA: proof that I am a human, and how to get in contact with me!
— Home isn't where the heart is — it's a single node on a very, very large graph. Annotations for the "Independent Regions" pattern of *A Pattern Language*.
— My time at the University of Utah was longer than I'd planned, cut shorter than expected by COVID-19. I was very lucky to have mentorship to push me across the finish line.
— How close is too close? How far is too far? *A Pattern Language* annotations related to the statistical, economic, and ecologic concerns in balancing how dense human habitats ought to be.
— 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.
— Stop reprocessing your entire dataset every time new data arrives. A practical guide to Spark Structured Streaming with code examples and cost logic.
— 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.
— To understand why OpenAI completely upended the world of mathematics with its proof that Navier-Stokes is not smooth in three dimensions, you must first understand that cucumbers of any size can be properly pickled.
— Urban development has the high ground over agricultural and ecological preservation — and it should! *A Pattern Language* annotations on Pattern 4: Agricultural Valleys
— City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years.
— The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself.
— Annotations for Greiner's 1972 paper "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow", about the structural composition of organizations at different sizes and requirements.
— A dive into the hottest algorithm of the 1960s: Gale-Shapley matchmaking. Who knew that the mysteries of the heart could be solved with a matrix?
— My life devolves into sleep-eat-procrastinate cycles without structure—I call this "The Goblin." Productivity tools, hating on hustle culture, and a new definition for horticulture.
— I've learned so much in my career — so why do I finish fewer projects than I used to? Over-engineering: it's easier to be bad at something on accident than on purpose.
— I may not have any control about how AI affects me, but I can at least make a policy for how I use it.
— Looking back at my year-long attempt to build up long-lasting habits. A retrospective on routines, remote work transitions, and learning the art of slow-and-steady.
— The only market crashing is the market for sanitized language. Stay human. Embrace typos.
— I'm embracing being wrong on the internet in an effort to learn in public. A disclaimer on digital gardening, dead pixels, and the fear of terminal online-ness.
— 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.
— The kickoff post for my Season of Stamps: exploring new places, meeting new people, and putting the final stamp of approval on a back catalog of projects worth publishing.
— I think I’ve found a pretty large CVE that has gone without a formal report, despite absolutely saturating the field of software engineering. It’s subtle and…
— Many an engineer has heard tales of Valve's "flat" organization structure — what is fact, what is fiction, and how does it actually work? An annotated copy of the 2012 First Edition of Valve's Employee Handbook.
— 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"
— How dense is too dense? How sparse is too sparse? Annotations for A Pattern Language's proposals for the density of metro-adjacent country streets for agriculture, recreation, and preservation.
— Can graphs be libertarian? Authoritarian? Annotations for the introductory portion of the 1977 book A Pattern Language.
— Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures.
— What *is* the advantage of rolling with advantage? Exploring dice roll combinations and probability convolutions.
— 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.
— I'm learning to live with the systems that stole my beloved em-dash. A season dedicated to negotiating how to live with the agentic models that have turned my career upside-down.
— Classifying opinions as "strong" or "weak" to stop wasting hours in fruitless engineering debates. How consensus can beat being "right", and an open letter for the tactically apathetic.
— Initial thoughts on using tools like Apple Shortcuts and Timery/Toggle for tracking how I spend my time -- every minute of every day.
— 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.
— "Fight or flight" is a rough way to treat white-collar life. My Season of Rhythm is dedicated to transitioning from constant sprints to slow-and-steady.
— A beginner-friendly and guided resume starter for Typst users! Great for anybody looking to easily maintain and adapt their resume to new applications.
— 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.
— The obligatory "Hello!" post to suss out what this site will be. Python examples as unnecessary as the post itself.