Software engineering, maker projects, and work-life balance.
Last week, I got a pair of inline skates. I haven't had skates since high school, about twenty years ago. The first day I put them on and skated, I didn't fall down. The second day I put them on, I fell down a lot, and I'm more proud of that. I made a lot fast…
I have some weird hobbies, and one of those is opening up the network tab on just about anything I'm using. Sometimes, I find egregious problems. Usually, this is something that can be fixed, when responsibly reported. But over time, I learned a bitter lesson:…
It's common to spin up a server in a test so that you can do full end-to-end requests of it. It's a very important sort of test, to make sure things work all together. Most of the work I do is in complex web backends, and there's so much risk of not having all…
Last week[1], when I went to publish my blog post, I ran into a surprising error: I was out of disk space. My server is used only for hosting a couple of small static sites, so I was surprised. None of the content is very large, why is the disk full? A little…
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook[1]. It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!…
I'm working on a silly word game right now, which means I need a list of words for it. I can't rely on the system word list, since this is for a web project. I'd also like, ideally, multiple lists of words with different criteria: most common words, all words,…
I got a 3D printer recently, and got to work using it. When I shared one of the first things I made in a private Discord, someone commented that "This is the most niche thing I've ever seen someone design/print." That, my friend, is the point: that we can make…
Apparently, one of my hobbies is making updates to my ergonomic setup, then blogging about it from an Amtrak train. I've gone and done it again. My setup stayed static for some time, but my most recent iteration ended up letting me down and I had to change it…
We want medical tests to give us a yes or no answer: you have the disease, you're cured. We treat them this way, often. My labs came back saying I'm healthy. I have immunity. I'm sick. Absolutely concrete results. The reality is more complicated, and tests do…
As I do every year, it's that time to reflect on the year that's been, and talk about some of my hopes and goals for the next year! I'll be honest, this one is harder to write than last year's. It was an emotionally intense year in a lot of ways. Here's to a g…
Keeping up with regular blog posts is a challenge. To do it, I've churned through a few different organizational systems. Sometimes I have to change them due to actual life circumstances changing; other times, due to the old one just wearing off[1]. Well, my l…
November 20th each year is Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR). It is a day when we memorialize those who've been lost to transphobia, through violence or suicide. And each year, I make the most difficult git commit of the year, updating the list of names in…
Most of us use infrastructure provided by companies like DigitalOcean and AWS. Some of us choose to work on that infrastructure. And some of us are really built different and choose to build all that infrastructure from scratch. This post is a real treat for m…
As software engineers, we're paid to write really cool type annotations solve problems. Usually we do this by taking a bunch of different pieces and putting them together to solve the problem. Maybe you mix together a database, a queue, a web framework, and so…
There's a pizza shop near me that serves a normal pizza. I mean, they distribute the toppings in a normal way. They're not uniform at all. The toppings are random, but not the way I want. The colloquial understanding of "random" is kind of the Platonic ideal o…
When you're just getting started with music, you have so many skills to learn. You have to be able to play your instrument and express yourself through it. You need to know the style you're playing, and its idioms and conventions. You may want to record your m…
One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a…
One of the best known hard problems in computer science is the halting problem. In fact, it's widely thought[1] that you cannot write a program that will, for any arbitrary program as input, tell you correctly whether or not it will terminate. This is written…
I've been publishing at least one blog post every week on this blog for about 2.5 years. I kept it up even when I was very sick last year with Lyme disease. It's time for me to take a break and reset. This is the right time, because the world is very difficult…
A few months ago, I was talking with a friend about my ergonomic setup and they asked if being vertical helps it with cooling. I wasn't sure, because it seems like it could help but it was probably such a small difference that it wouldn't matter. So, I did wha…
The scene: you're on call for a web app, and your pager goes off. Denial. No no no, the app can't be down. There's no way it's down. Why would it be down? It isn't down. Sure, my pager went off. And sure, the metrics all say it's down and the customer is compl…
After I put up a post about a Python gotcha, someone remarked that "there are very few interpreted languages in common usage," and that they "wish Python was more widely recognized as a compiled language." This got me thinking: what is the distinction between…
I got a new-to-me keyboard recently. It was my brother's in school, but he doesn't use it anymore, so I set it up in my office. It's got 61 keys and you can hook up a pedal to it, too! But when you hook it up to the computer, you can't type with it. I mean, th…
There's this thing in Python that always trips me up. It's not that tricky, once you know what you're looking for, but it's not intuitive for me, so I do forget. It's that shadowing a variable can sometimes give you an UnboundLocalError! It happened to me last…
Every time I run into endianness, I have to look it up. Which way do the bytes go, and what does that mean? Something about it breaks my brain, and makes me feel like I can't tell which way is up and down, left and right. This is the blog post I've needed ever…
If you manage a team, who are your teammates? If you're a staff software engineer embedded in a product team, who are your teammates? The answer to the question comes down to who your main responsibility lies with. That's not the folks you're managing and lead…
Code ownership is a popular concept, but it emphasizes the wrong thing. It can bring out the worst in a person or a team: defensiveness, control-seeking, power struggles. Instead, we should be focusing on stewardship. How code ownership manifests Code ownershi…
After I wrote YARR (Yet Another Rust Resource, with requisite pirate mentions), one of my friends tried it out. He gave me some really useful insights as he went through it, letting me see what was hard about learning Rust from a newcomer's perspective. Unsurp…
Last week, I finally got verified on LinkedIn. Now there's a little badge next to my name that says "yes, she's a human who is legally named Nicole." Their marketing for verification says that I should now expect 60% more profile views and 50% more comments an…
The title is not a rhetorical question, and I'm not going to bury an answer. I don't have an answer. This post is my exploration of the question, and why I think it is a question[1]. Important things up front: what's my relationship with LLMs today? I don't us…