philosophy On societal decay and the incompatibility of established systems with new actors I watch Air Safety Institute videos online, and it's disturbing how many fatal case studies are caused by the tenor of interactions between air traffic controllers and pilots. Is this simply inevitable?
writing Progress Report: March 2019 Been a while since I wrote about the progress I've made on my novel. Here's the latest update: I'm at 42.5 thousand words.
writing Why code never works and you can't edit Wikipedia A long time ago, in a county far, far away, I had a gig that didn't pay well, and it was boring. As a result, I spent a lot of my time trying to unfuck Wikipedia...
writing Apple doesn't care about your work My endeavors fall into one of two categories: my hobbies and my work. When I engage in a hobby, it's fine if not everything goes to plan; my motorcycle breaks down, my 1911
Dragnet: A Time for Reflection Names have been changed (or just omitted) to protect the innocent, and the guilty have escaped into the wild. Beware, they are armed and dangerous!
gaming A real complaint about Shadow of the Tomb Raider When Shadow of the Tomb Raider came out, I didn't get what the big deal was. Having played it, I know what everyone was mad about...
freedom Another letter for my congressman I sent this today to my congressional representative. I encourage you to write your representative about the same subject. Feel free to copy mine.
writing What story do you tell? At the heart of every story is a single golden thread running from beginning to end, defining its essential elements. We take this thread, and we add characters, plots, and scenery. But which characters, plots, and scenery?
programming Rust modules and you The bad news is that the 2018 edition of Rust has pretty much settled on the worse of two module systems. The good news is that they have done so with the potential to unfuck this at some point in the future. In the meantime, what can you expect?
programming Programming Challenge: Nth Fibonacci Number Programming Challenge: Nth Fibonacci Number I did a quick Google search for "favorite whiteboard interview problems" and came up with a few interesting possibilities. The one I've chosen here is Nth
programming On testing Warning! Testing, like politics, religion, and how to butter your toast, is one of those subjects that will get you thrown out of better dinner parties and churches throughout the South. What you read here may shock you! You have been warned.
programming Programming Challenge: Data Validation Your boss has asked you to import a bunch of someone else's data into your perfect, precious, pristine database. Catch is, their data is hot garbage. What do you do? The challenge You
programming Programming Challenge: N Digits Today's challenge: given a number of digits, print the sum of all numbers that can be expressed using all such digits.
programming Ruminations on the efficiency of lookup tables in LINQ I can think of three ways to create a lookup table in LINQ. Strangely, they exhibit surprisingly variable performance characteristics.
programming Shelf and ladder programming Software engineering is a craft. A trade. Much of what we produce as software engineers is really quite simple. A web service might be the equivalent of an end table, or perhaps a bookshelf. Why, then, are so many of our shelves such harrowing endeavors?
writing Character age and perception Adulting is hard sometimes. No one can behave like a grown-up from dawn to dusk, and we all slack off now and then. Unfortunately for your fictional people, they don't get to slack off when they feel like it, because perception is everything.
writing The shoulders of a giant The idea is older than Sir Isaac Newton, but it is his quotation that comes to mind: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
programming Programming Challenge: Ordered Symmetric Difference Scary name, simple concept. The symmetric difference of two sets is the items of each set not present in the other set. Once again, however, the fact that a problem is simple has no bearing on how often we may or may not see it in real world situations.
programming Integers in parallel I recently attended a job interview where I was asked the following question. For some time, it did not make sense to me, and so I attempted to hedge my bets by talking about a variety of issues that could result from the code in question. That wasn't quite the answer my interviewer was looking for.
writing The dark truth about nostalgia I've had an article on the back burner for some time now that just hasn't been published because I'm afraid it'll get me fired. Here's one that has a slightly lower chance of conjuring a pitchfork-wielding mob to my front door. Hope you enjoy!
writing VS Code: markdown and word wrap All right, so I found this out after looking through the issues backlog on github for Visual Studio Code. You can set word wrap for markdown, but you have to do it specifically for markdown, because apparently there's some kind of default overriding here.
programming Code review: Goldbach conjecture I cannot spell Goldbach to save my life. My fingers refuse to type the ch in that position. I dunno why. Sue me. Anyway...
