I spent a few years studying Japanese with my wife. It was challenging, interesting, and fun. We met a lot of cool people in our classes, some of whom are still good friends. I found it so interesting, in fact, that I have also developed a love of talking about it. Fun for me, and a nuisance for anyone around me. There are a lot of things I could write about, but I’m just going to share one Japane...

Although it was years ago, I still remember the conversation vividly. I was having my regular check-in with the CTO. It was also sunny outside, and the view from his office was particularly nice that day. He asked me, “Is our app scalable?” After a moment of thought, I answered, “Yes.” I spent the next few years remembering that conversation, wondering what would have happened if I had asked what ...

For various reasons, I’ve had to set up new computers a few times lately. This is still a time-consuming task that I try to avoid, but as I’ve been automating more and more of the process, it’s getting faster and more consistent. This post is essentially a note to my future self, or any colleagues that want to use this as their baseline for their own setups. Many of the tools I use are free and op...

table { display: block; overflow-x: scroll; white-space: nowrap; } table th, table td { min-width: 6rem; max-width: 12rem; white-space: normal; } I have been feeling frustrated with my personal organization of late. I had a bit of time before starting a new project, so I put some time into improving my process. The post below is a simplified version of the notes I took w...

Many years ago I worked on a large system with a number of interconnected services that had grown organically over the years. As new services were added, they became dependent on each other in ways that nobody on the team fully understood. When our hosting provider announced a planned outage, we had to figure out how to safely shut the system off, and more importantly, how to safely and quickly st...

A couple of years ago I received my Makeway kit. It was a kickstarter project that included an assortment of tracks and tricks for marbles, all suspended on a vertical surface by magnets. For this reason, I mounted a large whiteboard (with a metal backing) in the hallway of our apartment. About a year ago, after conducting the household organization surveys, I started using the whiteboard as a phy...

I spent just shy of 9 years working on a suite of products that stored and processed environmental sensor data. This kind of data is naturally stored and processed as a time series. A time series is a set of data points, each with a time and value, and often more. They are common for sensor data, but can be used for pretty much anything that is measured over time such as prices, performance metric...

I have been trying to improve the organization of my household for years. My wife and I have been using shared Google calendars for over a decade, but there are plenty of issues we could still improve. It was only minor challenges when it was just the two of us, but once we had a child, the systems we had started to show their limits. I quit my job with the dream of building my own product, but I ...

I recently did a project for a client that needed a way to share a bit of live data with an external organization. He originally asked for a simple website with authentication and an API. I could have built this, but for the frequency and volumes of data they were using, I suggested a simpler approach: a Google Sheet and a recurring job that updates it. Any online spreadsheet is a great way to sha...

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an old text-based chat system that, while seemingly in decline, still has many users around the world. It’s not as convenient as modern alternatives, but for those of us that are familiar with it, and especially those of us that have friends there, it’s still a very viable way to communicate. There are a number of IRC clients available. On windows, mIRC is popular and ...