ramblings

I've had a variety of blogging habits, from an adolescent LiveJournal to the occasional Twitter rant. This is the latest home for the occasional post for public consumption.

  1. Visual Refresh for (late) 2022 10 September 2022 - design meta

    This year's visual refresh is a font update -- I spent a little quality time with Matthew Butterick's excellent Practical Typography and updated what I'm using on my website and my dotfiles. In the process, I learned new things about OpenType feature tags, and in terms of applying them I discovered …

  2. A Pythonista Debugs the Golang stdlib 19 December 2021 - startups dev

    After recounting this experience during a recent conversation I realized I'd never written it down anywhere. My memory is only getting worse from here on in, so for the sake of posterity... one of my most fun deep-dive experiences so far: the time I found a bug in the Go standard library (and/or glibc, depending on who you ask).

  3. Making your work DOPE 22 November 2021 - startups management

    I’m typically wary of “personality” tests, and the whole subset of the people management / “human resources” space that’s heavily invested in them. Speaking from my own experience, the personality that others notice in me has changed substantially over the last few years. Any assessments that claim to see into a steady inner core, therefore, get a skeptical look.

  4. Typechecking Python for fun (and profit?) 30 May 2020 - python dev

    I'm assuming you agree (or will consider) that adding some type-checking to your Python code can help you find bugs or otherwise improve your software. You've definitely heard of mypy, and possibly one or more of pytype, pyre, and pyright. That's a lot of options! What should you use?

  5. Visual Refresh for 2020 15 March 2020 - design meta

    It's been a while since I did anything with my web site. It seems a bit of an anachronism even to have one. Nonetheless, I'm quite attached to having an address of my own on the Internet, so I've given it a brief once-over.

  6. Developing with Empathy 07 September 2019 - python dev talk

    I gave a talk at PyColorado 2019! Thank you to Frank, Scott, Emily, the Cuttlesoft team, and everyone else at PyColorado for an awesome event!

  7. Command-line tools are fast; is Python faster? 21 March 2016 - python dev dask data

    A little while ago, I encountered a blog post that's stuck in my head ever since -- Adam Drake's experiment with command-line tools for data processing. Ever since then, I've wanted to do a little experimenting of my own. I finally got around to it this evening.

  8. Android Cloud-to-Device Messaging: A Story 14 April 2011 - startups dev

    A little background: at an exciting startup project, we're developing two main components -- a mobile client (a smartphone app) and a server. Currently, we've got an iOS (iPhone / iPad) client out, in a very early preview stage (more of an alpha than a beta) and we're building the Android side to match.