I read this and then had trouble finding it for a year, I'm writing about it so I have a way to find it... The proposal here is so obviously correct that it's shocking it doesn't come up more often when people discuss the NBA Draft... basically the idea is that you assign a high […]
#todays world
33 posts
12 Feb
30 Oct 2025
*This post originally appeared on Shyp's engineering blog in July 2015. It has since been deleted. It is reproduced as closely as possible here. The original is accessible on the Wayback Machine. Eight months ago when I ran our core API tests at Shyp, it took 100 seconds from starting the test to seeing output […]
25 May 2025
One of the first ever Redis libraries for Go was hosted at github.com/garyburd/redigo. It has been deprecated for some time and has now been finally removed altogether from Github. If you still have a dependency on this project, this means that will be broken now. github.com/gomodule/redigo should be a drop-in replacement for github.com/garyburd/redigo. If you […]
16 May 2022
I have a sweet tooth and one candy I really enjoy is Strawberry Sour Punch. Unfortunately after twenty years of having the same formula it seems that the company has decided to change the formula for Sour Punch. The new candy has more of a cherry flavor and isn't as sour. It does not taste […]
2 May 2022
On Sunday morning at 1am I had a lot of stomach pain. I am a One Medical customer, had heard that they offered urgent care, and so I searched on their website for information. Unfortunately their urgent care option does not show up in the list of care options on their website: I concluded that […]
6 Dec 2021
I fail phone screens pretty often, which limits my job prospects and is embarrassing for someone with ten years of industry experience, a pretty extensive Github account and a publicly available list of difference-making projects. 1 In theory a phone screen is supposed to evaluate whether a) this person would be good at the job […]
11 Oct 2021
Many companies break up their internal environments into different realms. A typical setup might look like: The prod realm is where production servers live. The dev or stage realm is a live testing environment, where code gets deployed before it goes into production, or long-running features are tested. The local realm is for code that's […]
1 Oct 2021
Here are some of the different strategies you can use to write tests that read or write data from a database, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. I'm usually writing Go code, so the examples here are for Go, but the notes should generalize to any language that runs tests against Postgres, MySQL, or […]
29 Jan 2021
It is difficult for children, especially young children, to learn over Zoom. It is more difficult to teach critical skills like learning to read and write over Zoom. As Heather Knight and others have noted, keeping children isolated has severe impacts on their mental health. It is the Mayor's top priority to get children back […]
19 Jan 2021
In very rare cases, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines will cause the person being vaccinated to have an allergic reaction. When I say very rare, I mean it; the chances are a few in a million, or about the same of picking a specific resident of Newark, New Jersey at random out of the phone […]
15 Sept 2020
Edit: If you are in a desperate situation, or getting rejected multiple days, please call your State Assemblymember. Staffers in the Legislature have access to additional resources and can help you get the assistance you need from EDD. The California EDD Paid Family Leave phone tree is like a choose your own adventure book, where […]
23 Aug 2020
Generally if you name a food or drink, people know whether they like it or not. It is rare for someone to drink a merlot, or try pizza from a new restaurant — toasted bread, melted cheese, tomato sauce and toppings - and be wildly surprised at their reaction to the taste. I can't quite […]
1 Jul 2019
For a company trying to sell and explain a product, a lot of this information was amazingly difficult to find so I wrote this. For the rest of this we'll assume you're cooking a steak but the same advice applies to most other meats/cuts. Why Do You Want A Torch to Sear Meat To get […]
7 Oct 2018
Belmont is evaluating pedestrian and bike improvements to Ralston Avenue. These improvements build on the Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan. There is pretty good cycle access all the way from the eastern tip of Foster City to the Belmont Caltrain station. However, the cycling access from the Caltrain station to Safeway, NDNU or Carlmont Village […]
10 Jul 2018
If you are using an Amazon Application Load Balancer, and forwarding traffic to internal services using HTTPS, the ALB will not validate the certificate presented by the internal service before forwarding the traffic. So we're clear here, let's say you are running a web server on Amazon ECS. The webserver is configured to present TLS […]
6 Jul 2018
Twelve days before Christmas 2017, Otto LLC, a company that wanted to produce smart locks, shut down with little notice. Employees were given no severance and contractors were left with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices. This incident was widely covered in the press, and one board member has since quit […]
23 May 2018
Belmont is finalizing plans to build affordable housing on two parcels it owns across from the Caltrain station along El Camino Real. The proposal from the developer, LINC Housing, would construct around 20 large-family affordable units (2 and 3 bedrooms) and 20 senior housing units (one bedroom). Belmont reduced the parking requirements for new construction […]
27 Mar 2018
In the middle of a housing crisis, cities up and down the Peninsula are moving forward with plans to add a ton of new office space and no new housing. These plans will add many more new commuters, without any corresponding housing for them. Last year the Apple Park launched in Cupertino. 2.8 million sq […]
20 Mar 2018
Writing middleware in Go seems pretty easy at first, but there are several easy ways to trip up. Let's walk through some examples. Reading the Request All of the middlewares in our examples will accept an http.Handler as an argument, and return an http.Handler. This makes it easy to chain middlewares. The basic pattern for […]
30 Mar 2017
Do you work in the tech industry in the Bay Area? You should start learning about, and getting involved in, local housing politics. The prognosis for housing and rent prices is bad, and things are likely going to get worse for tech workers in the Bay, unless we start taking action. I will explain why […]
15 Dec 2016
The next president of the United States showed a willingness to violate historical norms while campaigning, and there's little evidence that he has any moral compass - the examples of this are legion, one of the worst is him cutting off medical treatment to his sick nephew over a legal dispute. His kids are going […]
24 Oct 2016
This is Part 2 of my voter guide. Part 1 covers the 24 San Francisco ballot propositions and city supervisor races. The deadline to register to vote in California is October 24. I highly recommend you sign up. Click here to register to vote. A few notes I cover in more detail in Part 1: […]
16 Oct 2016
I think this is useful and the ballot's complicated so I wanted to share how I'm voting this year. I used several sources to compile this guide: The SF Chronicle's endorsements - they follow these issues every day. The ballot book mailed to every voter, especially the text of the law and the main pro/con […]
2 Aug 2016
For the past few weeks I've been on the hunt for a configuration file format with the following three properties: You can use a library to parse the configuration. Most configuration formats allow for this, though some (nginx, haproxy, vim) aren't so easy. You can manipulate the keys and values, using the same library. When […]
16 Jun 2016
I have a lot of tests in Go that integrate with Postgres, and test the interactions between Go models and the database. A lot of these tests can run in parallel. For example, any test that attempts to write a record, but fails with a constraint failure, can run in parallel with all other tests. […]
27 May 2016
(I'm omitting the many, many, astroturf posts - "Why X is Better than Twilio", "Why I'm Ditching Twilio for X" - and comments from employees at competitors between 2010 and 2014.) Twilio Raises $12m Series B "Can something like Twilio really become a $100m+ company? I hope so but my ignorance blinkers me to how […]
3 Apr 2016
You may have seen the TSA Randomizer on your last flight. A TSA agent holds an iPad. The agent taps the iPad, a large arrow points right or left, and you follow it into a given lane. How much does the TSA pay for an app that a beginner could build in a day? It […]
18 Feb 2016
DEAR SIR, I HAVE THE BELIEVE YOU ARE A REPUTABLE AND RESPONSIBLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON I CAN DO BUSINESS WITH FROM THE LITTLE INFORMATION SO FAR I GATHERED ABOUT YOU DURING MY SEARCH FOR A PARTNER AND BY MATTER OF TRUST I MUST NOT HESITATE TO CONFIDE IN YOU FOR THIS SIMPLE AND SINCERE BUSINESS. […]
19 May 2015
Pay people more! It’s really that simple. If you care so much about retention, put your money where your mouth is.
4 Sept 2014
I read Ready Player One recently and I enjoyed it; it was a pretty fast read and I finished it in a day. It presents a view of the future where the possibilities allowed by a virtual reality world surpass those of the real world, so most people spend as much time as possible connected […]
1 Aug 2014
I used to play a ton of Roller Coaster Tycoon when I was a kid. I loved the game but I was never very good at making the roller coasters. They always felt too spread out, or too unnatural looking. As a ten year old I idly wondered about writing a computer program that was […]
24 Jul 2014
I read a great blog post in college, and sadly I can't find it now, so I'll summarize. It showed a picture of Hearst Castle, and a photo of an average middle-class home, and the text of the post went something like: One of these can travel across the country in 6 hours. One of […]
15 Mar 2013
Email from my alma mater: Dear Members of the Claremont McKenna College Community, I am writing to update you on an important action taken by the Board of Trustees at its meeting on March 9, 2013. In particular, the Board acted to end the College’s “No Packaged Loan” financial aid policy. Beginning with the fall […]