technology, personal productivity, and education
A couple of months ago, I started thinking about getting a split keyboard. I spent a ton of time reading about them and decided that I wanted to try one. I was experiencing some back pain during the day and wondered if I would notice an ergonomic benefit from a split. The idea of being able to customize the keyboard also sounded cool, but was not a huge draw; I was worried I might spend too much…
About five times per year, Ethiopia ACT mobilizes week-long medical trips to provide care for hundreds of underserved people in Addis Ababa. I’ve been on three of these teams in the last five years and have used my tech skills to help. 1 On my most recent trip, in January 2025, I built a clinic data system, based on feedback and conversations with the staff since 2024. Screenshot: Dashboard of new…
I wanted to update my resume, and I wound up also building a resume generation pipeline. If you too are tired of fighting with a word processor to get your resume just right, and would prefer to fight with LaTeX and Python and Docker, then this post is for you! I’ve made the relevant source code available on GitHub. Goals I wanted to treat my resume like code. I wanted it to live in a repo, have…
In college, I had a friend with a part-time research job. One time we were chatting and he told me he had to copy and paste data from a government website into a Word document. He was explaining to me that he had over 20 hours of work left at the current pace, and wasn’t sure how he would get it all done with his other responsibilities. I asked him if he was interested in getting it done faster…
I recently used the emoji search feature in an app. I typed “car” and expected to be greeted with 🚗 as a top result but found things like 🥕 (carrot) to be much higher ranking. This post explores how a search algorithm for searching a small list can be enhanced. A search experience like this might be called substring match search because it works something like this: Start with a list of values…
Recently I was compiling a booklet of devotions for a mission trip. My goal was to make a simple booklet using standard paper, printed double-sided, and folded down the middle. I looked online for options and kept finding web-based tools that looked like overkill. I wanted a simple text booklet - no splashy template, no color, no images. I had heard of Pandoc and PDFJam before and decided to give…
I love learning new things. Rabbit holes can be fun. This year I dug into double-entry accounting. And I didn’t just learn the theory; I decided to use double-entry accounting, with some open source plain text accounting software, for personal finances. I’ll explain what I mean by these terms and what I have been up to in this post. Double-entry accounting: An accounting method where every…
I got two Elgato Key Light Airs for better lighting when I am on video calls. After setting them up, I wondered: How do I turn them on automatically for video calls? I wanted to open a Google Meet link and have the lights turn on instantly, like my webcam. I started Googling. I found this blog post by Evan Travers, and built off of that. Evan used Hammerspoon , a desktop automation tool for macOS…
One danger in mastering anything is forgetting that what seems simple to you is not simple to everyone. It is normal that something learned deeply seems self-evident to you. According to Albert Einstein, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” But when you do understand it well — when you have studied something deeply — you can explain it simply. When you have…
Shaving with a new razor is wonderful. I found that out this spring. I was on vacation and had no razor, so I bought a new one. I could not believe how easy it was to shave — fun, even. And that’s when I found out my old razor was dull. What struck me is that I never noticed that my razor was dull. The gradual wear with every use was imperceptible, until I tried a better tool. Gradual degradation…