I attended my first software conference! The conference, hosted in Columbia, Missouri, was named Software Should Work 1 . I really enjoyed what every speaker had to bring to the table. There were a couple of themes I took away from the conference and hopefully will convey intelligibly here. Software is a social contract § Software is essential to modern society. It runs in our phones, homes, cars,…
Introduction § As a software engineer, performing intensive intellectual work makes you susceptible to burnout. It's easy to imagine that digging ditches 12 hours a day would wear out your body. It's also possible to wear out your mind. Mental exhaustion may come as a result of the following informational risks: Contradiction. New information that contradicts previously held beliefs. For example,…
2025 was an exciting year for me. Events § Launched my blog Starting a blog/personal website has been something that I have wanted to do for a long time. Books, blogs and podcasts have always been an intellectual escape. So, it feels natural for me to join those ranks. Writing has been more arduous than I would like to admit. I am still trying to find my voice. I haven't had a lot of time to…
Introduction § One of the great joys of childhood is having a convenient place to swim. In my youth, that place was a perennial irrigation ditch that flowed through my front yard. Unfortunately, the water level was rarely satisfactory, which was just the pits. It didn't take long for me to come up with a solution. I would dig through the wood scraps in the garage and find a perfectly sized piece…
I recently finished Efficient Linux at the Command Line 1 by Daniel Barrett 2 . On my journey to master the command line, this book has advanced my use of Linux tools. As with learning any new skill, it takes practical experience and theoretical knowledge. Reading a book on a subject won't fully transfer into real-world practice. Luckily, this book doesn't waste time inviting you to get your hands…
Edit: Hey Hacker News! You may join the conversation here! I learned to touch type in fifth grade. We would shuffle into the computer lab and open up Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 1 . I peaked at about 80 wpm. Today, I type somewhere between 60-70 wpm. If I am writing code then that drops to 40-50 wpm. It bothers me that I can't crack 100 wpm but what I have come to realize is that text editing is…
I have been musing on my career transition from welding to programming. Welding was an obvious, well-laid path for me. My dad and grandpa were both welders. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith. When I was 13, I dug into my dad's collection of welding instruction manuals that he used in trade school in the 80s. I pored over them in great detail; even drawing the diagrams in a notebook. I…
During my undergrad, I took a course on engineering computation. It ended up being a crash course in Excel and VBA. It opened my eyes to the myriad uses of Excel. One feature that I didn't quite grasp was pivot tables. They were cool but the week we covered them in was not enough to understand them completely. Fast forward a couple years and I am tasked with creating some reports. The reports all…
I have been writing some reports in sql and kept running into confusion about how the group by clause works. The majority of my distress had to do with the interplay between columns in the group by and the select . Let's see what the 1986 SQL standard 1 has to say about it. Query Specification Syntax Rules § If R is a grouped table, then each <column specification> in each <value expression> shall…