For as long as I can remember, recycling has been the right thing to do. One of my first chores growing up was taking the recyling to the curb every Sunday. In fact, I recall it being a bit of a culture war topic. Maybe it still is? Anyway, it …
Although I rode bicycles occasionally as a child, I didn t own one as an adult until I moved to Washington, DC in 2017. In DC I had a perfect bike commute: 1.2 miles, mostly flat, and almost entirely along a protected bike path. I had recently learned about …
We re now at about five weeks since the start of the COVID -19 lockdown in New York. I ve found myself thinking more about the long-term future. I don t have real expertise on any of these topics, and I m hesitant to speculate excessively. However, many of us …
I thought it might be interesting to write some notes on my experience of the COVID -19/ SARS -CoV-2 pandemic so far. There are no doubt many of these on the internet, but so far I ve found each of them interesting to read. It seems worth writing mine down …
First, some exciting news that s relevant as context: starting in November, I ll be joining Mapbox in their Washington, DC office. One thing that made me excited about joining Mapbox was how much I enjoyed their interview process . No part of it felt like it required extra preparation and …
I have a fairly broad understanding of networking and how the Internet works. However, for some reason, I had previously never fully understood exactly what a subnet mask is. Why are IP addresses sometimes written with a slash and another number (10.0.0.1/24) at the end of …
Asyncio is a relatively new standard-library solution for writing concurrent programs in Python. It was initially released with Python 3.4, greatly improved in 3.5, and has a solidified API in 3.6. If you’re not entirely sure what “concurrent” means, you should be aware that there are …
Naming things – choosing a string of characters to represent a given expression – can be frustrating and difficult. This might be obvious, but the abstraction of referring to a block of code with something memorable and human readable greatly increases the ease of programming. Whoever first realized that we could use …
As I described at length in my Return Statement , I spent part of summer 2016 at the Recurse Center . In that piece, I mentioned pair programming as an important part of the RC experience. Being in an environment that encourages and facilitates it was a great opportunity. I paired for …
Humans have been using specialized systems of shorthand to record speech in real-time since antiquity. Starting in the late 1800s, automated stenotypes have offered an alternative to written shorthand. Typically, stenography has been reserved for settings where the precise recording of speech was important. One obvious modern example is in …
For the last few months, I’ve been working full-time on an interesting open source project called CIRCLean . CIRCLean solves a niche yet important problem: what you do you do when you are given a USB drive but cannot verify that the key is safe to use? There are various …
From July 5th to September 20th of 2016, I spent a majority of my waking hours at the Recurse Center , and I’ve been postponing writing about it ever since. It’s difficult to organize your thoughts immediately after such a big thing has ended. In fact, I’m still …