A potpourri collection of posts from programming, scripting, vi, i3, etc., to life and expanding your career prospects
Disclose Your Salary: Help Improve Information In The Labor Market date: Sa 22. Apr 18:31:31 CEST 2023 updated: Mo 11, May 00:12:20 CEST 2026 UPDATE: Understand the local laws, your local policies at the job, etc., before sharing information that could get you into trouble. If it helps, folks can share what they make rounded to the nearest 5k euros, or 10k euros and then their colleagues can say…
# Margin, Margin Loans, and my Aha! Moment I recently got our fiscal house in order. I recently paid off all of our credit cards and other loans except, of course, for things like the mortgage, student loans. But that's fine since those loans are either covered -- see also rental -- or on maintainable student loan payment plans that are, luckily, within budget. The thing that blew me away was…
Have AWS and Snowflake and Doing Event Driven Things? Try This. If you’re on AWS for your cloud AND using Snowflake for data warehousing AND needing a way to ingest events into Snowflake then this is a bullet proof way to go. It’s this simple. Given Snowflake is often about analytics and often times that means order does not matter (but if your events are schema’d right there’s timestamps on the…
TL;DR - Apple Podcasts is awesome again date: Tue Apr 28 21:52:05 CEST 2026 For years now I’ve spent hours and hours using Marco Arment’s Podcast Player . Years. I’m switching back to Apple Podcasts. The UX of Apple Podcasts has sucked for years. It’s hard to get right. It’s a small device. There’s a lot of content. There’s a lot to pack in a small area. But for the most part Overcast gets it…
### Almost A Year In And I Love My Macbook Pro, Still date: Fri Sep 5 13:28:54 CEST 2025 There's not much to say. I am typing this on it now. I really, really like it. I like it more than I thought I would. I've written about it previously [here](https://gigatexal.blog/pages/no-perfect-workstation/no-perfect-workstation.html) and [here](https://gigatexal.blog/pages/new-laptop/new-laptop.html) ####…
# I Am Mildly Bullish On LLMs Date: Tue Feb 11 00:16:11 CET 2025 Unless you've been living under a rock LLMs - large language models - basically super, duper complex AI magic that predicts the next word or token have taken the world by storm. They have come a long way. They're not perfect. They don't think. They don't reason. They aren't artificially intelligent... BUT ... I have found them quite…
Axioms About Berlin In No Particular Order date: Thu Jan 9 22:14:27 CET 2025 1. You Don’t Need To Buy A Ticket On A Bus It seems that after COVID-19 they just don’t care anymore. During COVID the bus drivers (maybe to do with distancing) stopped enforcing (if they did previously at all) the need to have a valid ticket. Now of course most Germans are law-abiding, rule-following citizens and always…
# On This Day In 2024 **Update: Thu Nov 14 16:42:12 CET 2024** As of today the GOP now controls the House of Representatives. Trump now controls the Senate, the House, the Presidency and with it the FBI, the DOJ, the military and has stacked the Supreme Court with a wierd far right majority. So even if states or citizens sue the federal government over Trump's policies they'll likely get no relief…
Stay Awhile And Listen Ahh, Dekard Cain you old, tortured soul. I was talking to a friend the other day who is in his senior year of his undergraduate degree studying business and technology. He’s passionate about tech and due to my influence wants to work as a data engineer. He and I have been meeting most every sunday for about an hour to 90-minutes (if I drone on too long) talking about his…
Once A Skeptic, Now Not An Evangelist But A Happy User TL;DR - I was once a skeptic of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT but now I use them for what they are and nothing more and as a result I am far more productive than I was before. Consider using them, playing around with them to see how they fit in your workflow, pay for them if needed or not. They’re not paying me to tell you this so…
### MacOS, Windows, Linux, ... there's no perfect workstation OS (for me, maybe you, too) date: Tue Sep 17 00:07:48 CEST 2024 I've a recently updated to MacOS Sequoia aka MacOS 15 [Macbook M3 Max](https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/compare/). It cost me [5700 USD]((/pages/new-laptop/new-laptop.html)) (Yeah. I know.). It's awesome. (I mean it had better be, right?). It was also insanely expensive.…
# Unmatched Quality My 2013 almost-top-tier Macbook Pro 15 I got in college lasted me almost 10 years. That aluminum beast cemented in my mind the lasting power of the Mac as a laptop platform. Now, now, before the horde of legacy Thinkpad stans come at me with pitchforks -- yes I know the same can be said about a nearly 10 year old Thinkpad that's been through countless upgrades. But what the…
# API Gateway And Cloudwatch So there I was prototyping an API on AWS using API Gateway and wondering where the logs were in CloudWatch -- Amazon's Cloud Logs tool. Unbenownst to me, and what I think is a user-hostile-terrible-default logs for API Gateway aren't on by default. So I google and find this wonderful blog:…
My Laptop Condundrum and Why Apple Should Thank The Asahi Team Where I’m At Now I have been very happy with Linux of late. Very happy. I’m running Fedora 39 . I like the freedom, the hackability, the customizability, and just how things work how I think they should, they’re intuitive. Why I Run Linux: Tiling Window Managers And More The main productivity hack for me, and something that has kept…
# Access Notes From Anywhere ### A (Very) Poor Man's Org-Mode For Taking Notes I had a colleague at my previous role that would collect wisdom seen in Slack channels or things he learned in a text document. Whenever I asked a question he'd usually have the answer. The secret was this text document. I had always thought: "Man, I really should have one of those." I'd send myself notes in Slack and…
Coder Radio Date: Sat Sep 16 11:42:37 PM CEST 2023 This podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting is one of my favorite podcasts I listen to every week. The hosts Mike (sometimes Jar-Jar Binks, sometimes Yoda, all-the-the-time Objective-C obsessive and Taylor Swift/Katy Perry fanboy programmer with a penchant for destroying laptops with adult beverages and proprietor of alice.dev ) and Chris (The…
### Today I Learned: Order Only Dependencies In Make date: Tue Jul 25 11:07:30 AM CEST 2023 Now I am almost sure I am using `Makefiles/make` wrong here. It seems make purists hate that some (most?) use make as a task runner of sorts? I forget where I heard this but I remember seeing it in tech circles like HackerNews or StackOverflow. In anycase I don't care. I work as a data engineer. Everything…
A Historic Day: DJT Charged In The Classified Documents Case date: Fri Jul 14 11:11:44 AM CEST 2023 More Powerful Than The Charges Was The Message On The Rule-Of-Law A formative pillar of mine growing up was that, eventually, the federal government would step in and “do the right thing”, and that “nobody was above the law”. In the US this is engrained is us as children in schools and in movies and…
### A Sure Fire Way To Get Promoted date: Thu Jul 6 09:12:24 PM CEST 2023 #### Preface Look this is going to sound like all that garbage you see in the Self-Help isle of the book store. Some greasy, pontificating, know-it-all that should be akin to the world's richest person but instead decided to share their win-at-the-game-of-life secret in a 300-page self-help book. [1] And in some ways, this…
## Financial Advice To My 20 Year-Old Self date: Fr 16. Jun 21:19:58 CEST 2023 ### Update: date: Sat Jun 17 12:00:27 PM CEST 2023 Some have commented in the HackerNews thread about this post that my calculations are wrong. Salary is paid 2x a month and the calculator I used said as much. I missed that. So instead of having ~2M USD saved by the end of this excercise one would have > 5M USD! Check…
## 1 Maxim, 2 Sides date: Tue May 30 01:43:36 PM CEST 2023 The best managers, parents, mentors, friends follow this simple maxim: "Give praise profusely and often in public; provide constructive criticism in private." That's it. That's all. ---
### How to get Podman running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS date: Tue 16 May 21:53:34 CEST 2023 #### Why Podman? I've already got Docker installed First let me tell you a story: "Stay awhile and listen..." ;-) You know Redhat really dropped the ball on all this container stuff. I mean, I can't blame them for not being able to see the future and inventing an easier to use abstraction over core container…
### How To Sort Lines In Place Very Quickly With Vim In VsCode, Vim, or Neovim date: Sat May 6 09:34:50 PM CEST 2023 #### Background In a recent pull-request review a colleague of mine suggested something very smart that showed a lot of empathy for our end users: *"What do you think about ordering the values of the struct so that stakeholders can scan the fields in alphabetical order?"* I hadn't…
### The Ideal Data Engineering Resume And Other Resume Tips And Tricks date: Tues 2. May 16:48:32 CEST 2023 If you find this useful and especially if this post helps you land a job, [send me a tip!](https://buy.stripe.com/8wM4gOfeI7c40Le8ww) **May 2024 update:** It is the year of the LLM. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, PerplexityAI, etc., etc. A lot of what I wrote below is still useful ... but the hard…
### On Pronouns date: Thu Apr 27 04:36:03 PM CEST 2023 This blog is a bit of a "who is Alex" sort of endeavour. I feel like I have some worthwhile ideas and stances on things that I'd like to share and these "hot-takes" I'd like to put out on a platform that I own (like this blog) and not add to the fervor for free on a platform like Twitter. > I thought that the above preamble was important to…
Building A Blog From Scratch Using Only Linux Tools: Update #1 date: Di 25. Apr 15:01:23 CEST 2023 What’s changed? Before I dive into what has changed since I talked about the blog’s infra/design read the inspiration for the whole thing here . If you don’t want to then let me give you the TL;DR: Basically I stumbled upon the --standalone flag of the very useful tool: pandoc which is a tool written…
### Cookies So Good We Drug Mule Them To Us date: Mon Apr 17 08:32:47 PM CEST 2023 #### We Came For The Quiche But We Came Back Again And Again For The Cookies When we lived in Hamburg we had a lot of luck finding good places to eat by scouring the surrounding area on Google Maps and looking for highly rated places and then trying them out. It wasn't fool proof but more often than not we found…
Building A Blog From Scratch Using Only Linux Tools date: Sun Apr 16 10:34:49 PM CEST 2023 Why? Because it could be fun. Why am I not just running a hugo blog? It’s statically generated and has a ton of themes and plugins. Why am I reinventing the wheel? Because I can. And it could be fun. :-) Okay so this is not 100% running on “just/only” Linux Tools if by that you mean OSS/self-hosted etc…
### Playing God date: Tue 13 Apr 23:44:16 CEST 2023 #### Probably Futile Attempts to Save Earthworms I understand how ecosystems work, that there's a cycle of life that leads to an equalibrium in predator and prey populations given the resources available. I get that. And yet I can't help but upset that equalibrium by stealing would-be food from the crow or raven or other such predator of the…
### Dogs As Conversation Starters date: Tue Apr 11 07:56:36 PM CEST 2023 #### Introduction I've a soft spot for chocolate labrador retrievers. I've always wanted one. They remind me of friendly bears. Even when they grow up they never seem to grow into their paws much the same way a puppy has ears and paws and bellies that don't seem to fit them. My wife fell in love with german shorthairs and so…