Recent content on James Hochadel
Two Types of Engineers 
 Thanks to our genetics and experiences, our reactions to every moment are shaped by a variety of “default settings”. Our default settings determine our instinctive responses to good and bad news, to unexpected inconveniences and unexpected opportunities. As software engineers, our default settings inform the way the approach creating and maintaining software. It takes…
Edit 2022-01-07: This page clocks in at nearly 100MB, which is enormous. The size is mostly due to uncompressed screen recordings that download when the page loads rather than when the reader clicks play, and partially because of uncompressed screenshots that have not been resized for web. I plan to fix all of these things, but I haven’t had the time yet, and I didn’t want to wait to…
My M1 MacBook Air is an amazing computer. Its battery lasts 20 hours while browsing the web with Safari and programming with Sublime Text, or about 30 days asleep with the lid closed. Except today, it died after less than a day of sleep. 
 A rogue, poorly coded app with bad power management must have caused this. Which wayward app developer is to blame? 
 Answer: Apple. 

I needed to print addresses on 40 A7 envelopes today. It’s been a while since I printed on anything besides US Letter, and I’m unhappy to report that it’s no less ridiculous than it was 15 years ago. 
 Generating the 40 envelopes with mail merge was easy enough. The rest was not: 
 
 A7 envelopes, at 5.25" tall by 7.25" wide, are not a preconfigured paper size in…
Today I nearly got stuck while learning something new. In the early years of my programming career, I got stuck all the time. Now, I rarely do. I thought I’d write about how I got from there to here, using today’s experience as a representative example of what often happens when I’m learning something new. 
 My goal today was to create a GraphQL server using Go. I’ve…
I’m James Hochadel, a software engineer based on the U.S. east coast. You can find me at these places online: 
 
 GitHub 
 Keybase 
 LinkedIn 
 
 Opinions on this blog are my own as a private citizen. 
 Credits 
 
 This site is built using Hugo . 
 The “It was Monday” style of dating posts I copied from Peter Welch .