A personal site about software engineering, computer science, and open source development
What did I make? Whenever I wipe down my laptop keyboard, I prefer to disable the keys first. There are apps that can do this, but none of them are a good fit for me: some are paid, some are closed source, and some do far more than I need. heel is a small tool that deals with this problem. It is command-line only and is packaged as a script that can be downloaded from GitHub and run without…
What did I make? PDF files often carry incorrect or incomplete metadata. A paper downloaded from a server might have a title like draft_final.docx . A document exported from another program might have a completely empty author field. For users who rely on a PDF reader to organize a library of documents, this matters. I recently wrote a tool called etch that deals with this problem. It is…
The context-switching problem It happens often enough: you are in the middle of a feature branch, files scattered in various states of half-done work, and something urgent comes up. A bug needs a hotfix. A colleague asks you to review their branch. You need to run the app on a different branch to compare behaviour. The usual answer is git stash — push your work onto a temporary stack, switch…
At the end of each year, I plan to compile a list of my favourite things, i.e. books, films, shows, and games. This is inspired by Barack Obama's famous lists and by the delightful What's Making Us Happy segment of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. Here is this year's list... Books Babel by R.F. Kuang Cozy in parts but often deeply unsettling. If you are nostalgic about a particular type of…
Our attention is constantly under attack. Most news and media organizations, ad-slinging tech companies, and internet influencers and personalities ultimately seek to convert our attention into profit. In Stolen Focus (2022), Johann Hari writes, “The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention — to focus — was cracking and…
Georgia Tech Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) is an innovative, award-winning graduate program offered by the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. ( Wikipedia ) As I make my way through this program, I intend to write short, opinionated reviews of the courses I complete. My intended audience for this is the current or prospective OMSCS student who is considering taking these…
What did I make? The process of uninstalling apps on macOS can be disorienting for new users. While on Windows, users typically use an uninstaller or the Add or Remove Programs utility, uninstalling apps on macOS simply means dragging the .app file to trash. For many, this minimalistic process triggers distrust and disbelief. What about preference files and other gunk written by the application…
Georgia Tech Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) is an innovative, award-winning graduate program offered by the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. ( Wikipedia ) As I make my way through this program, I intend to write short, opinionated reviews of the courses I complete. My intended audience for this is the current or prospective OMSCS student who is considering taking these…
Elden Ring is the newest game from acclaimed Dark Souls developer FromSoftware. It has released to near-universal praise and currently sits among the most highly-rated games of all time according to Metacritic. Elden Ring retains and refines many design patterns present in other FromSoftware games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. But unlike any other game from this developer, Elden Ring is…
Georgia Tech Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) is an innovative, award-winning graduate program offered by the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. ( Wikipedia ) As I make my way through this program, I intend to write short, opinionated reviews of the courses I complete. My intended audience for this is the current or prospective OMSCS student who is considering taking these…