Recent content on Jacob Goldman
There are a few short form videos on TikTok and YouTube Shorts that have wormed themselves deeply into my brain with their catchy music. After an infuriately long time trying to find one of these videos again, I went ahead and mirrored them here using the yt-dlp tool. The Figs - Our beef with Dancing With The Stars Such a great and funny premise, the “Ok bud” call is excellent too.
In my first Hello World post on this blog, I mentioned that, since I work in Google Ads, I intended to place subtle below-the-fold display advertisements at the end of the posts on this website in order to learn more about how publishers use our product. I signed up for Google Ad Manager, which also required an AdSense account, and configured some house ads showing my family dogs. In fact, one of…
Since the creation of the derby pie in 1954, this simple American favorite has a tumultuous history of fate, intrigue, and litigation. From its naming out of a small Kentucky inn’s hat draw, to its branding by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the “most litigious confection in America”, a variation of the Kern Family’s Derby-Pie® secret recipe is revealed here and now from the faded ink of my…
A few weeks ago my friends hosted a Passover Seder. Calling upon the Goldman family tradition, I embarked upon my first attempt to cook my mother’s brisket. A staple of many Passovers and even the occasional Thanksgiving, the tender slices of meat smothered in a bright tomato gravy evoke childhood memories of holidays and family, the recipe and the aromas as familiar as the cracks on the sidewalk…
This past weekend I decided to go through Peter Shirley’s Ray Tracing in One Weekend, after which I made a few optimizations of my own. I never took a graphics course in college, so this was my first real exposure to the mathematics and C++ wizardry involved in harnessing the power of light to render cool 3D scenes like this: I highly recommend checking out the book yourself. I enjoyed…
Web Bundles, more formally known as Bundled HTTP Exchanges, are part of the Web Packaging proposal. This is an interesting change to the web platform based around the idea of packaging websites into a self-contained binary file. Much has been said already about the specifications and potential use cases, this post focuses on my early experience hacking on the feature. Bundling Hugo Sites Hugo is…
This began as a tongue-in-cheek internal document I wrote on a plane for work. Background I maintain a blog at jacogoldman.dev “monetized” via GPT (check out the ad featuring my dog below). It offers a quick and simple method for verifying production GPT as opposed to visiting cluttered publisher sites that slow devtools to a crawl (cough CNN cough). It also has some writing on it to…
My grandfather loved movies. In his house on the beach in Hull, he would record dozens of films on DVR. He called them “pictures” (pronounced pitch-ya) as in “motion pictures”. I fondly remember visiting the beach house in my youth and seeing him, comfortable in his great brown leather chair, with a movie playing in the background and waves crashing quietly in the distance.…
Living in Cambridge, MA without a car, I have learned to ride the T, Boston’s subway system operated by the MBTA. This has been a pleasant experience overall and I have enjoyed the relative flexibility and independence brought by public transit. Recently I became curious about the characteristics and history of the passenger cars I rode. Every transit system has a “rolling stock”…
Around 9 months ago I was impressed when GitHub Copilot was making the rounds on HN and Reddit, so I decided to enroll in the technical preview on my personal computer. I suppose my application finally came to term as I was finally able to see auto-completions for the first time today while fiddling with some JavaScript. Given that my personal projects have generated an embarrassing amount of dust…
console.log('Hello world!'); Welcome to my new blog! I am still playing around with the layout and [writing | design] styles, so please bear with me if things get weird and change around a bunch. Behind the Scenes I use Hugo to generate a static site from source controlled Markdown files. nginx then serves the outputted public directory. I am writing this post from within VSCode, which has been…
Hey there! I am a software engineer working at Google in Cambridge, MA. I am interested in video games, literature, and food. Check out my hello world post to get an idea of what I write about on this blog. Feel free to reach me through LinkedIn or find some of my projects on GitHub.