software engineer · enthusiastic technologist · curiosity advocate
I like to think of myself as a relatively curious person, and as a professional who builds software, that often has a lot of benefits. But one big downside is that I have a lot of itches to scratch, and I’ve never been able to satisfy them by doing just one thing. I love what our team has built at UpHex and the work we’re doing to make analytics monitoring easy for businesses everywhere. I wanted…
I frequently get questions from my other technologist friends in SF, Boulder, NY, and elsewhere about what it’s like in Charlottesville. I’ve lived here for a little over a decade now, and while New York will always be my home, Charlottesville has many things to recommend it. The technology profession has the great advantage of not requiring us to be tethered to a specific physical location; if…
Like many Linux distributions, Debian comes with a package management and distribution system called apt (Advanced Package Tool). While apt is a very useful feature of Debian systems, upgrading packages can be a little daunting. Here’s what a recent apt-get upgrade looked like for me: ψ sudo apt-get upgrade [sudo] password for jxf: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading…
To see a world in a grain of sand, And Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” Infinity is an idea that has fascinated humans for a long time. To some it can seem inscrutable. For others, it symbolizes the mystical or spiritual. For mathematicians, it’s a tool that’s essential to working with and understanding…
The “Cheryl’s Birthday” problem has attracted a lot of press, with CNN , the Washington Post , Slate , and the Telegraph and countless others weighing in. There’s plenty of explanations that give a good overview of the problem and show you how to work out the solution to the problem via a series of logical deductions. But what if we could just ask a computer to find the answer for us? The problem…
Jekyll is a popular static site generator written in Ruby and in wide use. A major selling point for Jekyll adoption is that it provides some excellent defaults out of the box, heavily geared towards the assumption that you’re writing a blog. It does this largely by taking a convention-over-configuration approach; the defaults are designed to be sensible choices for the majority of its users.…
Every once in a while, I’ll think about a somewhat morbid and yet universal question: how long do I have left to live? While no one knows for sure when their time will eventually run out, everyone confronts the reality of their ultimate fate sooner or later , willingly or not. Thanks to its continuous presence in all human lives, people have thought about death quite a bit. One of my favorite…
It’s probably unusual to start the first post for a blog by talking about one’s past failures, and yet few things seem more appropriate right now. My failure to start and commit to any kind of blog has been a recurring thorn in my side. There’s always been a litany of perfectly plausible excuses to draw on: I don’t have enough time right now Other things in my life are more important Building my…