More than Coding: What is Exploratory Work?

This blog runs on Jekyll, and I generate my post templates using Rake commands. When getting set up on a new laptop I ran into a new issue: $ rake draft["blog title"] zsh: no matches found: draft[blog title] Apple changed the default shell from bash to zsh back in 2019 with macOS Catalina. zsh helpfully tries to expand the square bracket...

This is a really small programming “style” best practice that came up at work last week. TLDR; don’t pre-concatenate strings in Java log calls! I’m working in Java now after a long stint in Scala-land. I used Java in university and at my first few internships but haven’t worked in it since then. So, there are a lot of coding conventions and best...

I built a Slack bot with a coworker for our internal company hackathon. It was….an experience! Here are some notes that might be useful to other folks. Our team runs a company-public “help” channel, which is meant for folks outside of our team to ask questions. Unsurprisingly, many of these questions are repetitive, and answering them is a drain...

I subscribe to several Patreons that offer paywalled video content. Some of these are reference materials that I might want to re-watch over and over again, and I find it annoying to have to stream them when I could just download the videos and have them available offline. There are loads of sketchy Chrome and Firefox extensions that purport to...

My organization typically interviews in pairs: two interviewers, one candidate. This is beneficial for several reasons: it helps interviewers calibrate against each other, it frees up one person to take notes while the other asks a question, it helps the candidate meet more potential coworkers during the process. Sometimes it also creates an...