An encouraging thing happened to me last year. I was faced with a mystery involving how a bit of application code was interacting with ActiveRecord. It seemed like we were calling ActiveRecord properly, but the query wasn’t coming out quite right. In years past, this would have likely stymied me; productivity lost! But this time, … Continue reading These are computers, I know this →

Best albums, singles of the years. Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Top 100 smooth jazz to fall asleep to. We love to put music into boxes and then rank the items in those boxes. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the string section of the orchestra, … Continue reading Music ranked: the string section →

I spent some time this weekend attempting to make front-end code with Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a utility-first approach to CSS wherein styles are organized into classes by how they function, not what they style. Instead of avatar-image as a class name on a user’s photo, you would probably have m-4, roughly meaning “margin four”. … Continue reading A foray into building interface →

I’m refreshing my understanding of mainstay Rails libraries lately1. This week, it’s OmniAuth. When you sign-in (authenticate) to website A (say dev.to) via website B (say GitHub), that’s delegated authentication and the protocol underneath it is OAuth2. OAuth2 is a bit tricky because there is a lot of back-and-forth between the service that the user … Continue reading Refreshing my Rails: OmniAuth →

Gorillaz, Demon Days - this one holds up, still a solid album. News to me, Moby has been making extended ambient tracks in some manner of partnership with the Calm app. They make good “I need to focus and get stuff done” music, but aren’t particularly high energy, if that’s your thing. Says Moby, "my … Continue reading Gorillaz & Moby & Van Vaudeville & Soulection →

They're on our phones, in our voicemails. Computers or sometimes even humans calling in massive volumes, funneling people into bad purchases. Questionable insurance at best, outright fraud at worst. Sometimes, depending on the state you live in, politics! There's no reason to pick up on an unknown number in 2019, or even 2009. For many … Continue reading Robocalls. What a concept! →

Space isn’t a dead-end, it’s just taking us longer to figure out than our earliest trajectory. The New Yorker has a great look at The Race to Develop the Moon for industrial purposes: Lunar construction projects now look feasible. “Down the hall, we have a telerobotics lab,” Burns said. “You could print components of habitats, … Continue reading How we get back to space →

Unclogging the blog pipes here… Think better I feel seen - Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work: For more open-ended problems, much of the challenge lies in figuring out what to do next. These rich questions offer deep satisfaction on longer time scales, but without a clear sense of progress, each day ends ambiguously. Was … Continue reading The notes – May 6, 2018 →

Into the Great Wide Open strikes me as a singular album. Perhaps it's not even the best Tom Petty album, but it stands out from the rest in some kind of way. Maybe it's nostalgia? It's the first Petty album I bought. Maybe it's humble? None of the songs are flashy, sitting right on the fence … Continue reading What makes Into the Wide Open such a great album? →

At some point in what feels like the very distant past, I bought The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero. For six years, apparently, I’ve flipped past it on the way to reading other things. For some of that time, I was convinced I’d already read it. I was wrong, I just started reading it, … Continue reading Why are you building this? →