Blog

I recently visited Westville Correctional Facility, an Indiana penitentiary, to talk about jobs in the field of computing.

The Too Good To Go app has been my fixation this summer. Since moving to a new neighborhood two months ago, I’ve picked up 43 surprise bags (all the more absurd because I didn’t discover the app until two weeks after moving). Dramatically increasing my consumption of sandwiches and pastries wasn’t in my original goals for the summer, but here we are.

In January, during some time off between jobs, I started working through Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom. There aren’t that many accessible books for programming language design and implementation, so discovering the book (and that it was free to read online!) was very exciting.

Probably once a year, I end up back in the same discussion about timezones. I don’t like timezones and apparently I bring that up a lot….

I went to PyCon a few weeks ago and while there, saw Peter Wang’s keynote on a new project called PyScript. I think that’s going to have a significant impact on the Python world, though maybe not in the way you’d first expect.

I recently returned from a 10-day road trip. Nowhere too exciting, just through the middle of the continental US: St. Louis, Memphis, northeast Arkansas, and Champaign (home of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).

I recently crossed the 9-month mark as a Chicago resident. The time has come for a big decision: renew my lease, or make the move to a new apartment?

I suspect meetings at most American companies are full of jargon. While frustrating to newcomers, these terms and phrases typically have a fair amount of value. Shorthands for industry-specific concepts are useful, both in time savings and added precision.

In data science and engineering, technical skills are often the quickest way to early-career advancement – a new contributor who can write decent code is immediately an asset, in a way that a business-savvy developer with no coding ability is not…. I think that’s why technical people never learn how to run meetings.

With the announcement of Apple One in September, I decided to reevaluate my loyalty to Spotify. If Apple was going to offer me a (slightly) discounted rate if I went all-in on their services, I wanted to have a good look at Apple Music and see if it could replace Spotify for me…. After almost three months of use, my conclusion is that I could live with Apple Music, but I’d happily pay a small premium for Spotify instead.