I am not a casual user of profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity. Despite being surrounded by people and media where casual use is de rigueur, I choose not to use it. It doesn’t bother me much when I hear it used, and I don’t mind it in TV shows and movies, although I appreciate the cleverness of…
For years, I’ve wanted a personal archive system that allows me to easily search all of my documents, email, and other information in a useful way. Over the last few months, I’ve finally built the first iteration of what I am calling my Personal Archive System, or PAS for short. Back in September, I wrote…
Late last year I set myself some goals to tackle in 2023. These goals fell into three areas in which I am seeking improvement: (1) consolidation, (2) simplification, and (3) automation. In setting those goals, I wrote the following: I believe I can get away with two primary work product formats: plain text files used…
I’ve spend much of this week writing code for a fairly significant update to some software my team rolled out in May. Much of it was refactoring (from about 4,000 lines of Groovy script down to about 900), some of it was making things more efficient, and a lot of it was to make the…
Over on his blog, The Waiter’s Pad, Mike Dariano asks, “How much coding do you really need?” It is an interesting thought piece. He observes that, What we really mean when we say, “people should know how to code” is that people should be able to use tools to deliver value. I’ve been coding for…
In his recent column in WIRED, Paul Ford has a great metaphor for science, one that really resonates with me as a software developer. He writes, After a while you realize that science itself is just an API to nature, a bunch of kludges and observations that work well enough to get the job done.…
Not long ago, I came across Ryan Holiday’s notecard system for remembering, organizing, and using everything he reads. It was instantly appealing to me, the way that reading about John Gadd’s journals changed the way I did my own journals back in 2017. You can read about Ryan’s methods at length, but the gist of…
Since I am on vacation and happened to find myself with an empty hour this afternoon, I managed to clean up my code enough to where I was willing to put my Obsidian daily notes automation script on GitHub. This is the script that I use to automate the creation of my daily notes in…
While reading Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Code Breaker, I was particularly struck by some seemingly minor details. The book is a fascinating look into the modern process of scientific discovery, and there was some discussion of how a discovery written in a lab book and then signed by witnesses in order to document the…
Author’s Note: This essay is the second in a series on how I learned to write code. You may want to check out Part 1 if you haven’t already done so. By the time I got my VIC-20, the computer was already outdated, but I wasn’t complaining. There was only one problem: I didn’t know…
Recently, I passed a personal milestone. It is an arbitrary milestone, one for which I am the sole judge, but it is one that has been 37 years in the making. I have been a professional developer (coder) for about 27 years now. In that time, I’ve generally had no problem considering myself a professional.…
I felt productive at work today! I spent the entire day working on SQL stored procedures for importing data. Pretty routine work, but I did some innovative validation stuff, that should make it easier for a person to validate the data that gets imported into the database. I was in good flow and both the morning…