Hey there

I don’t have some revolutionary new take on daily standups or anything like that. This isn’t some grand reworking of any part of the agile manifesto. It’s another rant. Eventually, if you’re a developer, you will have to take part of a daily standup call, where everyone has to give an update on the previous day and state what they plan to do during the day. I understand why this is a valuable meeting in the ideal case: everyone on the team gets updated on what everyone else did and is doing without having to repeat themselves....

A couple of years ago, I was helping with an acquisition at my company. The company we were acquiring had one product, a B2B web app. One of the things that came up during the first couple of days of reviewing their system setup was their monitoring. They had some very nice looking Grafana dashboards set up. I want to discuss one of them in particular, because I don’t really remember what the others said....

One thing that I love to do is visit National Parks. Visiting them all is on my bucketlist. Some people really like to collect the cancellation stamps; I am more concerned with witnessing and experienceing all these amazing natural areas. At the time of writing this, there are 63 parks, and I have been to about 18 of them. I say “about” because I am not 100% sure that I went to certain ones since I went when I was a kid (Grand Teton, Haleakala)....

This is not going to be anything revolutionary, but I have observed this about myself and what works for me. If I have 30 minutes or so between meetings, very little programming work is going to get done in that amount of time. By programming work, I mean the kind of deep work that you get done when you’re in flow state and you aren’t staring at the blank cursor. It ususally seems like it takes 10-15 minutes to get into that state....

I was doing a bit of job searching recently, and I applied to a company throgh a referral from a friend who worked there, so it was a little more high stakes than just a run-of-the-mill interview, as I wanted to leave a good impression at the very minimum. This was a full stack position, and I made it to the technical assessment. There was a database component, a backend component (python), and a front end component (Vue....

Several years ago, I took over partial data ownership a web application at work. The front end was a mishmash of Javascript and PHP, and the backend was C#. There were some areas for improvement there, but it was workable. However, the most glaring problem was the database. The entire application was backed by as single node Amazon Redshift database. I am here to spread the word: DON’T USE AMAZON REDSHIFT… …as the only database for your entire modern web application....

If you’re reading this, that means I was able to get this website up and running. This site is running on the Hugo framework, which is a static site generator written in Go with the PaperMod theme. I have written a static site before with Pelican, which is based on Python. There are static site generators written in all sorts of languages – I tend to gravitate towards the ones that I like for programming, but in reality, the language doesn’t matter as much because most of the writing that I do is some form of markdown....