The surprising link between music orchestration and software development — I have to be honest: I didn’t think I would end up being a software engineer. When I moved to Los Angeles after grad school, I was hoping to score music for films. Although my quest to break into the industry did land me a couple of credits (and my…

It was after my trip to the emergency room when my cardiologist said a word that stuck with me: “programmed”. She was not talking about software. I had been teaching a data science bootcamp at the University of Southern California when I started feeling off — my neck was hot…

As wildfires burn across Siberia and temperatures in Antartica soar 70 degrees above normal, people are paying more attention to the environment. It is high time to ask an obvious question: “Where are the green jobs?” A concerned developer wants to know. There are lots of jobs out there for…

Know the working of strings — It is time you gained membership in the secret society of the dark question marks �����. This may be the last explanation of encodings you will ever need to read. I had run afoul of string encodings for years, but it wasn’t until I started working with Elixir that I…

Incremental changes do not provide emergency exits for a failing system. It’s time to recognize when a tool is not useful — You want an intro that goes straight for the jugular? Here’s one: Agile methodology’s veneration of small incremental improvements is bullshit. I am not here to worship waterfalls or eulogize Kanban, and I’m not saying all of Agile’s philosophy is bad — I could even argue that small incremental improvements…

Necessity is the mother of invention… or in the case of software, need begets packages. And packages require names, preferably something cool that maybe invokes the supernatural and/or throwbacks to ’90s television. So here’s my little PSA about Xfile, my latest Elixir package. Recursively List Files I kept encountering shortcomings when using Elixir’s…

Stars aligned last week — while I was busy digging into how to document Ecto database schemas in some Elixir applications, I saw a relevant Stackoverflow post, basically asking how to do this very thing. So here’s my official un-official release of the package I had been working on: Inspecto…

Russian tanks are rolling on Kyiv and fellow Ukrainian developers are swapping laptops for Kalashnikovs, so I felt a timely topic would be more appropriate than my usual development drivel. In the United States, the reaction to Russia’s aggression has been mixed. Republicans have declared the party’s “solidarity” with Ukraine…

Wordle might be the best thing to have come out of the pandemic, and my engineering brain latched onto it immediately after playing it. …