Thoughts on Object Oriented Class Design
The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you...
Recent Posts
Creating a Budget and Sticking to It
The hardest part of doing anything is starting. If you’re someone who has delayed getting serious about retirement savings, or budgeting in general, I would ...
Sync dotfiles with GitHub
What are dotfiles?
My favorite coding interview question
Every software engineering interview I have ever participated in has involved a coding exercise. For one position, I would expect three two five separate cod...
Picking a place to live in the East Bay
My wife and I recently bought a house in the San Francisco bay area. Having no family in the area, and no real ties to any neighborhood, it was surprisingly ...
Why software engineers should maintain a blog
I have a few pieces of standard advice that I give to anyone starting out in software engineering. Join a startup, max out your 401k and start a blog. Why sh...
Creating International CSV files with Python
You might assume that reading and writing files using the CSV format, being a simple and human-readable implementation, would be relatively pain free. You wo...
Designing a Dimensional Schema for a hierarchy that can change over time
I’ve recently been reading about dimensional schemas, aka star schemas. The whole idea seems to be to optimize for fast queries that are also simple to write...
Enabling SOLR autocommit with a custom Haystack backend
By default Django Haystack makes updates to your Solr index available for searching immediately. It does this in the simplest way possible, it commits every ...
Debugging an IE7 browser crash (manual git bisect)
Every once in a while, you have to put in a heroic effort to diagnose a bug. When you finally figure it out, you want to run around the office singing “We ar...