Hollywood memoirs aren't things I normally read. I like movies, but usually I prefer the characters to the actors, so I'm fine being ignorant. Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me by Ralph Macchio ended up in my hands after helping a neighbor with a computer problem. The problem was …

Architecture Patterns with Python by Harry Percival and Bob Gregory

I learned about this book by watching Harry Percival's 2020 PyCon talk Stop Using Mocks (for a while). In the past, I was pretty enthusiastic about mocks, especially in Python because they, along with patching, let me test just about …

I set up an eero Pro 6 mesh network in my house this past week. These are my first impressions of the system.

Why

Earlier this year, my employer decided that the pandemic-motivated "work from home" policy would continue indefinitely for the engineering department. After moving a few PCs from …

Douglas Crockford, in JavaScript: The Good Parts said, “Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make.” As someone who builds software, that idea can make you feel pretty good about your intellectual place in the world, because even though I don't know how lots of software works, I …

After working at home for a couple of years, it was hard to get back in the car every morning to commute after changing jobs. I'm lucky that it isn't that far, but it still felt like a monumental waste of time to be stuck in traffic. Podcasts have redeemed …

Sometime when I was a teenager, my step-dad gave me a box full of sci-fi and war novels. I'm not sure where he got them -- maybe in bulk at a garage sale or something. Years later, many of them are still sitting on a shelf, mostly unread. I thought I'd …

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a quick, easy to read introduction to usability, especially as it relates to web design.

Some sections are very web-specific, but you'll also find plenty of things that apply to any kind of user interface. He also doesn't try to be comprehensive, often …

Offsite backup for critical files

This task has been lingering undone on my to-do list for months. I imagined that I'd figure out some way to use Dropbox, Google Drive, Sky Drive, or something to keep my data safe in case something catastrophic happened at the house. All those solutions …

1. Two reminders

I want a reminder at the specified reminder time, and another one at the appointment start time. This is how it typically goes for me:

PHONE: Ding!\ ME: Oh yeah, I've got that meeting in 10 minutes. Let me just finish this little bit of code in …

I've read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think it's not quite there yet.

The book I read is Jez Humble and …