TL;DR: I’ve learned things, built things, got employed at a thing, was sad about and thought about things, and am happy about things.

Ohai there. I said I’d post with what I’m up to over my break, so here are things:

• I got a job with an awesome data viz company which cares about the people they join on data (heh, get it?) as much as cool code
• I’ve been enjoying my last summer vacation with plenty of kalsarikännit before moving to (hopefully) consistent adulthood employment
• I’ve been re-discovering and admiring OG hackers of yore and their phone phreaking exploits
• I’ve been pondering mortality and how to effectively convert the data about it into a motivating and humbling visual
• I celebrated one year with my incredible SO
• I’ve begun a homebrew project to make my own batches of one of the world’s oldest libations (yes, Dad, it’s legal)
• I built a tracking and recipe management system so I have detailed and sharable records of said beverage (and, if you ask nicely, I might send you a bottle)
• I’ve been adjusting to my new MBP as a daily driver (my jumbo PC is mostly a game- and compiler-box now, but I’m appreciating the consistency of Bash full-time instead of my usual ebb/summer-flow of CLI speed)
• I’ve been watching the cryptocurrency market frolick aimlessly as my fun-money (shockingly) fails to spontaneously spawn a complete retirement plan
• I’ve been mourning for and with friends for their losses in the sudden and nightmarish NorCal wildfires (please donate money, time, or things to people who are helping; mark yourselves as safe so I don’t come bugging you — I’m fine; help those who aren’t)
• I’ve been learning Solidity, consulting, and contributing to a project to immortalize important texts on the blockchain (here’s to contributing to a blockchain project that ISN’T A NEW TOKEN OR CURRENCY YAYYYY)
• I’ve been serving as Sysadmin-In-Residence for the family business (unsurprisingly, when you teach people to Google well, most of the problems you come home to actually require your attention! Seriously! It’s un-ironically nice to have some puzzles and problems to solve when you come home instead of just rebooting a router and teaching how to use the printer. Fellow geek-children, take note — your parents are, in fact, smart; just show them the tools).
• I finally got around to enabling (and slowly instinct-ivizing) vi-style keybindings in Bash (when I can remember to use and practice them, they’re a Godsend… actually, they’re a pain in my behind, but I’m getting faster and better every time I use them… kinda like Vim… hm….)
• I’ve been admiring and enjoying life as I transition from an epoch marked by quarters, semesters, and midterms into one marked by new jobs, marriages, and children.

I still have a few weeks to go before day one at the new job (first full time job after a decade in the industry — a weird, exciting, and terrifying prospect), so expect a few more frivolous side projects and (hopefully) some alpha releases from projects I’m helping out with!

Today marks the end of two summers of interning with Facebook; I’ll be going away for a week and then the job hunt begins with a mess of interviews.

I’m so proud of my time at FB — the friends I’ve made, personal challenges faced, and skills developed. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what I’m feeling right now; it’s part excitement, part sadness, and many parts perspective looking forward and back.

Hey y’all. This has been a long and tiring (and sleepless) week, so in my restless hours, I built a web app to help you unplug, breathe deep, and recenter.

Hope you like it.

Head to defuse.xyz –>

[trigger warning: pretentious thinkpiece]

Tonight I was speaking with a new friend and the topic of what we do with our free time came up. In the course of describing what I do with my down hours (usually, coding), I realized I had never actually verbalized my reason behind this to anyone but her until then. At first glance, it may seem odd — I code all day; why would I want to do more of it in my free time, and especially dufus projects like what I usually pick?

And no, it’s not my brain.

nope forcibly shuts down your computer down like pulling out the plug. No shut down process, no graceful halt, just a crash and burn.

Because sometimes you just gotta say, ‘nope.’

Hi all. New implant tonight. I’m zonked so not much fanfare, but it’s an xEM that lets me clone contactless access cards (like cards to get into buildings, gym, etc.).

Check out the video here (don’t need a FB account to watch).

…because I make things like this. I have no regrets.

https://jkingsman.github.io/TheProclaimers/

Wait! Don’t run away! This is actually super cool. It’s a long post, but you’ll be super smart by the end ;)

Yesterday, an extremely exciting academic study from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam described tremendously exciting leaps in anti-aging drugs, often thought to be a holy grail of biological science. These results are so cool I wanted to break them down into layman’s terms for people who aren’t necessarily interested in hardcore microbiology (if you are, the original paper can be found in Cell (paywalled; reduced but public version is here)). By the end, you’ll know enough to perfectly understand the title! I’ve taken some scientific liberties in breaking it down into easily explainable terms, but for the most part, everything here is pretty much accurate, if a bit simplified.

Tech debt: a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution.^source

Research institutions often suffer from the effects of technical debt that slow processing, lead to inflexible procedures and pipelines, and ultimately limit the potential for forward progress in high speed academic environments. This article covers three key ways that researchers can begin to tackle the issue of tech debt.

As you may or may not have heard, the CIA has recently had a major document trove released about the works of CCI in Langley. There are lots of analyses of the technical aspects (including on the leak homepage).

Politics aside, I’m mainly enjoying seeing the internals of a different developer/company/government culture — some of them are hilarious, some of them are laughably relatable (who doesn’t have notes scrawled somewhere about handling git submodules so they don’t have to hit StackOverflow), and some of them are reminders that software devs gonna software dev, no matter who signs the paycheck!