While I unfortunately haven’t had a lot of time to contribute to Factor for a couple of years, I still love using it for the little random programming tasks I have to deal with day-to-day. Factor’s design makes it perfect for the kind of exploratory work that hits at the fringe of what it makes sense to automate. And on top of that, I still think Factor should be more widely used, so I like doing what little I can with what time I have to “make fetch happen”. One of my current addictions is…

For quite some time, I’ve had an appreciation for text-based tooling. Not (necessarily) for terminal-based tooling, mind—there are some meaningful benefits to using a GUI, after all—but for solutions that truly think of plaintext as their source of truth. To that end, I’ve been using a nice Python tool called jrnl for years, which makes maintaining a pure text journal really easy. All jrnl really does is to automate maintaining a simple text file in a straightforward way, and providing a few…

The best teacher I ever had on how to write and how to code was a complete charlatan hack who conned his way into Duke’s English department. No wait, hear me out: the prof (let’s call him Matt, because I’m not even entirely sure he gave us his real name) was an awful professor in most respects. He didn’t grade anything, I’m dubious he had any teaching credentials in the first place, he often didn’t even bother showing up to class at all, and, while I’m about 95% sure he had some college degree,…

Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Dogs, I thought it would be great to offer you falsehoods programmers believe about mankind’s other best friend. But since I don’t know what that is, here’s instead a version about cats. Cats would never eat your face. Cats would never eat your face while you were alive.[1] Okay, cats would sometimes eat your face while you’re alive, but my cat absolutely would not. Okay, fine. At least I will never run out of cat food. You’re kidding me. There…

For reasons that I’ll save for another blog post, I decided recently to ditch pretty much the entire Apple ecosystem I’d been using for the last decade. That’s meant gradually transitioning from macOS to Ubuntu, and from iOS to Android. Of course, to ditch iOS for Android required a new phone; after some research, I opted for a Google Pixel 2. The Pixel 2’s been a great phone and has lots of interesting features, but one of the more esoteric features is called Moving Images. These are Google’s…

When the Apple Watch first came out, my initial reaction was basically disgust. Everywhere I looked, I saw people already Krazy Glued to their phones, missing the world around them to live instead in the small mini-Matrix in their pocket. Now, Apple was proposing to add additional distractions right on our wrist, making it even easier to ignore real life and stay focused on a screen instead. Not only was the Apple Watch not for me; it was a sad commentary on how tech was ruining our lives. Yet…

Yeah, that’s right: there’s finally something I feel so negatively about that I’m unsatisfied hating it all by myself; I want you to hate it, too. So let’s talk about why Slack is destroying your life, piece by piece, and why you should get rid of it immediately before its trail of destruction widens any further—in other words, while you still have time to stop the deluge of mindless addiction that it’s already staple-gunned to your life. 1. It encourages use for both time-sensitive and…

This should be a hard blog post to write–after all, it’s the one where I openly admit I had an emotional breakdown and saw a mental health professional–but it’s actually easy. And it’s easy because it has a good ending: facing long odds and a frustrating situation, I ended up turning everything around and getting a place where I love my job and I’m a happy person again. But this is not one of those times where the journey was the fun part. No, I’d really preferred to have skipped the journey…

Edit: Mere days after posting this (and unrelated to this post), Google publicly apologized for the Android 6 roll-out delay and pushed out Android 6.0.0 to Nexus 6 devices. They then followed that up extremely rapidly with the Android 6.0.1 update. I think this bodes incredibly well. Project Fi is still a very new service, and I’ve little doubt that Google has to work out some kinks of their end. For the moment, I’m going to take a step back, watch, and see if this new rapid update cycle is…

When I was in high school, I used to do competitive speech.[1] I didn’t really want to do competitive speech as such; what I wanted to do was competitive debate. After all, debate was way more fun: you got to argue, on purpose, about things with little actual consequence! And you got more points for being the best arguer! What’s not to love? Sadly, my school didn’t have enough people to do both debate and speech; we had to pick one, and since the overwhelming majority of my fellow classmates…