Posts

22 July 2018Amazon's Culture of Discomfort

The door desk is a well known part of Amazon's culture but there is an unknown part that has a larger impact on how the company operates.

25 March 2018Splootysplotty: Open Source Alternative to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky

A trend in the open source community is to use cute naming of well known concepts for a project. This is a satire of that based on Lewis Carroll's famous work.

11 October 2017An Email from Edsger Dijkstra's Son

Marcus Dijkstra came across my blog post on how I improved my handwriting and used Edsger's as inspiration. He sent me an email with more details about how Edsger maintained his script.

20 June 2016Iowa, Pigs, Microchips, and Founding Silicon Valley

Robert Noyce was the creator of the microchip, cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and was one of the people that created Silicon Valley. He grew up in Iowa like I did and it turns out a single pig almost thwarted and changed the future of technology.

29 November 2015The Bram Moole-Laaw: There Will be Attempts to Rewrite Vim in Nearly Every New Language

An attempt at naming the Vim rewrite phenomenon that we all have seen.

22 August 2015Self Documenting Vim Key Mappings

A little trick to be able to list and view all key mappings that are grouped. It works great for custom plugin mappings.

07 March 2015Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned in my High School Calculus Class

I learned a lot through my high school years growing up but I learned the most in my class of Precalculus and Calculus during my last two years. It set the foundation for everything later in my life.

13 February 2015Why I Blog

It has been over four months since I last blogged. It has been the longest draught since I started blogging. This is a reminder to myself why I blog.

11 October 2014The Similarity of the World in Gattaca and the World Elon Musk Envisions

I explore some of the interesting similarities between the world in Gattaca and the world that Elon Musk dreams of.

03 October 2014Heavy-handed HackerNews: Mods are Unnecessarily Editing Titles and Swapping URLs

Some recent events on HackerNews got me a bit frustrated over how some admins are moderating the site.

26 July 2014Oh-my-zsh is the Disease and Antigen is the Vaccine

I used oh-my-zsh for years but finally got fed up with the slow issue resolution and rate of development. Antigen is a far better solution for managing your zsh configuration. I take a look at why it is better and how to set it up in this post.

30 June 2014GitHub + University: A Follow Up

Revisiting my previous post on using GitHub for College.

13 June 2014Put Yourself Out There: The Myth of the Genius Programmer

A year ago I decided to put myself out there and face my fear of being vulnerable by starting a blog. I look at what has happened since then and how great of an experience it has been.

15 May 2014Josh Uses This

My attempt at mimicking UsesThis.com and listing what hardware and software I use in my current setup.

12 April 2014A Beginner's Tutorial for knitr

knitr is a way to write LaTeX, HTML, and Markdown with R code interlaced. knitr seamlessly adds code, charts, and anything else that R can do straight into the document. This tutorial explains the basics of it.

05 April 2014Vim Tab Madness. Buffers vs Tabs

Vim's buffers vs tabs is a hot topic. Vim's idea of what a tab is leads to a lot of confusion and is actually really limiting. Using buffers correctly is far more powerful. I explore that in this post as I was confused for a long time by it.

15 March 2014My New Site to Demand Two Factor Auth Support

Two factor auth is available on a lot of websites but missing for some very important ones. We need to encourage best practice standards for all companies that have sensitive data. This website helps with that.

12 February 2014Doing Your Homework in LaTeX

Using LaTeX to write up your homework for university isn't as hard as some people think. In fact it has quite a few benefits, I discuss them here.

19 January 2014GitHub + University: How College Coding Assignments Should Work

Looking at how to use GitHub for college programming assignments and how to simplify the workflow.

30 September 2013The Differences Between Imperative and Functional Programming. Part 1.

An explanation of imperative and functional programming paradigms. Part 2 will include pros and cons and example code.

31 August 2013Never Save Anything for the Swim Back. Ever.

I put my mantra, 'I never save anything for the swim back', everywhere. I finally explain where it came from and why it means so much to me.

11 August 2013My Favorite Elon Musk Quote

Elon Musk, the visionary behind Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has a cool quote at SXSW 13, he said he tries to put someone's heart above their brain when evaluating someone.

24 July 2013C: A Minute to Learn... A Lifetime to Master

The C syntax can be deceptively simple at first. Yet it has features (such as pointers) that create complexity. We explore that a bit and uncover some resources that help "master" C.

17 July 2013Where Do I Sign Up to Change the World?

If there's only one thing I'm certain about in my life, it's that I want to leave this world having made it a better place than when I came into it.

07 July 2013Verification is Often Easier than Creation

A quote in a textbook chapter talking about P vs NP got me thinking about what it means for something to work well.

01 July 2013Program to an Interface, Fool

Explanation of the classic saying of 'program to an interface' with an example in the Rust programming language.

22 June 2013Phil Zimmermann, Creator of PGP, Quote on Government & Crypto from 1996

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, successfully predicted an incident similar to the one happening right now with PRISM and the NSA over 17 years ago.

16 June 2013The Rise of the Gang of Four with Rust

How a classic book on OOP is being brought back to life with the Rust programming language.

09 June 2013The Legacy of the Clicky Keyboards

How I started to love clicky keyboards and ended up buying one of my own.

02 June 2013The New Google Maps User Experience

Some thoughts and musings about the new Google Maps interface.

27 May 2013The Difference Between TDD and BDD

Explanation of the difference between TDD and BDD using an example in JavaScript.

20 May 2013The Path to Dijkstra's Handwriting

How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.

11 May 2013The Beginning of a Beautiful Blogship

How I went from trying to hide on the internet to fully embracing it.