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A common pattern I’ve seen over the years have been folks in engineering leadership positions that are not super comfortable with extracting and interpreting data from stores, be it databases, CSV files in an object store, or even just a spreadsheet. We’re going to cover SQL & DuckDB, then some useful statistical tools: summary stats, distributions, confidence intervals and Bayesian reasoning.
It’s been over 14 years since the original 7 Languages in 7 Weeks was first published, giving a hands on tour of Ruby, Clojure, Haskell, Io, Scala, Erlang and Prolog. Ruby achieved critical mass, to some degree so did Scala, with the others being popular within their specific niches. This post shows 7 languages worth exploring in 2025.
I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with my team about our career ladder, and what it means to be “senior” in a software engineering context. It’s a little different in every company, but here is my view.
Anecdotally, one of the more maligned features of the Heroku platform are the 24-hour limits on compute units, known as “dynos”. This is actually a good thing, but very misunderstood.
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Waymo’s factory, a map of US land values, ships in the Arctic Circle, battery industry trends, and more.
What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.
It’s been fantastic being in the Philippines for this year’s WordCamp Asia. We have attendees from 71 countries, over 1,800 tickets sold, and contributor day had over 700 people! It’s an interesting contrast to US and EU WordCamps as well in that the audience is definitely a lot younger, and there’s very little interest in … Continue reading WordCamp Asia and Maha Kumbh Mela →
Plus the government did the stupid thing after all.
Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree. A little while ago I watched a video by Hank Green called “$4.5M to Spray Alcoholic Rats with Bobcat Urine”. Green has been banging this drum for a while. He hits some of the same notes as Watson, but from a different angle. This last month has been a lot, and I’ve withdrawn from news and social media quite a bit because of it. Part of this is because I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s also because I’ve felt overwhelmed. There are now a lot of bad-faith actors in positions of power. Part of their game plan is to spray a mass of obviously false, intellectually shallow, enraging nonsense into the world as quickly as possible. At a certain point the bullshit seeps in if you’re soaking in it. The ability to control over what you see next is powerful. I think it would be great if more people started being a bit more choosy about who they give that control to.
