BlogDB

Examining My Biases via My Fiction

About four months ago, I seriously started eating disorder recovery, working with a new therapist and a nutritionist.  I’ve also taught my class on how to be an ally to people with eating disorders...

Setting up VSCode for Ansible Lightspeed AI in Ubuntu 22.04 desktop

Red Hat launched the Ansible Lightspeed Code Assistant Generative AI with IBM Watson Code Assistant in May 2023. This preview is now available to all Ansible users, allowing them to explore the tec...

Radicals Are Losers

Radicals, at least the core base of them, have to, by definition, be losers. People usually only take stances for changing society, especially fundamentally changing society, if they see a problem ...

The Gardener's Trap

Humanity has convenience and choice to such a point it borders on vice. Humanity assumes, due to said convenience and choice being an easy-to-digest abstraction over the complex reality of the worl...

I gave up on statistics

For a very long time it has been almost essential to track traffic on your site and peek on the analytics. But what if you... don't?

Strong focus

I have a strong opinion on how strong your focus indicators should be. They should be strong!

Moving into a New Data Centre with Equinix MA5

We’d been operating out of the Equinix MA2 Reynolds House data centre in Manchester for many years - it was our first POP/colocation site which we originally came to when it was called IFL2. Howeve...

Brute-forcing the NYT Digits game

You’re given a list of integers and a target number. You can add, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers, and you can use the result for future operations. Once you have used a number in an operatio...

Craft your own serverless observability platform

How do you build your own observability platform? And should you?

Maintaining the past

One of the nasty parts of having a long internet presence is that you have all those old things still around. So, I preserved a quirks mode test page.

External links with the least HTML

These days we have the need to display links to external sites with an accompanying icon. Typical implementations involve adding lots of extra elements under the hood. Is there a way to get it done...

How to Blow Up a Timeline

NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so...

Startup Friday

A couple of years ago, I came up with this concept and have tried to keep it in mind at all times.

My personal one-pager

A short write-up about creating my portfolio website.

Tips on DP + Bitmasking for competitive programming

A birthday invitation

1 July 2023 is a totally not important date for the world but it just happened that I was born exactly 29 Earth circles around the Sun before that date. The thing is, while the Earth is rotating ar...

Bash completion for aliases

Bash completion is a wonderful feature that allows you quickly compose complex shell commands. Add muscle memory to the mix, and one-liners will appear on the screen as if you were typing with 20 f...

Floats in 2023

Floats used to be the way to do the entire layout. Since moving to responsive mobile first design and flexbox people have avoided them. Could they still be actually useful in the current age?

Fight Club has the answers

It’s a few hours after watching the Fight Club for the second time in my life that I write these words. It's been more than decade since I watched it for the first time and even though I had liked ...

The Optics

The significance of questioning widely-held beliefs and how this can lead to new insights.