Notes by Isaac

Swamp milkweed in bloom (Asclepias incarnata) From the day the swamp milkweed went into our rain garden, I noticed a world began to unfurl in its leaves, flowers, and seed pods.

December 1974.

A small smart ring to discretely dictate notes, with 2 years of battery life, and phone-local transcription for $75 was enough to pique my interest.

Last year I wrote a post discussing some of the common ways to test assumptions and features to make sure that you're only building what's worth putting a lot of effort into.

In any given process, there is a single bottleneck, and that bottleneck determines the throughput of the entire process.

Working longer hours means improving faster.

Most people don’t know this, but you can do just about anything.

A quick amendment to this post can be found here.

Systems thinking become clearer once you have a credible model of the system you're investigating.

Introduction In this post, I present a minimal personal productivity system.1 This article is for people who would like to improve their professional and personal effectiveness and reliability, while managing to reduce task anxiety.

I've recently run into a couple behaviors which I found odd with respect to how SQLite decided to execute a particular query (and those with some similar characteristics).

DNA sequencing is the process by which we extract from raw cells a string of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs, known as a DNA sequence.

I got a message from Omar Camarena about my post "e and Clojure"; I had misstated an identity equating e to the expectation of a random process.

Many backend systems, while difficult and expensive to construct, are very similar to one another in a fundamental way; they manage state, over time, as it responds to external events.

If you work in the terminal regularly, and particularly if you work on a number of ongoing software projects, and particularly if you try to do everything code-related in the terminal, you should be using tmux [wiki] to mux your tees.

I was part of a fun little excursion into the world of fintech (née “financial technology”) this weekend.

Though I know I'm late to the party, I've been enjoying poking around Chas Emerick's newest project, Clojure Atlas.

If you love using Pandora, but really wish they had a command-line (or at least non-Flash) version of the desktop application, this post will make your day.

(Written about Clojure 1.2.)

A few weeks ago a provoking question was posted on StackOverflow asking if, for example, Common-Lisp's `numberp` could be written using only the primitives that John McCarthy presented in [his now famous essay introducing LISP](http://www-formal.stanford.…

What is the Golden Ratio?

Judging from the buzz on Twitter, the mailing list, Hacker News and other places where this kind of buzz occurs, Clojure's popularity is rapidly growing.

A few articles made the rounds a number of weeks ago, all talking about computing Euler's Number, e, using Clojure.