Hoarding Minimalist. Product-minded Software Engineer. Usually confused. on Kevin Quinn

This is a simple serverless design pattern that has come in handy numerous times during my career.

I was recently walking past Equinox, the fancy $250/mo gym, and was thinking about at what level of income you’d have to be at for that to be a no-brainer, “Starbucks coffee”-level, decision.

I naively thought I could apply the same complex & scalable solutions used by actual companies to my side projects.

As a long time user of Pi-hole (and now NextDNS ) to unclog my network from all the garbage ads the internet serves, I’ve always been amazed at the speed at which their systems operate.

Impostor syndrome sucks, and without hearing from real people, you can easily assume every software engineer is a god-tier FAANG architect mage who eats Leetcode Hard problems for breakfast, and never makes a mistake (or at least, I did).

I’m no data scientist, but inspired by Spotify Wrapped (and even more so by Jimmy John’s Wrapped ) - let’s continue the descent into year-end madness and make a Venmo Wrapped!

Recently I had a small get together with a variety of friend groups that didn’t all know each other, and inspired by Nick Gray’s cocktail party suggestions , we used name tags and had people choose an icebreaker for themselves (that’s not how Nick recomme…

The problem: you need to decode a JSON string, but at some point in the process you don’t control, unescaped double quotes are inserted into your string values.

To entertain you, a short clip of me playing Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” on my 5th grade recorder. ⬅ Back to About

Life is a long string of making mistakes and learning lessons.

I had a vague understanding that different states had different levels of taxes (wow Florida with that no-income tax woot woot!)

You want to self-host apps for fun or privacy - but not the ‘running servers in your garage’ type of self-hosted.

Calculating the total cost of a graduated pricing scheme is a PITA if you have to do it more than once - and Stripe’s Price dashboard unfortunately doesn’t have any tooling to help you.

The web is Fun, therefore this site should be Fun.

You want to self-host apps for fun or privacy - but not the ‘running servers in your garage’ type of self-hosted.

You want to self-host apps for fun or privacy - but not the ‘running servers in your garage’ type of self-hosted.

Like so many tinkerers, I love to automate small parts of my life, while ignoring any actual work I should be doing.

There are skills, tools, and ideas my CS program didn’t teach and which I hope to gather here in case someone in the future finds it useful.

If I got teleported back and was starting a college CS program this year, I would do a few things differently than my first go around.

You don’t have to be a software developer writing code to break into working at a tech company.

“Turtles all the way down” As an engineer, I always thought sales was this distant land of people with slicked-back hair, and that I’d never have to concern myself with it - but I’ve misled myself.

Looking for a new way to annoy1 your website visitors?

There is a double standard in how we treat learning experiences.

If a genie could snap their fingers and give you 500 hours to spend on anything, what would you use it for?

I struggle to make habits stick in my life — that is, the good ones.

As someone who easily gets caught up in research & over-analyzing how to do new things, I need to hear this every other day.

Stop asking for advice.

A resume is supposed to showcase your skills, but in the default format, the most eye-catching information is the companies you worked for.

Turns out, bookmarking lots of links doesn’t help you create anything new.

To end each day on a great note, it’s more effective to remove the negative & disappointing elements than try to cram in more good.

As someone who pretends to know tech, it can be a hair-pulling experience watching the blatant disregard people you care about have for privacy & security online.

It takes an insane amount of dedication and pure talent to reach the top 1% of any skill.

My best ideas sit and gather dust on my list of potential writing topics.

With digital privacy, it can feel like you have to become a hardcore privacy advocate using only the most secure open source tools, otherwise why bother?

TL;DR: Find out whether you default to consuming or creating.

So you’re using the Hugo static site generator and interested in auto-generating pages from data, similar to Gatsby’s programmatic generation or Middleman’s Dynamic Pages ?

The rest of our lives seems like an unlimited canvas with infinite possibilities, especially in the modern age.

Despite considering myself a “project person” for years, I have little evidence to show for it.

Overall philosophy with my items is to buy quality where it matters, but we often over complicate and draw to the shiny.

Obsidian is an amazing tool with a bazillion themes and plugins available for you to go crazy tinkering and customizing.

Sourcegraph is a neat company building tools with great developer experience, especially search, which is a critical part of a developer’s day to day.

Wanna build tools with horrible developer experience?

It should be as easy to find information at work as it is to Google.

TL;DR: No market validation, coding doesn’t get users, and fantasizing instead of taking action.

My team was building a new product at work, and as a part of it, deploying an API to prod for the first time.

As a creator, it’s so easy to get tunnel vision — focusing on the vast distance between the current version and the perfect state in your head.

I love reading a unique use of software (or CS concepts) that’s “just for the hell of it”, exploring an idea even if some might consider it silly.

I wanted to add a random button to one of my Hugo sites after remembering how handy it is on XKCD .

I struggle with over-thinking, perfectionism, and never shipping.

I recently wanted to parse an RSS feed as a part of a larger script.