Caffeinspiration

Timeline and discovery: the early days The simple timeline of my journey sounds deceptively easy at first: I found out about the issue after an echocardiogram on January 23rd, 2025.

Author’s note: this is a departure from topics that I usually write about.

Listen, there isn’t much in this world that’s as luxurious as being able to pee whenever you want to.

Look at this orange: Now look at this orange: It’s the same orange.

Sometimes I just love a good visualization, and there’s something about radar charts that makes them so approachable.

Note: this post requires a basic familiarity with the songs discussed.

The other day, I was thinking about less-obvious skills that I find helpful for working as a software engineer.

You’re given a list of integers and a target number.

Because I spend my entire workday on the computer, my mouse is very important to me.

There are things that are hard to measure, and there are things that are easy to measure.

Let’s say, purely hypothetically, that you’re in Joshua Tree National Park.

I’m a big fan of trying new things.

There’s a common pattern I’ve seen when learning something new, where you can effectively move towards a larger goal by working on problems just outside of your reach.

Discoverability I spend a lot of my time thinking about UX and design, and I try to consciously think about it in the wild when I can.

There’s a trap I used to fall into that has happened more times than I’d like to admit1.

Every now and then, there will be the type of problem to solve where I know it will require an extra cup of coffee, a long block of dedicated time, and a lot of careful reading, debugging, note taking, and going for walks to think.

WebSocket (WS) connections are pretty neat.

I dabble with DNS for work, and I’m frequently checking if CNAMEs are properly configured.

A woodsman was once asked, “What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?”

I like to window shop houses on Zillow.

I got into programming after college, but there was a brief period of time when I had first tried to learn how to program.

When I usually think about context in the meta, non-technical part of being a software engineer, I usually think of context switching and swapping your brain’s focus and working memory from one mode to another, switching from focused programming to a stat…

I like to talk about small mistakes I’ve made.

There’s nothing quite like merging a pull request that has been pending for months.

If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is.

Here’s a scenario.

I’m working on a color picking/finding game, and part of it will be asking the user to pick a color from a range of colors.

In-flight messaging I was on a Delta flight the other day, and I was thinking about how they offer free messaging from your smartphone.

This is a game for matching musical notes.

I saw a math puzzle the other day on Hacker News.

Software engineering is cursed with uncertainty.

I think a lot about the human part of code, especially the work our brains do when writing and reading it and interfacing with the computer.

What’s in a minute?

Before I got into tech, I worked at a tutoring company in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., doing a mix of schoolwork-related tutoring and standardized test prep.

I like to keep a debugging lab notebook when I’m working through a particularly tricky problem.

I’ve been playing with the Web Audio API recently, and I made a basic app that will detect the pitch of incoming tones using your microphone.

Usually, biographies go through someone’s story in roughly chronological order.

I’m declaring defeat.

It’s one of the little things I miss about working in-person with other people.

This is a game for playing Wordle with Morse Code.

Playing sound with the Web Audio API Playing Morse code Morse code timing Playing letters, words, and sentences Adjusting the speed The Listening Game The “Speaking” game Parsing the incoming signal into Morse code Hooking it up to user input Finishing th…

Be sure to also check out my other Morse code game, Morse Codle, a daily Morse code Wordle puzzle.

traceroute is a tool you can use to trace the route of packets from your computer to another computer.

There are many good things about JavaScript.

The other day I was reading about the development of personal computers and the desktop GUI, and I was thinking about how comfortable we all have become with the analogy of the “desktop” for our personal computers.

Editor’s note: the following document was found in a collection of papers and assignments, apparently dating from late 2020 when the author was stuck inside studying distributed systems.

“I’m going to be 29 anyways, so I might as well be 29 with a Master’s.” — me 5 years ago debating whether I should take classes On June 5, 2017, I started taking classes at Tufts University while working full time.

I recently read Turing’s Cathedral, a book about the early history of computers, and it largely focused on the life and brilliant times of John von Neumann, who was, to put it simply, a genius.

There are many ways for computers to talk to other computers.

You’re reading this in the future.