James Simas

I was in Ops for several years at a fairly large SaaS.

This means it’s really easy to get stuck.

Today I was troubleshooting a problem where my computer could not talk to a host on my network.

We sold our 2018 Nissan Leaf last year.

At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot.

Just have notebooks lying around, or on your person.

So, I use this as an excuse to buy beautiful Moleskine, Leuchtturm, and MUJI notebooks and coloured pens, and I stash them in my gym bag.

Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it.

This was a helpful reminder to focus on the basics first.

Among other things, Fong argues that Costco’s limited selected raises its average product quality.

Here’s the thing no one acknowledges about the entrepreneurship narrative: it’s written by survivors.

Financial options live in highly liquid markets.

When we record every casual encounter, we’re optimizing for “Information Retrieval” at the expense of “Relationship Formation,” treating our friends // colleagues // loved ones as data sourced to be mined, rather than co-conspirators in the brilliantly me…

[…] LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion.

Emphasis mine: On my first solo two-night camping trip, I forgot to bring a backup battery to charge my laptop or phone.

Poor is the person without Slack.

I’ve been thinking about doing this exact thing recently.

I installed Ubuntu Desktop 26.04 (Resolute Racoon) last week.

In my view, the current core AI skill is shifting as much work onto AI agents as possible, without going too far.

Give me a blank page of my notebook and my pen — I shall fill that page in no time.

Unfuck Your Habitat has a lot of great information for keeping your space tidy.

Thanks for Simon Willison for the link. […] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left.

Today my computer ran out of disk space.

I’ve been drilling on LeetCode recently and ran into a problem which I did not know how to solve while using constant extra space: Given a non-empty array of integers nums, every element appears twice except for one.

Today I spent some time learning about SQL common table expressions (aka “CTEs”).

Today, I learned about shell process substitution from Bread on Penguin’s latest video.

I’ve been using Sublime Text as my main text editor since August of 2014.

Today I needed to create a new SSH public/private keypair for work.

Today I encountered an API which sometimes sends back numbers as strings.

Rebasing your feature branch on main regularly is a good idea.

Here’s how to add key/value pairs to an http.Reqest’s query string in Go: package main import ( "fmt" "net/http" ) func main() { // create a request req, _ := http.NewRequest(http.MethodGet, "http://www.example.com/", nil) // get the current query…

Path Note /usr/local/bin/ System-wide binaries go here!

I’ve been using Alacritty exclusively for over a year.

This interview with Simon Willison is great.

There have been four1 major versions of HTTP in-use in the last 30-ish years: Version RFC Year HTTP/1.0 RFC 1945 1996 HTTP/1.1 RFC 2068 1997 HTTP/2 RFC 7540 2015 HTTP/3 RFC 9114 2022 It’s surprising to me how quickly HTTP/1.1 was released after HTTP/1.0.

This blog post by Sean Goedecke was a great read on high-level system design patterns.

Much productivity advice on the internet is too complicated and not actually that helpful.

I get the impression that a lot of people are overwhelmed by their personal email inbox nowadays and get so much email that they’ve more or less given up on it.

I regularly have to look up how to create an Echo router context with (a) path parameters and (b) query parameters, so I’m making this post as a cheat sheet for my future self.

I ran across a blog post by Josh Bleecher Snyder today which has some beautiful backoff algorithms in Go.

Today I needed to remove a bad route on macOS.

My work laptop was provisioned with a case-insensitive filesystem for some strange reason.

I got bit by this again today, so I’m writing it down so I can reference it later.

I was playing around with implementing Depth First Search (DFS) and Breadth First Search (BFS) in Go today.

My blog post from yesterday made me think… how can you marshal and unmarshal enums in Go correctly?

I was asked yesterday how you implement enums in Go.

Getting things ready in advance I’ve been musing on how ridiculously useful it is to get things ready in advance.

I’ve been doing a weekly planning session for the last five or so years.

This post documents some testing I did around whether unit tests in Golang are run in parallel.

Thanks to Julia Evan’s latest post, I learned that creating new slices by sub-slicing an existing slice has an important caveat: They can sometimes use the same backing array!