I occasionally write utilities for my computer that make my life a bit easier. This morning I was looking for a way to detect whether the monitor was turned off on my Linux laptop. The best advice I came across was using xset -q and parsing the following section: DPMS (Energy Star): Standby: 0 Suspend: [...]
Testing123
Hello. I have a single thing I want to say and see if Jesse sees this: JITM
My Dead Letter Queue
I came to a realization a long, long time ago that one day I'm going to die. One day, I won't be here anymore. What happens then? How will people read my (hidden) blogs from the Army? How will people read my unpublished stories and poetry? How will my wife know how to pay the [...]
There Are No Easy Wins — Stop Asking
How many times have you heard a manager ask: "What are the easy wins?" It's so easy to focus on easy wins (see what I did there?) and distract ourselves from actual progress. I promise one will never run out of easy wins either. But why is it a trap? What Easy Wins Get You [...]
Casem; an Experimental Language
Every few years or so, I like to try thinking up a new language for writing software. Mostly, I don't publish them or even attempt to create a parser. This time. Well, this time, I blew my own mind with this one. My inspiration was Scala, PHP, and Lisp. Allow me to demonstrate a simple [...]
On Porting Beanstalkd to Scala
Beanstalkd is a notable and mature job queue. It's written in C, rather sparsely commented, and moderately complicated. I wanted to add some functionality and discovered reading the code pretty tricky. The soundest way to learn what some system is doing is to rewrite it. At least for me. So, I did. In Scala. I [...]
The Right Place; The Right Time
In the Army, we had this saying: be at the right place, at the right time, in the right uniform. We also learn to do extensive risk mitigation. I've taken a lot of this to heart to learn that in the worst case, you end up in the wrong place at the right time, or [...]
Serverless: From a PHP Developer’s Experience
this is suicide for all hosting companies that currently host all websites. Suddenly, no one would need servers. PHP would be, quite literally, the easiest migration to serverless known to mankind.
Building Things
I tend to build things differently from other people. It's an annoying fact about myself that I can't seem to accept. One, what I build tends to be robust, extendable, and, non-idiomatic (I hate idiomatic code). Two, what I build tends to be more complex than it needs to be, right now. One of the [...]
Software Design From a Toddler
I've watched my son grow up to the last four years and change, surviving a string of "firsts" while he learns to survive in this world. He's also taught me many things about my job, more than I'd ever learn in a class. More than anything, he's taught me what is in store for the [...]