That title was a mouthful, but I can’t think of a better catchy title to encompass all of that. I grew up in lower-middle class, so money was always sort of an ongoing issue. I was fortunate enough to become a software engineer after I graduated from college. Being frugal…

I was watching The Martian (yes, 5 years late) and thinking about what being an astronaut is like. Sure, I’m not talking about the whole Matt Damon experience of being stuck on Mars alone for 2 years. I’m just talking about generally being an astronaut. If you ask kids, most…

I open sourced the framework that powers my blog, and called it Miner! The README of the repo describes pretty well what it is and the story behind making it. It’s based on Sapper, the web app framework based on the Svelte UI framework. Sapper supports regular SPA mode (Single…

For many years I’ve held the opinion that San Francisco was too expensive for startups to run (even back in 2015 or so when I first started thinking about this when it wasn’t even as expensive back then). Office rents are high, cost of living and apartments are expensive which…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: I wouldn't start a new company in Silicon Valley today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that if he were launching a new company, he wouldn't do it in the San Francisco Bay…www.businessinsider.com Zuckerberg is only the latest, but certainly the most high-profile, tech exec to cast doubt on the future of Silicon Valley as the tech hub of the world. …

Consider this a follow-up from my article from 2017: Setting up your first Node.js environment! This is sort of the guide I wish I had when I first moved to a job working with node.js in 2017, coming from a PHP world before that. If you’re a web developer coming…

Having a little bit of free time tonight, I thought I’d look into Elixir and Phoenix. Elixir is a relatively new language that runs on the Erlang VM and Phoenix is the web framework for it. There has been a lot of talk on Hacker News about Elixir in the…

In Part 1 of this post I talked about laptop keyboards. It was something I just really needed to get off my chest. I was annoyed by the ultrabook laptops’ keyboard design trends, and hoped that a laptop company would release one that’s actually good. Now, onto the topic I…

I like obsessing over keyboards — I’ve owned many mechanical keyboards (which I’ll talk about in part 2 of this post), and I also like to have a good typing experience when I’m coding on a laptop. When it comes to Apple, there’s little choices — the Macbook/Macbook Pro keyboards…