Hi! I'm Nate. This is one of those blogs that get updated quite sporatically and with no particular theme.
But Jeff Atwood told me in a YouTube video to Embrace the Suck and Do It In Public. And then Austin Kleon told me in a book to Show Your Work. Oh, then Casey Neistat taught me that "perfection erases humanity." And then Tom Sachs did that Space Program thing, and I was reminded of an insight that I had a long time ago.
I was turning in a magazine assigment in elementary or middle school. My professional graphic-designer dad had helped me desktop-publish a decent National Geographic parody about mushrooms. I was proud of the work we had done. And I was about to scoff (silently, internally) at the work of a fellow student, when I realized that the reason mine looked so good was because of all the help I had from my dad. The content was all mine, and the National Geographic cover was my idea. But the well-done presentation of which I was proud, was all him. This other student had done all the work himself.
I realized that if I had tried to do the magazine myself, even if I had gotten the National Geographic cover looking good, I would have run out of steam before I finished the magazine. I imagined a 3rd grader's crayon-rendered magazine. If it had a beginning, middle, and end, it would be superior to my "excellent" beginning.
And so, I make an imperfect website.
Lots of times I read job descriptions and they say that the ideal candidate will be “detail-oriented”. That’s not me.
A few months ago learned from some blog post or article that you can refine an approximate square root by averaging a too-high guess with a too-low guess.
Today I learned that homebrew installs the GnuRadio Companion along with the gnuradio package.
Today I learned that Java can have multiple variables in a for loop:
We were writing a custom LoggerAdapter.
Base Outline Character-Arc Article
I thought it might be a good idea to write down some of my memories before I’m too old to remember the details.
This is the start of an idea that I had around 2009. It’s a quick sketch for some kind of retro-future where people broadcast audio from their rooftops.
By the way, if you’re trying to verify that you are actually SSH’d to the real GitHub, their fingerprints seem to be published at docs.github.com
When I was a kid I would watch a TV show, or read a biography of someone I admired. There was a common theme: “I used to take things apart to see how they would work.”
I’ve been writing Python at work lately - a web service using Django. Before that, I was doing Java for a few years. Java and Python will both let you reference a class member through an instance variable. In C# that’s a compile error.