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.
Continuing with Part 2 of my series on evaluating MongoDB vs PostgreSQL for this particular workload
Part 1 of a series: MongoDB vs. PostgreSQL for Audit Logs
I skimmed a Reuters article saying that a battlefield communications prototype has deep flaws.
Painfully relatable: comms-system flaws (a subset of the painfully relatable topic of “system flaws”). The real question is whether they’re embarrassing, catastrophic, or just the kind you fix after a weekend of debugging. When I was working on airline reservation systems, it was always a relief to note that if I screwed up the system, planes wouldn’t crash; the airline would just lose millions of dollars and make the network news.
I was reviewing changes before I committed them. This particular file had a line marked as changed, but I couldn’t see what had changed. Usually that means a whitespace change. I counted my indents… four spaces on both. I changed the diff-window’s setting from ‘Ignore whitespace’ to ‘Do not ignore’. Still nothing.
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.