Blog Posts

Wow. What a cliffhanger. I don't think I've finished an episode on the edge of my seat like that since you know who was disintegrated by [spoilery cameo] at the edge of the space-time rift at the end of Sex and the City. But whew, before we even get there, we've got a ton of stuff to un ...

This is a simple running list of computer terms that sound inappropriate. (last updated Sep 24 2021) In no particular order: dongle penetration testing hot loading packet sniffing dirty bit core dump long polling RAM stick VD (virtual desktop) hot desking pull request Big O bare metal ...

This blog website is a Frankenstein, some would say "Frankenstein's monster", if they wanted to be pedantic and rude, of different tools and technologies. Just in case anyone was curious about which, I'll list them and keep it updated as it changes. I use a lot of Firebase products ...

What if dragons wore caps? Before we can explore this important question, we need to dive into some background, so bear with me. There was only one time I ever won a championship and it was in a browser-based war strategy game in the early 2000s. I played my first season on a random team (you get a ...

I’ve always hated the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls because it was on the radio all the time in college and every single line is the same melody. The “chorus” is literally just singing the same melody but louder. But did you know it also has words? Here’s what they mean. He’s talking about an iPho ...

My dog Frobolome died a few weeks ago at age 11, and it’s been rough. He was named after one of the best typos I’ve ever seen. A teenager on a forum I was on posted his sandwich recipe on a “favorite sandwich” thread, which included several ingredients he had clearly only heard spoken and never see ...

I had to give a little talk about ES6 promises a while back and was forced to organize my thoughts and learn a few things so I thought I might as well share the wealth. This is a progressive introduction to promises starting from the previous status quo (callbacks), then talking about basic usage, ...

I recently made an unexpectedly popular tweet based on the incredibly deep insight of "what if you removed a letter from a popular library?" Specifically, what if instead of prettier it was pettier? Hahaha! Instead of cleaning up your code, it would belittle it, you see. has anyone made ...

Back when I was in college I mentioned liking this one song on the radio which turned out to be “Run-Around” by Blues Traveler, and my boyfriend at the time said, “If you like that, you’ll like this other song by Sister Hazel because it’s exactly the same song” and I heard it and I was like, “WHAT.” ...

Last time I talked about monads — not actually defining them or providing any useful background, but they were discussed. Today we’ll talk about the goopy viscera of the internet: servers. Server, like “smurf,” means a lot of things. Sometimes a server is an actual computer. Sometimes it is a virtua ...

This is a simple, friendly guide for people who don’t know anything about computer science, or people who know computers but want to learn less. If you don’t know a kilobyte from a mitochondria, don’t worry! Just 3 years ago I didn’t know anything about computer science. Fast forward to today, I sti ...

Two years ago I switched careers from animation to programming. I talked about my first week's of bootcamp experience in my first post on this blog but never really put the whole story anywhere. It was a pretty non-traditional trajectory, which is all the rage these days, so I thought I might ...

A lot of people have asked me for advice on character development. None of these people are technically “real” in the sense that “normal” people might consider “real” but Writers (like you and me) understand that the characters we create are just as real as the people around us. Maybe even more so. ...

The power set problem is one of those algorithms that turns out to be a bit trickier than they appear on the surface. Like the five stages of grief, there are 3 common stages for being assigned a power set problem. "This looks pretty simple, it'll probably take about 10 minutes." &q ...

As part of our data structures sprint, we implemented a bunch of data structures, most of which had a good amount of resources out there adequately explaining how they worked. One thing I had a bit of trouble finding good explanations for was a breadth-first tree traversal using a queue as a helper, ...

So it's week 1 of the Hack Reactor course proper. My class is the 5th Remote Beta class (all instruction conducted online), or HRR5. I guess now's the time to share some first impressions. They get you off to a pretty good start with 3 weeks worth of precourse work, which is good for both ...