Author: Steven Helferich

I’ve been off the map a bit since the weekend, but I’m back and hopefully will have a developer post later this week. I’ve been working on my event tracking system and it’s coming along nicely. I had to spend a few friendly hours with Google’s API documentation, but it’s relatively intuitive enough to get the hang of once you come to terms with the API wrapper package. I’m planning on having something written up by the weekend.

In other news, the latest Mac Demarco album just came out and I attended the “How Weird” festival in San Francisco. “How Weird” was alright, but a bit flat if you ask me. It has a strong hippie presence so that might be why the atmosphere was low-key. New Mac Demarco is great and I strongly suggest giving it a listen. Anyway, here are the links:

5/5 – 5/9

• The US economy nears full employment with signs that both wages and inflation are beginning to pick up.
• A helpful breakdown of the concept of task-switching and the advantages of using a “maker’s schedule”.
• A walkthrough for creating your own personal Kanban workflow.
• Yet another reminder to think carefully before enforcing a 100% code coverage standard for your org.
• Part 14 in the “Let’s Build a Compiler” series from Ruslan Spivak.
• The mismatch between college major composition and new job composition continues unaddressed in 2017.
• A longread from the New Yorker on the pitfalls of the Gig economy.

Something interesting I’ve started noticing is that Facebook ads are actually useful to me. I don’t know what Facebook’s approach is versus Google’s (this is probably worth finding out), but whatever the difference, it seems to be sending me content I’m interested in. I’ve found a number of clothing-related posts that I’ve bought into because they actually found items that fit my style. Likewise, last night I found out that one of my favorite beat artists, Flamingosis, will be in San Francisco tomorrow doing a DJ set with a couple other artists. Obviously, I’ll be there. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures good enough to put up a post sometime during the weekend.

5/4 – 5/5

• A longread covering the ever-expanding Chinese corporate-industrial diaspora in Africa and its increasingly frosty reception.
• An interactive take on whether Trump’s presidency is slowly becoming more “normal”.
• NASA announces a challenge to improve the performance of its computational fluid dynamics FORTRAN codebase.
• A quick overview of some of the most exciting features of the API testing tool, Postman.
• A breakdown of the failings of “privilege” politics as practiced by the modern Left in America.
• China’s first home-developed jetliner takes its maiden voyage in Shanghai.
• One team’s take on why we write tickets for our work.

Having put more thought into my scheduling automation idea, I decided to forgo the Android front end for now and just stick with something more resembling a cron job until I get the time to slap the front end on it. I’m a big believer in the strength of gamifying activities to make them more desirable. If I can gamify hitting my scheduling metrics, I’ll be way more loyal to my schedule and be able to use it more effectively as a prioritization tool. At some point I’ll start putting together my time management ideas into a series of articles, but that won’t be for another month or so at best.

Also one last announcement: I’ve been very lazy in setting up the links on this page to open in new tabs, but as you can see now, I have fixed this. From now on links will now open in a new tab.

Anyway, here are the links:

5/2 – 5/3

• An examination of the potential collapse of Google as a technology giant relating to the decline of search and ads.
• Understanding the nuances of the Docker “latest” tag.
• US lawmakers begin talks to address the recent abuses of passengers on major airlines.
• A surprise drop in iPhone sales cause a drop in Apple’s share price.
• A reminder to plan our usage of customer data ahead of time, rather than a collect-all-ask-why-later mentality.
• Economist Michael Pettis reposts an older, but informative breakdown of the anatomy of the global savings “glut”.
• An interactive breakdown of the current state of polls for the upcoming French presidential election.
• A short example of the dangers of false positives in software testing.
• An overview of Scala’s flexibility as a language and the trouble that creates for its compiler.

I took the weekend off from reading this time around to instead put more time into a YouTube video I needed to finish. Time management is an art and I definitely need to continue working on coming up with a system to fit all of these projects in. I have an idea involving some integration between Google Sheets and Calendar, but it’s probably going to require dusting off the Android book I have on my bookshelf. The plus side is that it’ll make a good weekend project post.

In other news it looks like the world hasn’t ended yet although North Korea seems hell-bent on making that a reality. Apparently Bill Nye launched some self-aggrandizing Netflix series as well that I won’t be watching. That’s all I’ve got for now, so here are the links:

5/1/17

• A summary of some semi-recent features added to Postgres.
• China aims to continue to expand its auto manufacturing despite overcapacity issues with a plan to export the excess into emerging and mature markets.
• Congress passes a stop-gap measure to fund the federal government through the end of September, largely ignoring proposed cuts to government programs out-of-favor with Trump.
• A in-depth look at New York’s trouble in upgrading its decades-old subway infrastructure.
• A walk through for adding Facebook auth to a Django application.
• A quick lifestyle piece on a strategy for fitting books into your daily routine.
• Yet another hit-piece on Apple’s declining product quality, increasing price; the case builds for migrating away from Apple.

Another busy week, including a night with Sydney to celebrate 6 months together. In putting together this week’s list, I found that I already had enough interesting links after just 2 days of collecting to make a complete, so I decided to publish today, 4/25/17. Going forward, this series will no longer be weekly, but more of a “whenever, wherever” approach once I hit a number of links I feel is appropriate. You can bet on this being multiple times a week.

In other blog-related news, something I’m hoping to do more of in the future is to include some posts about the books I’m reading and now that I’ve restructured my time at home to open up another hour or so, I’ll most likely be doing just that.

• Vaccination rates recover in northern California after state-sponsored personal exception rules are repealed.
• The latest post from the economist Michael Pettis’ blog on China’s unexpectedly high first quarter growth numbers.
• A short overview of a team’s experience migrating from monoliths to microservices.
• A breakdown of the latest bit of bad press to hit Uber; this time over “fingerprinting” of iPhones against Apple’s guidelines.
• The situation on the Korean peninsula escalates as North Korea conducts live-fire exercises while the US moves more naval power to the region.
• Yet another tirade against the world of JavaScript with a great rant lifted straight from Linkedin.
• The first part in a series on implementing microservices and the potential benefits for engineering organizations.
• The second in the aforementioned series on microservices. (I got to this series a bit late, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it from now on.)
• The “Tao” of Microservices: a webinar.

4/16 – 4/22

Hey all! While I’ve been busy with my day job and my nascent YouTube channel, I’ve been continuing to read constantly throughout my day. I always like to remind myself of the example set by Theodore Roosevelt who made it well-known how much time he invested in reading on topics of any kind. He could be in-between presidential meetings addressing the breakup of a monopoly and the Venezuelan crisis and still find time to read a few pages of a treatise on North American bird populations or the like.

I think many of us with active minds find ourselves sneaking in articles or books here and there throughout our working day and personal life and this gave me the inspiration to start putting together a weekly list of things I’ve been reading. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor will it be in any sort of ordering, but I hope it can serve as a launching point into the different topics I read about on a weekly basis. Without any further preamble, I bring you “What I’m Reading” for the week of 4/16/2017:

• A review of the concept of modularity and a pitch for the benefits of functional programming.
• An interesting solution to the problems faced by social networking services in designing A/B testing.
• A fun visualization of the different programming languages used throughout the day by SO users.
• An expanding expose of the lead contamination crisis in the United States.
• President Trump launches a probe into potential Chinese dumping of steel onto the US market.
• An overview of the pros and cons of DI according to the author.
• A top ten list of rules NASA uses for writing mission-critical code, showing interesting departures from some popular, modern coding paradigms.
• An exposition on the reasons when and why software estimation is useful.
• A breakdown of China’s growing efforts to build a regional order to challenge that of the United States.
• The recent terror attack in France could tip the balance in the favor of Marine Le Pen and the National Front.