This week I wrote a tool I currently call "missing from Wikipedia" although the name may change. You feed it a list of people's names and the language Wikipedia you want to check, and it …

Dumping into a post some things I've learned recently, trying to disregard the potential "you didn't know that already?!?!" surprise, feigned or genuine, that people might impose on me.* How did I never use top …

It's autumn. I spent a bunch of September in San Francisco, trying to tie up loose ends at work so I could go on my sabbatical with a free heart. My notebook says things like: …

I recently came across Lauren Bacon's "The Accidental Boss: Making Peace with Power" again, and it reminded me: We don't talk enough about power. We don't talk enough about how hard it is to transition …

It's easier to read and contribute to code when it's stylistically consistent. This is a reason why we have PEP 8, the style guide for Python code. It says things like: Avoid extraneous whitespace in …

Someone discovered "that the addition of 'Harry' to almost any Plato quote makes it seem legitimately like a nugget of wisdom out of the mouth of Albus Dumbledore." This reminded me to look up my …

Problem 1: Food at tech meetups usually fails to satisfy foodies. Make-your-own-tacos if you're lucky, "the Statue of Liberty is crying" bad pizza if you're not. Problem 2: Most places we hold evening tech talks …

At Hacker School, I'm working on little projects to teach myself various things. I am following my own advice by embracing silliness. A few things I have made, all of which now have code up …

I spent a day at Hacker School without a working pair of headphones recently. So I spent about three hours pairing, which I loved and which I'm going to repeat every day that I can. …

So, there are random non-programming reasons why I didn't feel like I made much progress yesterday -- I tried working in a beanbag chair (no good for Sumana), I drank coffee too early in the …