Author: Steven Helferich

Since it was Father’s day this weekend, and my own is across the country, I spent the weekend with Sydney and her family instead. It was mostly a relaxing weekend so I don’t have too many crazy updates. I tried recently working out in the mornings before leaving for work and so far have positive things to say about it. I come to work more energized and it lets me reclaim some time that is usually spent with me half-awake listening to street noise before getting out of bed.

Anyway, here are the links:

• Over 200m voters in the US have their information leaked by an unsecured RNC data mining site.
• If translators had to interview as software engineers do.
• Russia continues to dominate the competitive programming scene.
• In Georgia, a special election that could see a Democrat take a 40-year Republican seat.
• Partisan gerrymandering will be decided by the Supreme Court, potentially dealing a massive blow to Republican efforts over the past seven years.
• Michael Pettis breaks down the economics and psychology of the slew of employee stock guarantee plans that have sprung up in Chinese companies.
• Via a coworker: a new AI add-on to your DSLR which uses ML to know how to adjust your camera settings and take the perfect photo.
• A response post to the infamous “Tabs vs Spaces” StackOverflow article from a few weeks ago.

The camera came! I’ve been busy taking it for a spin and learning as I go. Don’t worry, I’ve put all the pictures underneath the links; no need to clutter the actual content here. The reason behind the new camera is actually less about photography and more about recording HD video. Sydney and I decided we wanted to put together some videos of the different interesting to see and do in the Bay Area along with all the recipes we’ve been cooking recently.

Anyway, here are the links:

• Rahm Emanuel claims Democrats need to refocus on “kitchen table” economics as a strategy to regain lost seats.
• Some nuanced bugs that are very Rust-specific and related to writing what Rust refers to as “unsafe” code.
• Advice on reducing and avoiding technical debt in a software project.
• According to StackOverflow, using spaces over tabs in code is correlated with a higher salary.
• Open-source fellowship announced, supporting 3-5 developers on $8,000/month for 3 months to work only on Open-source technology.
• Amazon will buy Whole Foods Market for $13bn.
• Uber and Lyft daily rides in San Francisco beautifully visualized.

Some sample photos. More to come 🙂

Now that trips are over for a few weeks, I can settle back into a rhythm and get some work done. I owe you guys a couple other blog posts on my adventures around the city, so I’ll get to work on those this week as well. I finally took the plunge and made the order for the DSLR I’ve been eyeing; I think it’ll make filming vlogs and photographing outings more rewarding. I’ll get my first chance to try my hand at it this weekend when it arrives.

I don’t really have any other interesting life updates, so this time I’ll just skip straight to the links:

• A British-American highlights the rigidity of America’s class system.
• Shitposting in GitHub issues.
• Turkey’s Erdogan comes out in support of Qatar despite recent boycotts, citing the need to support Islamic neighbors.
• A thought piece on how to create an inclusive work culture: focus on the work, not the fun.
• An adorable infographic of the benefits of pure functional programming.
• The dangers of Jeremy Corbyn and his ideology.
• Humorous advice about naming conventions for your projects.
• A detailed breakdown of the some of Rust’s safety benefits without sacrificing performance.

The move is just a few days away and things are just about ready. I’ve been working through the remaining checklist and have it down to about 5 or 6 items now. Tomorrow morning we’ll move everything over and hopefully be mostly operational by next week. The last of the furniture will have to wait until after our trip down to LA next weekend, so after we get back I’ll put together a tour of the place. Anyway, here are the links:

5/30 – 5/31

• An alternate view for enterprise application design with heavy caching for low bandwidth scenarios.
• An incredibly in-depth look at how the Linux kernel operates.
• Former Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega, is dead at age 89.
• Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, becomes the subject of more Russian-linked controversy as information surfaces that he sought a direct, clandestine link to Vladimir Putin.
• Samsung’s emojis make no sense.
• A breakdown of a recent think-tank report on the future of the traditional “individual-ownership” model of automobiles.
• An argument for the US leaving the Paris climate accords in order to make them more effective.
• The latest post by Michael Pettis, this time on the effects of a fiscal deficit decrease for the US government.

Trying to find time for these projects in the build-up to the big move wound up being way more difficult than I had anticipated. At this point, I’m taking every free minute I can get to scan through Amazon and Wayfair, filling out the remaining holes in the furniture needed to set up the new apartment. Today, it looks like I’ve made the breakthrough. I won’t dump all the details here because I’ll have a great video tour to post on Facebook and YouTube of the new place once it’s done, but sufficed to say finding the right desk/speaker/monitor combination was no small feat. Fitting two 27” computer monitors, two 6” stereo monitors, and w/e else I need onto anything smaller than a 60” wide desk looks to be impossible. I’ve got some 2.1-style speakers lined up that might work, but I think at this point I’m just going to figure that out once the move is over.

I had literally no clue what else is going on in the news this week other than the fact that I saw a picture of Trump with a yamaka on his head, staring vacantly at the Western Wall.

Anyway, here are the links:

5/23 – 5/24

• A who’s who of the latest buzz-topics in the web development world.
• A breakdown of how we waste our productive time on our computers and how we can go about fixing that problem.
• An admonition to the development community highlighting the lost context when git commit messages are written lazily.
• The Firebase CEO fires back on Medium over the accusations made by an IoT developer claiming Firebase cheated them using a new billing scheme.
• A tutorial for working with CSV files in Rust.
• The Google I/O Keynote address by Sundar Pichai.
• More details emerge about the background of the Manchester bomber linked to this week’s attack.
• A former SaaS CEO weighs in on the future of SaaS and what might come next.

Closer to the big move and I’ve sorted out a few more items for the final set up. I’ve been playing around with different floor plans and think I’ve settled on a few options that should work out. I know I promised this blog an overview of my time management job and I haven’t forgotten; there will be a post coming soon on that topic.

In other news, I was sick as a dog most of the weekend and so I don’t have much else to provide as far as updates go. Anyway, here are the links:

5/17 – 5/22

• A brief opinion piece on Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s rise over the past 20 years.
• Steam begins a hunt to stop “fake games” from scamming it’s in-app trading card system to make money.
• A growing cohort of Republicans endorses an independent probe into the Trump-Comey scandal.
• WeChat begins eating into the market share of Jack Ma’s Alipay in the online payments industry in China.
• An overview of the Millennial-focused, zero-commission stock brokerage app, Robinhood and its struggle to generate revenue.
• A long-read on the treatment of childhood psychosis.

With a big move coming up my time is pretty much split between work and wrangling together things like kitchen supplies and furniture. Scifiguys has a new video coming out this week, so keep your eyes on YouTube for that to be posted. I also just realized that this post marks one-month since I started putting these together. I like this format as it allows me to share content I’m reading without making some awkward post on Facebook or a lengthy recap video on YouTube. If you enjoy these, make sure to leave a comment on the blog post itself. Feel free to suggest topics you’d be interested in reading more about as well.

In other news, it looks like North Korea will continue its missile testing program. I have a feeling this will eventually lead to some sort of definitive conclusion or compromise. China has increasingly little interest in keeping North Korea around as regional dominance becomes more and more a realistic possibility. Anyway, here are the links:

5/16

• A seasoned Scala contributor announces their departure from the community.
• A follow-up retrospective to the aforementioned announcement.
• A visual tour through Turkey’s transformation into an autocracy.
• A succession crisis looms at Disney as interest in the job wanes due to CEO Robert Iger’s influence.
• Japan joins the US in putting more pressure on China to thwart North Korea’s missile program.
• A long-read covering Pixar’s creative decline under pressure from parent-company Disney.
• A breakdown of the growing interest and development of chatbot and personal AI to help with day-to-day life.
• Facebook adds Snapchat-style filters to Instagram, further eroding Snapchat’s technology advantage.

My productivity tool is coming along nicely and I’ll have a working version by the end of the week. I’m excited to put together an article covering what I did; working with APIs for services you commonly use can be very rewarding and useful for your day-to-day life. I can’t say I’ve loved working with the Google APIs (the Python package is a little clumsy to use at times and the resource naming isn’t the best), but I love Google apps and use them in all parts of my professional and personal life so it’s worth putting in the effort to learn.

In other news, I spent the weekend in Sacramento relaxing and didn’t get a chance to put this article together until this morning. I missed some big headlines, like the ransomware attacko n Friday, but I’ve included it here for anyone that missed that story. Anyway here are the articles:

5/10 – 5/15

• A plea to rethink the abuse of interfaces and design patterns without minding the use-case.
• Creating an event sourcing microservice using Go and Kafka.
• Trump fires FBI Director James Comey.
• An interesting take on the lack of automation in low-productivity industries and its effect on US employment.
• An overview of all the different flavors of Docker deployment and management.
• An update of Rust lang two years in.
• A ransonware virus affected companies around the globe over the weekend, apparently developed from NSA hacking tools.