Category: Uncategorized

I know I’ve been away from this site for a little bit. The move took just about everything out of me; I’ve spent just about every free minute I have either moving boxes, unpacking boxes, filling boxes, breaking down boxes, or basically anything else you can do with boxes. The furniture is built and everything is hooked up, the only remaining piece being the new router. I have some photos from some adventures Sydney and I went on in the interim that I need to put together into some posts, but that will probably have to wait until we get back from LA next week.

Anyway, here are the links:

• New research shows early human fossils in Western Africa dated at 300,000 years old, much earlier than the previous oldest fossils found in East Africa.
• A short example of how reducing nesting can improve code readability and maintainability.
• US oil exports jump as fracking unleashes more crude onto the global market.
• Apple pioneered the voice-assistant category, but now it finds itself in third place to Amazon and Google.
• The four stages of team development.
• A nice breakdown of the “cargo cult” syndrome of small organizations mimicking larger ones.

I’ve started playing some Kerbal Space Program again recently in a bid to manage the excitement/stress of the new move. After completely forgetting how to enter orbit, I ramped up quickly and have a space station core in orbit with a brave Kerbal manning the helm. I’ll be streaming that and some beats to my Twitch account for the next few days. Next steps are completing the station and attempting a moon landing. No reverts; we’re playing this ironman style, any lost Kerbals must live on in memory only.

In other news, I still haven’t spent much time in front of the news cycle, but what I have read I’ve included here. Anyway, here are the links:

5/25- 5/26

• A compilation of algorithms and data structures commonly found in competitive programming (and interviews).
• An interactive tool for generating medieval-style city maps.
• The US Navy conducts “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea, sailing within 12 miles of one of China’s artificial islands.
• Manila dispatches troops to retake the city of Marawi which was recently taken by rebels claiming loyalty to ISIS.
• A chart showing the recent decline in Fox New’s ratings relative to its biggest US rivals.
• The US economy grew faster than originally reported in the first quarter of 2017, with the growth rate adjusted up to 1.2% from 0.7%.
• A data dive showing the growing food insecurity in the Sahel region of Africa, specifically South Sudan.
• A career retrospective from The Verge covering the ways technology has changed since the 1990s and where it seems to be headed next.
• A former Firefox employee declares the browser war over with the winner being Chrome.

I’ve yet to decide on a naming convention I like for this article series. Currently I title the post after the date that I started collecting links, but I’m thinking that might be confusing for people coming to the article because the date they read it and the date on the article will be different. One solution would be to post the range over which the links were collected in the article so any readers can know the complete range of dates included. I want to make sure everyone understands that the links in here are almost always up-to-date and not old reposts (generally speaking). 

I have a few new coding blog posts that I’m putting together currently; one is on an open-source project I recently worked on and the other is one configuring Jenkins Pipeline jobs. If you ever plan on using Jenkins in your CI pipeline, I recommend staying tuned for that one considering the Jenkins 2.x docs are pretty sparse at the moment.

4/26 – 4/28

• Speaking of Jenkins, here’s an overview of using parallelism in your Jenkins Pipeline job.
• Controversial emerges that a species of human could have migrated to North America by 140,000 years ago.
• China prepares to outfit her first domestically-built aircraft carrier in a sign that she has ambitions to project power globally.
• Trump releases the outline for his tax overhaul. Corporate tax is reduced along with the number of tax brackets. The estate tax and alternative minimum tax would be abolished.
• An informative overview of some common spatial algorithms, nicely visualized.
• Disappointing first quarter growth in the US is offset by medium-term optimism.
• Terror suspect in London had been on a raided refugee flotilla in 2010.