Tagged “tech”

When I start a new job I often spend the first day bookmarking all the important sites we use (email, ticketing, reporting, documentation, hosting, etc). At my new place of employment, they rely on go links. Not my favorite tech, but it is an interesting alternate soultion to my bookmarking workflow. Go links have been around for decades and there are a ton of implementations, including my... [read more]

This is my perspective on using Nix (the OS, the package manager, and the language) as a main driver for the past 2 years. I have gone to conferences, engaged the community, donated, submitted bug reports, converted my home servers, and probably spent hundreds of hours in Nix configs. I consider myself well versed, but certainly no expert. TLDR: In its current state (2025), I don't generally... [read more]

The relationship between technical interviews and real-world performance remains one of the most debated topics in software engineering recruitment. While you may be reading this because of a recent interview experience we shared, this post aims to explore a broader and more important question: how can companies better identify talented developers? Although many organizations have established... [read more]

I'm a keyboard nerd. I think if you are spending most of your days sitting at a desk, you may as well make it nice. For me, its all about ergonomic forms and layouts, but in this talk I get into the world of keyboard styling, meetups, hacking, competitions, and history. Its a very visual talk and somehow I managed to deliver these ~120 slides in 1 hour. Slides and source here. Key takeaways... [read more]

At Udemy we had a two day workshop/game given a couple times a year for anyone who wanted to join. It was a fun way of introducing penetration testing to web application developers. As a developer we may know to use the right database library that prevents things like an SQL injection, but do we really ever get to experience a real SQL injection? So we review the top 10 web vulnerabilities, put on... [read more]

I have been trying to bring back SF casual carpool since it ended with the pandemic. Here are some of the things I/we have done mostly between September 2022 and August 2023. Things I have tried Waiting at the North Berkeley passenger line daily, using both sfcarpool.app and the RapidCarpool app I have done this for close to a year, waiting 20 minutes a day. I get picked up around once a... [read more]

When I was working at Udemy, there was a new charter for all services to communicate internally via grpc, and all for public facing traffic to use GraphQL. Some teams were using these technologies a bit, but for most of them these were both new technologies to learn. Since I had GraphQL experience from previous jobs, I was tasked with doing this work for my team, Adaptive Assessments. This was one... [read more]

This was a post I wrote for the PLOS tech blog, which is no longer online. If you manage, develop, or use REST APIs I have a tip for you. Swagger is a framework and toolset that greatly eases the pain of documenting and interacting with your APIs. It's a swiss army knife for all things APIs and in this post I'll explain why and how it makes APIs more enjoyable to work with. We have quite a few... [read more]

This was a post I wrote for the PLOS tech blog. I later started writing a book with the same title, but eventually moved on to other projects before finishing it. As PLOS has grown (in users, articles, and developers) we have put a lot of effort into splitting our original applications into groups of services. My team is responsible for several web services. We have worked on finding open source... [read more]

When I was working at The Public Library of Science (PLOS), one of my co-workers ran into Richard Stallman on the streets of San Francisco - presumably flown in to give a talk at some local conference. Somehow my co-worker talking him into giving a talk at PLOS. After all, our mission (making science/research free and accessible to all), is somewhat parallel to the mission of the The Free Software... [read more]

This is about my graduate thesis on database query optimization. In the 2000's, organizations were dealing with more and more data. Efficiently making sense of it all was a hot topic. Several universities were working on these problems and the The Database Research Group at UCSC was no exception. We had quite a bit of active research on data mining and search efficiency. The particular issue I... [read more]