Tagged “tech”

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 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]