Philosophical Hacker

A few hundred years ago, Renè Descartes, the fella who brought us the Cartesian coordinate system 📉, isolated himself for a while to figure out (among other things) whether we can know anything for certain. The result of his retreat was his Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the most important philosophical texts of the modern era and one of my personal favorites. Early on in his Meditations, he decides that it’d be useful to engage in a thought experiment. »

A few months ago, I stumbled upon something I found hard to believe: Some people continue smoking cigarettes because they are unaware of how bad it tastes. Although it was counter-intuitive, I had pretty good reason to believe it, as it was suggested by Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist who developed a mindfulness-based smoking cessation program that’s supposedly superior to the standard one developed by the American Lung Association. 😮 »

I almost gave up on becoming a programmer. I took two years of college-level programming in high school and I didn’t particularly care for it. Although I did fairly well in those classes, at the time, I probably had something like the following thoughts about programming: I’ve given this a fair shake. I’ve taken two years of classes, and I’ve decided that programming is some tedious bullshit 💩. I need to find something else. »

Edit: James Shore, the guy who attempted to shame Uncle Bob on Twitter, has fairly pointed out that I’ve omitted some of the context that makes his shaming appear more reasonable. I’ve edited this post to include more of that context. Holy crap! In case you missed it, Uncle Bob got excoriated on Twitter earlier this week for a comment he made about the media’s coverage of the separation of immigrant children from their parents. »

I’m a big fan of KPCB’s internet trends report, and I’ve been following their reports for the last few years. This year, I’ve decided to clip and comment on what I think are some notable trends they’ve captured for 2018. Here are 2 trends that really stood out to me from this year’s report, along with some commentary. 1. The End of Mobile’s Golden Era Mobile’s growth has been slowing for years and others have already noted the effects of this. »

Here’s a written version of my recent React Orlando talk: I want to talk about some patterns, principles, and tools for testing react native applications. I’m going to focus a lot on the “patterns and principles” part of the testing equation because, as we all know, the improper use of tools can actually be worse than not having those tools at all. Michael Scott’s misuse of the fork-lift in Daryl’s warehouse came to mind while I was pondering this truth, and it turns out there’s a gif of this exact moment in the show. »

Recently, I’ve been wondering, Should new APIs created in 2018 be RESTful or be built using graphql or be something else entirely? While pondering and researching this question, I’ve stumbled upon some broader realizations like, Most web APIs and SPAs aren’t actually RESTful. 😨 In fact, I’ve never worked with a completely RESTful API. We’re reinventing the wheel and making our lives harder — on the server and on the client — by ignoring the standards around REST APIs 😞 The same force that explains our half-ass adoption of REST (i. »

About a year and a half ago, I was sitting in my Manhattan studio apartment trying to write an html lexer in python. I was about half way through my batch at the Recurse Center, and I was frustrated with my lack of progress towards my learning goals and intimidated by all of the absurdly smart people around me. While writing the lexer, I got hung up on an odd piece of python syntax. »

Recently, I’ve picked up Psychologically Healthy Organizations from the APA to learn more about, among other things, the importance of recognition in the workplace. Here I want to share some highlights from the APA’s work on employee recognition in the workplace. Recognition Meaningfully Shapes Performance The authors of Peopleware make some strong claims about team composition and the extent to which people can change in the workplace: For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out…managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. »

Me: I really like my new job. Family: (incredulously) Really? Me: Yeah. The people are smart, passionate, and the company seems promising. Family: (sarcastically) Ok. So you’ll stick around for 6 months then? Two Wednesdays ago marked my 1 year anniversary at UniKey, and as the above dialog suggests, this is pretty weird for me. I’ve never been at a job for a year before, so this 1st ever anniversary in my career has given me the urge to reflect a bit on a couple of questions: »