Clippings

On choosing a college | Seth’s Blog Here’s a different way to look at it, one that we can broaden into an insight about adult decisions about where to work, where to live, who to hang out with. There are two parts: Are the people this place attracts the sort of people I want to spend time with and become more like? Is the system that is in place here one that pushes and cajoles and processes people to become more like the kind of person I’d like to be? That’s it. ...

Life is too short to read a bad book. — James Joyce

Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes Yahoo Pipes—or, officially, Pipes by Yahoo!, a rare switcheroo of the company’s name—was a service that offered all that and more in a single platform. Individual “Pipes,” as it were, were both personal and public—the service seemed like a portent of the future that techno-utopians were then predicting. But like many great products and services of its time, it never quite came to pass. ...

The Beauty of Unicode: Zero-Width Characters Did you know that there are five characters that have zero width? What could be their purpose? Let’s sort it out… See examples in the linked article. Zero-width space (U+200B) The zero-width space can be used to enable line wrapping in long words, when using languages that don’t use spaces to separate words, or after certain characters like a slash /. Most applications treat the zero-width space like a regular space for word wrapping purposes, even though it is not visible. ...

clitic (plural clitics) (linguistics) A morpheme that functions like a word, but never appears as an independent word, instead being always attached to a following or preceding word (or, in some cases, within a surrounding word). e.g. It’s, should’ve, shouldn’t’ve. There are 2 reasons [for why/when clitics can be applied] ...

Which Face Is Real? Which Face Is Real has been developed by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington as part of the Calling Bullshit project. All images are either computer-generated from [thispersondoesnotexist.com](http://thispersondoesnotexist.com/} using the StyleGAN software, or real photographs from the FFHQ dataset of Creative Commons and public domain images.

It’s important to understand that recruiters and hiring managers are often looking for concrete evidence of your accomplishments in previous roles. Quantifying your achievements means providing specific, numerical data to illustrate the impact you’ve made. Here’s how you can effectively do this: Use Numbers and Metrics: Quantify your impact with data, e.g., “Reduced website load times by 40% through optimised code.” Project Successes: Highlight successful projects, e.g., “Led a team of 5 to develop a new application, delivered 3 weeks ahead of schedule.” Efficiency Improvements: Mention any improvements in processes or performance, e.g., “Automated key reporting tasks, saving 10 hours of manual work per week.” Technology Implementations: Discuss new technologies or systems you implemented, e.g., “Deployed a cloud-based solution that increased data retrieval efficiency by 25%.” Security Enhancements: If applicable, highlight contributions to cybersecurity, e.g., “Enhanced system security, reducing breach risk by 30%.” Downtime Reduction: Quantify improvements in system reliability, e.g., “Reduced system downtime by 20% through improved maintenance protocols.” Cost Savings: Mention cost-effective solutions you introduced, e.g., “Identified and implemented cost-saving measures in software procurement, saving the company £50,000 annually.” User Support and Training: Showcase your role in user support, e.g., “Trained 100+ users in new software, leading to smoother departmental transition.” Innovative Solutions: Highlight any innovative solutions you developed, e.g., “Developed a custom algorithm that increased data analysis speed by 50%.” Certifications and Skills Upgrades: Include any relevant professional development, e.g., “Obtained Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.”

The Little Book of Deep Learning This book is a short introduction to deep learning for readers with a STEM background, originally designed to be read on a phone screen.

Short teaser Have you ever heard the story of the procrastinating robot on Mars? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Charlie Peterson🤷🏻‍♂️ (@thatmakessensetome) ...

Messaging Patterns Overview - Enterprise Integration Patterns This pattern catalog describes 65 integration patterns, collected from many integration projects since 2002. The patterns provide technology-independent design guidance for developers and architects to describe and develop robust integration solutions. The inspiration to document these patterns came when we struggled through multiple integration vendors’ product documentation just to realize later that many of the underlying concepts were quite similar.

Architecture Antipatterns Discover common architecture antipatterns, learn how to avoid them and overcome design pitfalls! Gain valuable insights, practical advice, and real-world examples to build better software architectures and improve existing ones. Cargo-Culting Domain Allergy Emotional Attachment Infrastructure Ignorance Malignant Growth Misapplied Genericity Never change a running system Over-Engineering Over-Modularization Under-Modularization

The Frustration Loop | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman’s blog This lead me to an idea: The Frustration Loop The premise is simple. When spam is detected, instead of blocking the blog, fake system error or failure in the most frustrating way possible. Waste their time and make them give up. I got the idea from The Password Game which I highly recommend checking out. Since implementing The Frustration Loop the amount of spam has dropped from about 30% of new blogs, to less than 5% (nothing is perfect). There are a few improvements to be made, and some holes to patch, but it’s working well. ...

How You Can Use the 4 Gift Rule This Christmas | HyperJar The 4 gift rule is very simple: you get each of your children … Something They Want Something They Need Something To Wear Something To Read … the 4 gift rules is great because it helps teach children that they can’t always have everything they want, and helps them to focus on things they actually need. It also teaches them about sustainability — since you’re not buying anything in excess, meaningful gift giving, and gratitude — since they’ll get gifts they’ll really appreciate. And again, also makes sure each child gets the same number of gifts, saving you the headache of deciding how many presents to get for each child this Christmas. ...

HTML First HTML First is a set of principles that aims to make building web software easier, faster, more inclusive, and more maintainable by… Leveraging the default capabilities of modern web browsers. Leveraging the extreme simplicity of HTML’s attribute syntax. Leveraging the web’s ViewSource affordance. Principles Prefer Vanilla approaches Use HTML attributes for styling and behaviour Use libraries that leverage HTML attributes Avoid Build Steps Prefer Naked HTML Be View-Source Friendly

Ship of Theseus - Wikipedia The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object which has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object. … Each year, the Athenians commemorated this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several centuries of maintenance, if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one at a time, was it still the same ship? ...

Approval Tests - Home Unit testing asserts can be difficult to use. Approval tests simplify this by taking a snapshot of the results, and confirming that they have not changed. Interesting approach to testing using Combination Approvals: @Test public void upateQuality() throws Exception { CombinationApprovals.verifyAllCombinations( this::doUpdateQuality, new String []{"foo", "bar", "baz"}, new Integer []{-1, 0, 11}, new Integer[0, 1, 49, 50}); } private String doUpdateQuality(String name, int sellIn, int quality) { /*...*/ } Approval Tests has a variety of implementations on a wide range of platforms. You can browse all of the projects at our GitHub Org ...

Check Up, Checkup or Check-Up - Which One to Use? Checkup: When it’s a single word like this, it’s a noun to describe an appointment. “I have a checkup at the dentist later this month.” Check-up: Add in the hyphen, and it becomes a phrasal adjective meant to describe the type of appointment or something. “My check-up appointment is at two o’clock, Thursday.” Check up: If used as two individual words, you’ve got yourself a verb to describe what you’re doing, aka a phrasal verb. “I’m going to check up on my dad later this week and ensure he’s okay.” ...

GitHub - AndrewWalsh/openapi-devtools: Effortlessly discover API behaviour with a Chrome extension OpenAPI DevTools is a Chrome extension that generates OpenAPI specifications in real time from network requests. Once installed it adds a new tab to Chrome DevTools called OpenAPI. While the tool is open it automatically converts network requests into a specification.

PRQL Pipelined Relational Query Language, pronounced “Prequel” PRQL is a modern language for transforming data — a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement For example, “Top N by group”: from employees group role ( sort join_date take 1 ) WITH table_0 AS ( SELECT *, ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( PARTITION BY role ORDER BY join_date ) AS _expr_0 FROM employees ) SELECT * FROM table_0 WHERE _expr_0 <= 1

Interesting article about the “share often, in multiple ways” adage of over-communicating in a remote environment: The importance of overcommunication in a remote workplace – Pumble Blog How to overcommunicate effectively #1 – Keep it simple #2 – Hold short frequent meetings #3 – Make one-on-ones more informal #4 – Mix up modes of communication #5 – Set up guidelines for modes of communication #6 – Don’t wait on news ...