Left DataDog

25.10.2024

Misc

Today was my last day working at DataDog. Despite me having built and launched a pretty useful service within our department, the leadership decided to set it aside and built its next iteration with different people and different technologies. I resisted for a while :-), but wasn't really trying to ...

Status update: 2020

31.12.2020

Misc

Pretty sure I'm in the minority on this one, but this year was actually a good one for me! One of the best in a while, to be honest… Pandemic There's nothing good about this, and we all could do without it. But even then, being introverted probably helped me ...

Server upgrade 2020

28.07.2020

Misc

Regular readers of this blog have probably noticed that it is now served from a different IP address… Okay, okay, I'm kidding! This blog doesn't have any regular readers, of course. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I recently spent quite some effort to move all my stuff ...

Status update: 2018

29.12.2018

Misc

Hey, I almost managed an entire calendar year without a post! Not that I was ever adhering to any notion of schedule here, but I have to admit that lately I miss blogging more and more. It was nice to have a not-insignificant voice and be able to make some ...

Status update: 2016

20.11.2016

Misc

I thought I'd post something for no reason… We're still living in Washington state, I'm still into programming, with much the same hobbies as before. However these days I actually work for money. The company is Shutterstock, and I'm a resident "refactorer" on one of the teams in Search. So ...

On being 36

20.10.2014

Misc

This quote has made my day. Frédéric de Villamil in his Docker review: If I was still 25, the whole production would most certainly be full dockerized. At 36, I’m more reluctant to change everything for the latest hype. Not that I’ve became old and boring. But I’ve enough experience ...

HTTPS on highlightjs.org

08.08.2014

Misc

I finally followed the crowd and got an SSL certificate for highlightjs.org. The canonical read on the issue seems to be "Private By Default" by Tim Bray. However, Tim's piece is somewhat theoretical, so I took some additional real-world perspective on Hacker News. The process wasn't terribly difficult, though whenever ...

Ninth

04.05.2014

Misc

This blog turns nine today, and for the occasion I've got myself a new hairy yak to shave: Want to be famous again! Blog more Make time (done) The blog looks unkempt Comment system is outmoded Replace OpenID with something modern Remove Markdown legend WYSIWYG? The look is outdated Rework ...

Eighth

04.05.2013

Misc

Before writing this post I looked back at another one like this from a year ago and realized that I was going to write pretty much the same thing: the blog is quiet and it just turned eight :-). In the last July though I tried to resume more frequent ...

Scientists, engineers and teachers

08.08.2012

Misc

While working with people who write code I keep noticing three vaguely defined but nonetheless distinct "roles", or "styles of thinking", or "behavioral patterns", or "skill sets" — I don't really know how to call this classification per se, but I came up with a descriptive name for each class. ...

Where's that future everyone is talking about?

02.08.2012

Misc

I'm guilty of it myself… But sometimes I feel this supposed "future" is a little bit farther than I'd like it to be. I can't tell any device to remind me to turn on my noisy dishwasher when I finished watching TV. Nothing is going to boil my kettle 5 ...

Fighting procrastination

02.07.2012

Misc

It's been a while since I stopped going regularly to work. And while I really needed this break it also had its negative consequences, I forgot how to work using my brains. Many, surely, know this state of mind when all the good intentions and wonderful ideas are stopped dead ...

Seventh

04.05.2012

Misc

This blog was pretty quiet for the past year, so instead of having a proper anniversary post consider this a mere technical announcement that today this blog has passed its seventh year. Yay! I'm pretty content with the situation of having a place where I can publish something whenever I ...

Hacked retweet spam

23.03.2012

Misc

This morning I woke up to find that someone or something has retweeted spam messages on behalf of my Twitter account. Some of my followers alerted me about it (thank you!) and here are my thoughts on suggestions as to what might be the reason: This is not a personal ...

Lumix GH2

11.02.2012

Misc

As a birthday present this year I upgraded my old and proven G1 to the new and powerful GH2. I've got the G1 3 years ago (also as a birthday present from my wife) and it was the first µ4/3 camera on the market. Though it was a promising system ...

Nook

17.06.2011

Misc

After long time considering if I need an e-book at all I finally bought a new Nook. My current life style allows me more time to read and after having recently read "Anathem" I realized that reading and keeping paper bricks in the age of advanced contemporary e-books is just ...

Attitude towards competitors

03.03.2011

Misc, Ubuntu

Christian Giordano, designer at Canonical: We just noticed MacOSX Lion is likely to give it a try on merging the traditional scrollbars with the overlaid ones. From the few screenshots we saw, it looks like a quite different solution. What else can we say, good luck to them and may ...

Wishing…

30.12.2010

Misc

After pondering for half an hour on the passing I realize that I can't really characterize it in a single way. Too many different things had happened, bad and good. On the one hand I almost didn't grow up professionally and had many disappointments at work. On the other I've ...

Programming warm-up

07.09.2010

Misc

Today I've got a sudden revelation about the way I usually get to program. Not that it wasn't obvious before but this time I've managed to formulate this with actual words. Often I'm facing a problem of not being able to start programming something big: a big new subsystem, a ...

Restyling

04.09.2010

Misc, Web

I've made a small restyling of the site involving mostly the blog and the forum. Had to remind myself some of my old rusty CSS skills :-). As usually I welcome criticism though, as usually, it's unlikely to change much :-). Not because I'm stubborn (which I am) but because ...