samm81

for the past three years I’ve been living as a digital nomad, and I’ve kept a manual log of everywhere I’ve been. this is exactly the sort of stupidly specific problem that software should solve for me, and exactly the sort of software I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing before coding agents.

this new era of vibecoding has subtly changed my relationship with my computer. I already have a habit of running almost exclusively open-source software on my void-linux box, and open-source software is fundamentally vibe-codable. encounter a bug? need a new feature? not sure what config option to use and don’t want to spend an hour reading the manpage? clone the repo and vibecode it. vibecoding changes open-source from something you file issues against into something you directly adapt.

as a software engineer I’ve developed an obsession with hoarding data. deleting or overwriting data just rubs me the wrong way - disk space is cheap so just make a copy! so when I found myself opening up a new google sheet to make a quick kanban board that I could share with a teammate my first instinct was to structure it as an append-only log.

the promise of linux is that if you dream it, and if you have the know-how, you can make it happen. my father gifted me a camera to take on a road trip through the southwest usa and I’ve used it ever since, you can see me work my way through my growing backlog on in instagram if you’d like. for editing I use darktable, an open source alternative to adobe’s lightroom.

the phoenix framework is the de-facto web server for the elixir ecosystem. it’s production ready and doesn’t need any sort of ingress like nginx in front of it. there’s a section in the docs about how to set up ssl which does a great job, but you need to get the ssl certs first. which, most of the time, means you need certbot!

you’ve written your front end piece. you need serve it somehow. ok. spin up a quick express server. you want multiple people to use it. ugh. ok. get your auth0 account, go through their setup flow, everything looks good. except…

tmux is my multiplexer of choice, and I love it, but a part of the workflow didn’t work quite right for me. I use org-mode for emacs and would keep a dedicated session open with just a single window in which I had emacs up. Context switching from other work to org (to clock in or out of a task, for example) would require Prefix s (I use C-q for my prefix) -> navigate to org session -> do org work -> Prefix s -> navigate back to work session.

I never really believed in vitamins. My mom made me take them on and off throughout my childhood, but a lot of the literature out there is pretty adamant: there’s really no need to take supplementary vitamins, as we get an adequate amount through a healthy diet. There are exceptions - if you only eat ramen you’re gonna be in trouble. If you’re dark skinned and living in a low sunlight climate Vitamin D supplements might be a good idea. But I have neither problem, and so lived firm in my belief that vitamins supplements were for fools and worrywarts - capitalism’s latest grab at creating fear to turn a profit.

Back in my sophomore year of college I started food logging using Fitbit. Fitbit is, to most people, a thing you wear on your wrist to track your steps and (for the fancier versions) your sleep. I doubt many people even know that you can use the Fitbit app to keep track of the food eat, much less actually use that functionality. I don’t remember why I started tracking, but if I had to guess I would say it was freshman fifteen 😅

For those of you who unaware, I have been working on and using a personal project of mine for the last three years that I coined pesterbot. I won’t go into the details here, but the basic idea is that it messages you on Facebook Messenger every 15 minutes asking you what you’re up to. You respond, and you end up with a huge log of what you were up to on any given day for the past three years. 1.6 megabytes of a log in fact.

Or SSCFCBMT for short.

Not to be outdone by a professional, I decided to have my own go at making alcoholic boba. How hard can it be?

There’s a fun and healthy tradition that takes place at my internship for this summer. I’m interning with Airbnb, and their Seattle office sits on the second and third floor of a twenty one floor building. Every day around 1:30 pm, people gather together and climb up, then down the stairs just one time. We have a spreadsheet keeping track of everyone’s paces so you can track improvement over time. And man, is it brutal. Those who have done the stair climb are aware that not all stairwells in the stairclimb are created equal. Most of them consist of exactly 10 steps, but my legs know that this is not true of all of them. I set out to conduct and investigation.

Rescuetime is a great little app that tracks how you use your time on your computer and then shames you for not being productive enough. I got into it recently and installed it in my browser and on my phone, and tried to install it on my laptop. But of course it didn’t work, because I use dwm, and why would dwm work with anything out of the box? But I wanted to get it working so I sent in a support ticket.

Those of you who know me well are probably aware that Facebook and I have beef. Well, Facebook couldn’t care less about me, but I have a problem with Facebook. So I’ve decided to actually do something about it, instead of changing my profile picture everyday (topic of a future post). To that end, I’ve created Take Back Facebook.

For those of you who don’t know, League of Legends is a MOBA involving 5 players working together to destroy another set of 5 players. According to Wikipedia, by July 2012 it was the most played online game in North America and Europe by number of hours played. And in high school I played a lot of it. The site has since gone offline, but the last time I looked at “how many hours have I spent on league of legends” the total came out close to 1200 hours - or 50 days of my life 😅

My girlfriend, Rachel, and I have our anniversary on April 23rd. April 23rd is pretty close to my birthday, April 2nd, so Rachel also makes us celebrate our mid-year anniversary on October 23rd, since it’s close to her birthday. That way I spend October being stressed about making her two gifts, and she spends April being stressed about making me two gifts. This year, Rachel had been strongly hinting to me that she wanted a pair of earrings, as she lost the back to the last pair I got her (the part that holds it in place). Of course, I didn’t want to just get her another pair of boring old earrings… So I set out to make my own.

There are a million posts out there about getting things done. This one will not be done better, I will not have anything more insightful to say. Instead, I would like this to serve as a benchmark for me to look back on. I think it would’ve been interesting to have detailed record of how I got things done four years ago for comparison. This post will be that record for future me. If I accidentally introduce someone to a new tool or method, all the better.

Fri 2:40 PM

Way back when, spring semester of 2017, facebook messenger games came out and became crazy popular. There was the infamous Endless Lakes, in which you jumped over an endless number of gaps in a platform stretching out over a lake. There was EverWing, in which you flew a winged angel (?) character with some dragon companions to defeat enemies in the sky (forever). And there was Brickpop, where you had a grid of colored bricks, and you had to pop them all. Tapping a brick pops the whole chunk that the brick is in, where a chunk is defined by contiguous bricks of the same color. A brick on it’s own cannot be popped. This meant that you had to insure that every brick eventually had at least one buddy around it.

I had my first job in the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of high school. I worked at the National Institutes of Health as a programming intern, and I was flush with cash making 10.25 an hour. This being the first time in my life I had discretionary income, I went wild. Everyday on my way home from work I would pass by the soda machine. “Hey, kid,” it would beckon “hey, look, I got this nice and cold Dr. Pepper over here, it’s only a buck twenty five, really nice deal.” I would stand in front of the machine agonizing. “$1.25 / $10.25/hr = 0.12hr, 0.12hr * 60min/hr = 7.2min… so really, I’m just paying seven minutes of work for this soda. That’s nothing!” And so, the vending machine and my wallet would end the day a little lighter.

Well close enough.

I’ve been visiting my friend Avikar these past two weeks at Caltech, hanging out, working on a project, eating lots of food and boba, as well as trying alcoholic boba for the first time. It turns out that I also arrived in time for one of Caltech’s yearly traditions: Ditch Day.

It’s not often one gets to witness the birth of a culinary revolution.

Last weekend me and my roommate and a friend of ours drove a half hour up to a nearby Microsoft store to play in a tournament for the virtual reality game The Unspoken. I’ve written a little bit about this game before, but the tournament was probably the most play time with this game I’ll be getting in my life, so I figured I should write up my thoughts now.

Part two of a series in which I got back and examine old github projects. Today’s victim is PusheenScreensaver.

I went, last Sunday (4/30/2017), to Dreamhack Austin, a huge gaming convention in downtown Austin which spans three days. The main attractions are Smash, CS:GO, Hearthstone, and Starcraft II, but it also features a LAN zone, a hackathon, some league, some Overwatch, a bunch of companies trying to sell you stuff, and an Oculus Rift VR esport. Here were my thoughts, in no particular order.

I was definitely a late comer to Spotify. I only started using it during the summer of my sophomore-junior year of college (2016), at which point most of my fellow classmates had already been using it for several years. Finding myself on a new platform that didn’t follow any of the previous paradigms I was used to I was left struggling to figure out how to organize my music.

(An excerpt from a family conversation over email discussing this article: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2016/03/algebra_ii_has_to_go.html. In it the author argues that Algebra II doesn’t belong in the standard high school curriculum anymore. She says that there are other more useful courses that could be substituted (statistics for example), and that it is a crippling requirement for high school graduation. Many high school students fail to graduate solely because of the Algebra II requirement.)

Over the course of my first semester Chinese learnings, I encountered many characters, but none cracked me up more than this: 喝.

The Problem

13:59 We have arrived at Buildathon. After a couple of hours we have settled into an area and started exploring in a couple of possible project directions. They have several 3D printers which I’d like to give a try. I suggested to Rachel the idea of making a little wax seal with the 3D printer - so she made her last name which I think is pretty neat. Used an online tool called tinkercad, the people at the printers were very willing to help her. Meanwhile, I found someone talking about google tango which I was curious about, looked up, and then had to have one. Anyone who remembers my obsession with hololens will understand. I’ve been working on getting the sample code up and running, despite the horrible wifi.

This is the first part of a series of posts where I will be going back through old github repos, revamping them, and doing a little retrospective. We begin today with Dodge.