Writing on peterv!

Design Up Front

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You open your terminal and enter claude, “Welcome back Peter!”, it says to you, making you feel warm inside. In the console you write, “Build me a chess analysis tool that can load my chess games from chess.com and analyze my games to find frequent inaccuracies and suggest improvements.” The thinking indicator pulses gently, the token counter whirs to life, electricity is rerouted from hospitals to GPUs, magic begins. Thirty minutes later Mr. Claude returns from his meditative expedition, having produced what must be some of the most well crafted, idiomatic, and pragmatic software the world has ever seen.

And Farms Grew Larger and Owners Fewer

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As I wrap up my college education and prepare to begin the rest of my life, I have to consider, what will I do? I have a great opportunity lined up as a software engineer, but if I am to believe the likes of Huang (Nvidia) or Altman (OpenAI) then my days as a software engineer are limited, and it is inevitable that I should be replaced by something a lot more computerized and a lot less cool.

Day N

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Call to Adventure

♪ accompaniment

For accompaniment while you read.

On Day 1 I walk along the sidewalks and down the long staircases which thread between houses and follow Taylor Ave North, feeding towards downtown Seattle.

As I slip between the houses and the trees I catch glimpses of downtown Seattle. In the humid air the place I will be spending my days appears distant and blurry.

Breaking to Building

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I wrote Breaking the AWS Account* *where I spoke briefly on the first time I worked directly with AWS. In the process of of some notoriously productive intern work, I accidentally shut out access for my entire company. Well, one week after that internship, in a moment of dramatic irony, I boarded a plane to Seattle to intern at AWS.

Even having some professional experience under my belt there are some things that stood out immediately: the buildings were bigger, the elevators taller and the coffee line longer. Three months prior I met my first professional software developer and now I was surrounded, no escape.

A Text Editor for the Brave

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you don’t write a lot of code, this might not make a lot of sense.

9 Variable Scopes

If you do write a lot of code, you’re probably familiar with that feeling. You know, that shame and hopelessness as you hack away at your keyboard writing code in your Microsoft-owned text editor while getting completion assistance from your Microsoft-owned LLM and finally push your code to a Microsoft-owned git platform (just be grateful I didn’t say Microsoft owned OS). Why do I feel so crushed, you ask yourself, *why can’t I use a text editor made *by the people, for the people, for the little guys like me? You can stop holding your breath, because such an experience is available (well, has been available for 50 years).

Breaking the AWS Account

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The year is 2024. Computer science students are fighting to secure any internship opportunity they can get their hands on. I am no different. Lost, alone, and afraid, my mind goes numb as I let an AI fill out internship application 158. There is no end in sight.

Then suddenly I got my first interview, and my first internship.

Genesis

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.

apple-music.nvim

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am a pretty heavy music listener and for some time I have been using Apple Music to do my music streaming. I am also a pretty heavy coder and for some time (around a year) I have been using Neovim as my text editor of choice.

One thing I love about Neovim is how immersive it feels. If you don’t know, Neovim is a text editor known for its confusing controls (you use hjkl to move a cursor around and must memorize dozens of commands to become useful) and for its overall primitive experience (it is based on one of the earliest popular text editors). Neovim allows you to slowly build up a configuration by either installing and configuring plugins made by others, or by making your own additions in a programming language called Lua.

Keep the Channel Open

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There is a good chance you don’t know who Agnes de Mille is, nor Martha Graham. The long and short of it is that Agnes de Mille was a choreographer responsible for the legendary Oklahoma!. Despite achieving widespread acclaim and commercials success, de Mille was not entirely satisfied. She felt that a lot of her other work was actually much better yet received far less recognition.

To reconcile her feelings de Mille sought out Martha Graham, another dancer and choreographer who, while relatively less well-known outside the world of dance, was without a doubt one of the most powerful influencers of modern American dance. Graham was intense and painfully passionate, once saying “I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But nevertheless it is inevitable. (src)”

Division the Hard Way

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When I talk to people outside of software, the task of solving coding problems during interviews is one that I don’t think I am ever able to explain properly. Therefore, I’d like to share a problem I came across that I think has a really creative solution and may shed some light on the style of problems asked at companies like Amazon and Google.

Evaluating Division

In this problem we are given two ’lists’ of data. The first is a list of equations with variables which mean something like a / b = x. In other words, we get two variables (a, b), and the result of diving a/b which is a number, x. The second list contains a list of queries. Each query looks like *a/b. *The goal of the problem is to build a list of results. For each query, if possible, we compute the result. If it is impossible to compute a given query we place a -1 on the results list.

Meditations

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

*Meditations *is a book containing the thoughts of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. These thoughts are captured through journal entries written by Marcus Aurelius over the course of his life, and mostly pertain to his strong sentiments towards stoicism. There’s a lot of great morsels that I found when reading it, however if I’m being honest the book felt somewhat like I imagine someone’s best attempt at tweeting would be without Twitter. This could be due to a number of factors like the translation I had, or my own reading comprehension, but reading some of the passages felt like I was swimming in concrete.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Sat, 27 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The course of true love never did run smooth.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about love and a scenario so hilarious it would be difficult not to be entertained. The gist of it is that there exists a sort of ’love quadrilateral’ between two men and two women. This quadrilateral is quite dangerous and everyone finds themselves out in the woods where, in an unrelated storyline, a fairy king is out to play some petty pranks on his fairy queen with a mysterious love potion. The target of this kings potion of course gets confused and suddenly our love quadrilateral is complete chaos. You can’t tell me that doesn’t sound like a great plot.

Academic Integrity

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

According to Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, “college” is from the Latin lego, legere, legi, lectum, literally “to collect, gather, [or] pick”, and cum, which of course is “with”. In other words, the word is roughly equivalent to selected together (this also is a broader version of colleagues i.e. people chosen to work together). This doesn’t really tell us much.

From Oxford Languages:

an educational institution or establishment, in particular one providing higher education or specialized professional or vocational training.

To the Lighthouse

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is a book which entreats readers to introspect on the ideas of time, meaning, and relationships. The narrative is told through a “stream of consciousness”, where characters’ thoughts waft in and out of scene in a manner which sometimes to me comes across as haphazard, but if Woolf’s intent was to portray her characters and their interactions with as great an intimacy as possible I suppose she may have succeeded.

Musical Triumph

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some people are obviously passionate. I think an obviously passionate person dances in public, or shouts their ardor from rooftops. Then I am not obviously passionate. That is not to say that I am not passionate; in fact, I would claim to be significantly more passionate than average, but it may not be so obvious.

Later in my life I found music. I believe that, for better or worse, music may be the medium which I am able to express myself most accurately and perhaps in some sense empathize with the world. In learning about the artists and composers–how their lives influence their music–I think everyone can find something of themselves there.

Economics of the College Meal Plan

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Food: college students need it, and dining halls provideth albeit, not without cost. Most schools require that certain students sign up for a meal plan, where they pay up-front for colleges to provide X amount of meals during each week. Often, after a student is no longer required to sign up for one, they quit this program. For some, it is because they hate the food, but I think many make the decision based on the premise that meal plans are way overpriced.

Programming: 2023 in Review

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was tidying my GitHub today and noticed that it has been just a little over one year since I started getReddit, a tool that made videos in the ‘Youtube Shorts’ or Tiktok format from Reddit content. It was probably one of the first things that I programmed myself, that is to say it was not the result of following some tutorial or guide. I broke down the problem myself and then researched and implemented solutions to each step along the way. It was been an important milestone for me, also igniting the bulk of my interest and passion in computer science that I still have today. Working on it I learned a lot but in particular it opened my eyes to what I could achieve in programming if I would just RTFM.

Places on the Internet: XKCD

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this series I’d like to share a variety of places on the internet. They are not necessarily my favorite places, nor places that I like or dislike (unless I say so). More so they are a taste of what I think exemplifies the diversity of thought that the internet provides.

Today’s adventure brings us to xkcd.com, a site with little more than the imaginative comics of a Mr. Randall Munroe. This is a site that I really like. Despite the site’s humility in scope and design, it is immensely popular, garnering an estimated 150 million visitors per month.

Mr. President

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a story that I started writing when I started writing Programming: 2023 in Review’s section on BMCC. It quickly started growing out of proportion so I decided to give it its own piece here.

I had wanted to join a community of people who were like me, newly passionate about CS and full of ambition. I’ll admit that at BMCC I found it a little more difficult to locate this cadre than I expected. What I found instead was that community college was (largely) a group of people who have been beaten down spiritually and academically their whole lives (no, I am not going to unpack that massive anecdote here). People who had always been told you’re not able, *don’t bother, or just do something simple. * Therefore, I took it upon myself to tell them you can, you should, and you must.

Seasons of Superlatives

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago I read Dickens’, *A Tale of Two Cities, *which was a book gifted to me longer ago by a dear friend. To date I have read three Dickens Novels:

A Christmas Carol

Great Expectations

A Tale of Two Cities

I love to say I love reading Dickens. Though a part of me thinks that I may love saying “I love reading Dickens” more than I love “reading Dickens”. Jokes aside, I feel that Dickens novels are incredibly hard for me to get into, for their language (19th century British), and depth of scene and dialogue. After a few days when I am actually able to understand what I’m reading though I cannot put them down.

Inspirations in Brutalism

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to share a few of my bigger inspirations in design and part of the motivator to work on my new digital-presence project.

Motherfucking Websites

Now, I’m not normally one to speak in french, but some things are too important to skimp on emphasis. Enter, motherfuckingwebsite.com, a site which takes minimalism to the extreme. When I first came across this, I was a little shocked and dismissive; it seemed ugly, crude, and like something one would make as their first exploration into html. However, as I read it, I realized that the creator might really be on to something. Then I encountered bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com, a rehashing of the previous site, but with a few small changes which dramatically improve the experience. After reading these two sites and really thinking about it, this sort of website-brutalism really had me hooked.

My Favorite Chuck Norris Jokes

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Chuck Norris jokes amuse me way more than they should, so I’ve decided to start collecting them. Here are a few of my favorites:

Poker

Chuck Norris won the 1983 World Series of Poker despite holding only a Joker, a Get out of jail free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a green No.4 Uno card.

Poker II

Some dispute the previous fact, claiming that Chuck Norris wasn’t even playing poker at the 1993 World Series of Poker. Instead, he was apparently sat at the next table over with a menu in hand. When the waiter came to took his order Chuck said, “I’ll have the soup”, and they decided to give him* the whole pot.*

About My LinkedIn Replacement

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like many, I have a LinkedIn account. I don’t use it at all but, for that matter, I don’t use any social media (besides Reddit and Youtube if that counts). In a longer blog post I’ll probably delve into my reasons for such a choice, but here’s the gist:

LinkedIn profiles are boring and unimaginative; if I want a boring and unimaginative description of someone, I’d rather just see their resume in a single page.

Blank Pages

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“See this page of paper? It’s blank,” Scull said. “That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon.”

Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

I found this on a particularly deep internet dive skimming the Ph.D. thesis of a distinguished engineer at Google.

Simple?

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

*No, computers are not simple. *

Today I was reading a reddit post on r/webdev:

“Just a reminder. You cannot possibly idiot proof an app enough.”

Just deployed an app for a client. Holy shit what a nightmare. I thought I designed it to be idiot proof, but apparently the world evolved more advanced idiots lol

Disclaimer: idiot proof is just an expression. I am happy to have my clients and work with them to find the perfect solution.