peterv!

Day 1 is all about the thrills and motivations underlying technological innovation and business success. Day N is about thrill and motivation that comes with living each day well.

seattle
essay

reading ↗

On Mental Toughness (for Software Engineers): How the Best of the Best Get Better And Better

This post is part of a series where I try to take generic business articles and view them through my lens as an individual contributor software engineer.

philosophy

reading ↗

Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it.

philosophy
niche

post

Breaking to Building

AWS is all about Day 1. This is about Day 1, 2, 3, ...

seattle
narrative
personal
careeer

post

A Text Editor for the Brave

What is Neovim, and how to uninstall VSCode. If you don't write a lot of code, this probably won't make any sense.

neovim

reading ↗

Hash-Based Bisect Debugging in Compilers and Runtimes

Does this sound familar? You make a change to a library to optimize its performance or clean up technical debt or fix a bug, only to get a bug report: some very large, incomprehensibly opaque test is now failing. Now you have a major debugging job in an unfamiliar code base. What if I told you that a magic wand exists that can pinpoint the relevant line of code or call stack in that unfamiliar code base?

algorithms
technical
rsc

reading ↗

Storing Data in Control Flow

A decision that arises over and over when designing concurrent programs is whether to represent program state in control flow or as data. This post is about what that decision means and how to approach it.

rsc
go
engineering

reading ↗

What If Data Is a Bad Idea?

Several years ago, esteemed computer scientist Alan Kay participated in an Ask Me Anything on Hacker News. The dialogue was kicked off by Kay's provocative musing on the legitimacy of data; not just some data, but the idea of data itself. It was a bit like a physicist asking, "What if gravity is a bad idea?"

data
philosophical
technical

post

Breaking the AWS Account

A play by play of my time at Trusted Nurse Staffing.

buffalo
narrative
personal
career

post

apple-music.nvim

Apple Music + Neovim. Ugly duckling music player meets chad text editor.

neovim
lua
music
project

post

Keep the Channel Open

Art, Oklahoma!, and a sense of inferiority.

quotes

reading ↗

Roblox Expands Immersive Video Ads Access to All Advertisers, Adds New Measurement Partners

Early research points to the scaled opportunity for brands to connect with Gen Z consumers on Roblox via new and engaging ad formats.

society
technology

reading ↗

uv: An Extremely Fast Python Package Manager

A fascinating dive into some of the technical problems faced in implementing the latest competing standard.

software
tooling
talk

post

Division the Hard Way

A description and solution for one of the more creative software interview problems.

leetcode

reading ↗

Blame the Computer

EVIDENCE MOUNTS THAT THE FORCES OF DIGITAL CIVILIZATION have produced a technological dystopia run by artificially unintelligent algorithms designed in the interests of greed for maximum efficiency.

philosophy

post

Meditations

Reading 'Meditations' is kind of like Twitter except that in this world Twitter is good and it won't exist for a couple thousand years.

books
quotes

post

A Midsummer Night's Dream

'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is a play about love and a scenario so hilarious it would be difficult not to be entertained...

books
quotes

reading ↗

How to review code effectively: A GitHub staff engineer's philosophy

GitHub Staff Engineer Sarah Vessels discusses her philosophy of code review, what separates good code review from bad, her strategy for finding and reviewing code, and how to get the most from reviews of her own code.

github
engineering

post

Academic Integrity

What does it mean to have academic integrity? And why I think schools have it wrong.

school
rant
essay

post

To the Lighthouse

A beautiful (if not indecipherable) novel whose meaning flew far above my head when I read it.

quotes
books

reading ↗

Distributed Computing Manifesto

Who desn't love a good manifesto.

technical

post

Musical Triumph

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.