Archive for category Personal
On interviews and looking back at the future
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal on November 2, 2015
I don’t think I’ve published a post on my job searches as part of my time in the SoftEng program at UWaterloo, even though I’ve got a few in my drafts. Since I’ve had my last interview (and Jobmine has closed & matched), here’s some fun stats without naming companies: Favourite interviewer line: “So our […]
My State of Serving, aka VPS recap
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Sysadmin on February 12, 2015
So I wrote a bunch about VPSes a few months ago, and what I thought my future looked like with them. Well, a bunch has changed since then, and will going forward, so let’s go: Full out cloud hosting Still good for buy-as-you-need systems, still not right for my usecase. Other than reading about price […]
My state of VPSes
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Sysadmin on November 2, 2014
The VPS market is really really interesting to watch. Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of being able to get a year of a decent system for the price of a pizza is fascinating – and somewhat dangerous to my wallet. At my peak, I had 4 VPSes running at the same time – and […]
Musings on the Mythical Man-Month Chapter 2
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Programming on April 2, 2014
tl;dr: Scheduling tasks is hard We assume everything will go well, but we’re actually crap at estimating We confuse progress with effort Because we’re crap at estimating, managers are also crap at estimating Progress is poorly monitored If we fall behind, natural reaction is to add more people Overly optimistic: Three stages of creation: Idea, […]
Musings on The Mythical Man-Month Chapter 1
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Programming on April 1, 2014
Summary of the chapter: Growing a program A standalone product, running on the dev’s environment, is cheap. It gets expensive if: You make it generic, such that it can be extended by other people. This means you have to document it, testing it (unit tests!), and maintain it. You make it part of a larger […]
Chocolate chip cookies
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Cooking, Personal on June 30, 2013
On a random note, because I’m living on my own and have been trying recipes: Ingredients 1/2 cup white sugar 1/4 cup brown sugar (In theory, brown & white sugar amounts are swappable, haven’t tried it yet) 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp baking soda 1 cup chocolate chips 1/2 […]
LED cubes and Raspberry Pis…
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal on May 14, 2013
My plan of making an LED cube with a Raspberry Pi is coming together… been making a list of stuff I need, and looking good resources. IC 1: Serial in/Parallel out. Apparently this particular type of IC is called a 74HC595. Found it on a list of popular ICs for Arduino chips. Linked datasheet is […]
OpenVPN & China’s Firewall
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal, Sysadmin on May 10, 2013
Ended up choosing an SSH SOCKS proxy + Tunnelblick because it had the fewest moving parts. Combined with a passwordless SSH key, I saw this status on Facebook today: Kyle is truly a computer wizard! as in, his Tunnelblick thingy is working! Location? China. Success.
LED Cubes, and Raspberry Pis
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Design, Personal on February 2, 2013
Raspberry Pis have been out for a while. And I’m thinking of picking one up for projects over the work term in May – August. (Also, because a Raspberry Pi is just something interesting to have… the possibilities of a cheap & low-power Linux system are numerous.) I’m not sure how I got onto the […]
I’m glad I went
Posted by Kyle Lexmond in Personal on January 19, 2013
I went to an outdoor music festival thing (Igloo Fest) in Montreal today, on the recommendation of a friend. I almost didn’t go. But I’m glad I did. It was kind of amusing. They had a fire, and people were giving out marshmallows on sticks, so I grabbed one and toasted it. And as I […]