Archive for category Personal

On interviews and looking back at the future

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 […]

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My State of Serving, aka VPS recap

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 […]

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My state of VPSes

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 […]

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Musings on the Mythical Man-Month Chapter 2

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, […]

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Musings on The Mythical Man-Month Chapter 1

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 […]

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Chocolate chip cookies

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 […]

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LED cubes and Raspberry Pis…

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 […]

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OpenVPN & China’s Firewall

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.

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LED Cubes, and Raspberry Pis

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 […]

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I’m glad I went

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 […]

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