Internetting

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Being a person who is very very computer

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The internet is really good at helping you waste time – often during the pursuit of a work-related goal. Something like that happened to me this evening while I was hunting down the answer to Proxy server & NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID . By 7:45, I found myself reading the origins of Care Bear tummy symbols. This post is a recap of my findings…

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Illusions of Explanatory Depth (IOED)

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In 1993, everyone seemed to know of a pool cleaner who could also build a web site. That’s no longer the case. Now, there are too many sub-disciplines within software engineering for a single person to know how to design, build, test, and deploy a secure application from scratch. Most software engineers know this, but some are convinced they know more than they do – a completely normal phoneomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth.

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If Anthony Bourdain built CI pipelines, they would contain exactly Zero bullshit

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Inferred competence is the act of correlating performance of a highly complex range of tasks from a single performance of one (or a few) tasks. When Anthony Bourdain wanted to hire a cook, he’d invite the candidate into his kitchen, and issue a single command: Make me an omelette. A thoughtful CI pipeline tries to duplicate that same simplicity.

Computationally measuring similarity of terms with 6 algorithms

There are many methods of determining similarity and difference between terms with nltk. None are simpler to implement than the Levenshtein edit distance – but in many ways, this algorithm is grossly insufficient, because it doesn’t take into consideration a word’s meaning or sense (at all!). For accuracy, I’ve found that Wu-Palmer is the all-around most reliable. And even this has some not-too-obvious limitations. This blog post shows how each algorithm stacks up when comparing the word yell with some semantically adjacent verbs. Python code is attached.

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NLP Pipeline trained on Modern Art Descriptions

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“I have found that the trick to successful modern art isn't the art. It's the description.” – My buddy D

Naturally, ☝🏽this got my wheels turning. Could I design an algorithm that could write convincing modern art installation descriptions? Being a total noob with ai and nlp, how far could I get in a reasonably short amount of time in between work and snow shoveling? Well, I found out.

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ORF Specification for Writing bug tickets

ORF is an acronym for Occam’s razor format. It is not real. There is no chance it will become a W3C standard. I made it up years ago (jokingly at first) when I started managing a backlog. But I enjoy acronyms, so I held on to it. Here’s the quick and dirty:

Some bug tickets are unclear despite containing lots of information. Some are very good, despite being tersely worded, sometimes profanity-laced – even ungrammatical. I wanted to better understand why: what makes a good bug ticket good, and a bad one bad.

This blog post is an informal summary of those findings, and a breezy presentation of some simple patterns that have worked well for me and my current teammates.

Adding Tooltip Functionality to a SquareSpace Site

For anyone who pays for SquareSpace web hosting, adding simple and flexible tooltip functionality is pretty simple. You just need to have a premium subscription – meaning, you pay for the service. Here’s how it works…

  • Add jQuery, Popper, and Tippy into your Code Injection header, along with some basic JavaScript

  • Bring a page or blog post into edit mode, and create specially crafted links prefixed with #tooltip_

  • Save your page, then load it outside of the SquareSpace editor - you’ll see that each of your links is now transformed into great looking tooltips