CI/CD Dashboards for Observability of Software Build Failures

When you’re one of 42 developers spread out across 5 timezones waiting to merge work into master, flaky test failures in CI can really chap your ass. The video below is a brief show-and-tell of the CI/CD tools and processes I put into place in the summer of 2020 to fix that problem for my engineering team. Details are summarized below the video.

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E Pluribus Unum: 13 Republican and Democratic States in Charts

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Contrary to the absurd belief that republicans are rugged individualists, born in log cabins they built with their own bare hands red states like Texas frequently receive WAY MORE from the federal government than they give. Put another way, red states, on average, enjoy the redistributed wealth produced in places exactly like New York and New Jersey. This blog post lays it out in a series of charts.

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Feats of “Dad Strength”

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Dad strength is the kind of physical strength that’s useful when stuff goes wrong and people are depending on you — in clutch situations. Every dad ought to meet or exceed his own minimal definition of strong, but I think these strength benchmarks are generally applicable because they scale to any weight.

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Simple Randori Check List

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Improving your Jiu Jitsu is a bit like software development in that you want to be able to try new things, experiment, and collect data – when the stakes are low. Effective training should be empirical, not emotional. Stop giving a crap if you get tapped out during randori, and become more interested in collecting data.

My Mother

When I was a boy, I remember the amazing bedtime stories my mom would tell me about ancient times in Korea, about monks and wisemen and sorcerers. She was a remarkable storyteller and teacher. Half the time, I wasn’t sure if she was just making stuff up. I tried testing her by asking her to retell stories (to identify inconsistencies) but I don’t think I actually cared about keeping score. The stories were that good. She taught me how to grow vegetables, how to use an abacus, how to roller skate, how to write cursive letters, how to draw a face, how to invent games from string. She did this without the internet.

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Sphex Ichneumoneus

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Sphex is the colloquial name of a particular kind of digger wasp. Daniel Dennett effectively uses this wasp’s burrowing routine to show how, even basic examinations of animal behavior can lead us right to the doorstep of causal determinism: the belief that everything (ie: particle systems, wasp brains, human courtship rituals, the universe) can be explained as states of affairs, resulting from some previous state(s) of affairs in a purely mechanistic fashion. When a causally deterministic outlook is applied to questions of agency, free will, and consciousness, the implications pile up fast. Some interesting explorations of this issue can be found in popular shows like Devs [FX] and West World [HBO].