Thoughts on a LinkedIn Ad
When I’m cooking I’m almost always watching some kind of video or listening to some kind of podcast; when it’s video content that I’m consuming it is almost always accompanied by pre-roll video ads. A vast majority of th...
Recent Posts
Raise the Floor
Making your worst day better is more important than making your best day better. We all love the ‘high’ of success, accomplishment, and attainment. Society emphasizes this: how many songs include some notion of “raise th...
Use Your Manners
We all heard the same line at some point through our childhoods: “say Thank You”. Over time we were taught by parents, teachers, mentors, and other adults that the practice of expressing gratitude with these words was im...
After a Promotion
Many successful, talented, experienced tech industry professionals have written at length about how promotions work in the industry, and how one can go about leveling up in their career. I’ve read a lot of those blogs, L...
Creativity through Restriction
Could you build a bridge across 2 tables up to feet apart capable of holding up dozens of coins with nothing but newspaper, mailing labels, popsicle sticks, and index cards? In less than 3 minutes? I know dozens of kids ...
Please Leave a Message at the Beep
I’m thankfully old enough to remember a time before cell phones. I know that I’ll never forget my family’s home phone number, the answering machine message on said phone featured a 5 year old me letting callers know to “...
Take it to a Channel
Hearing the sound of your morning alarm when out in public can elicit a visceral response - be it a song, chime, or the classic “beep beep” noise, many of us are conditioned to react to that noise and have rather negativ...
Brothers
It is hard to overstate the impact that my family has and continues to have on me. I am privileged to have grown up in a tight-knit clan of six, consisting of my mom and dad (who are great) and three younger brothers. I...
2021 Favorites
At the start of the year I made it a goal to publish on this blog at least every other month - I want to maintain the practice of writing, revising, and publishing my thoughts no matter the topic. I benefit from the proc...
Small Asks for Simple Feedback
Shipping new features to users is a thrill that every engineer I’ve known chases; recently in my work with Robinhood I’ve been lucky enough to have that experience with the Recurring Investments team: we created and deli...
5 Lessons from the Weightroom
Finding connections is fundamental to the learning process - the synapses in your brain are literally establishing new connections as you acquire new skills and knowledge. The more I’m able to draw parallels between the...
My Pre-PR Checklist
I’m impatient. Fundamentally I want things to go fast, I want immediate results, and I want instant gratification. This is true in my personal life, and especially true in my work: one of the least favorite parts of bein...
Why Movie-Watching is the Most Intimidating Goal I've Set for 2021
How many times have I scrolled through Netflix, looking at the myriad of titles served up to me only to find myself watching the same thing that you watched last week? How many times have I watched The Office? I think th...
Costume Your Code
Of all holidays, I think I’m least consistent with the degree to which I observe Halloween. I can’t pinpoint any Halloween traditions that I subscribe to on a yearly basis, I don’t have any standing rituals around the d...
My Journaling MVP
Engineers love beautiful solutions to complicated problems. We strive to build strong, robust systems that make lives easier, enable new experiences, and create value. The iterative software engineering process often beg...
Picking Up Pennies
Author’s Note: This article was written in April 2020, but not published until September 2020. The world, and my life along with it, has change significantly since then; please bear this in mind while reading. Accordi...
Job Search by the Numbers
I’ve made a few posts recently about my job search - I found that it is something of an all-consuming process therefore it’s not surprising that it would be the topic I’d be most interested in writing about. I’m glad to ...
My Kotlin Toolbelt
Adopting Kotlin as my primary development language has been a great experience, improving my day-to-day satisfaction in my professional work developing Android apps and increasing my motivation to further my skills in my...
10 Essential Job Search Tools
The prospect of being forced to search for a job during the COVID-19 pandemic is nearly as intimidating as facing down one’s first dragon. Be it in video games, tabletop RPGs, or just as a child on the playground, nothin...
WeWorked
As I settle into my current job search I’m making refinements to how I tell my story and present myself: the skills that I have, the value that these capabilities can provide, and the path that led me to having these ski...
What's Next?
On Thursday, April 30th I was laid off from my job at WeWork. I’m not going to lie, the news came as a shock. I had woken up that morning with intentions to merge code, review pull requests, and perform my usual duties. ...
Automating Deployment with GitHub Actions
This blog used to be automatically built and deployed via CircleCI. I had spent the time setting up the pipelines so that I could ensure that deployment of new versions was as easy as merging a pull request. I was happy ...
Working at Home
Over the past week, as I’m sure many others in the software world have, I’ve been adjusting to working at home. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the SF Bay Area hard, and in order to try to reduce the spread of the virus th...
Doing Less to Drive Doing More
Over the last few months I’ve experienced a heightened drive to work on side projects and contribute to the open source projects that I rely on, more so than in much of recent memory. I’m not certain why I feel this way,...
The Difference Between Samples and Prototypes
Recently my work has found me focusing on developing SDKs for Android. I’ve found this work is distinctly different from building user-facing client applications in numerous ways, but one of the most notable for me has b...
Choosing a Reactive Programming Framework for Modern Android Development
The opportunity to participate in the design and development of greenfield applications and systems is, for me, one of the most exciting and energizing engineering challenges that can be undertaken. There is great freedo...
Thoughts on Best Practices for Technical Onboarding
Like many tech companies, my team at Pandora experiences its fair share of employee turnover. Between personal experience and talking to others in the industry I know that this can be challenging for even the most well-o...
Building a Word Clock
What is a word clock?The word clock is a popular amateur electronics project that displays the time in words, rather than with symbols. Traditional clocks, of course, use numbers to give a precise reading of the time. A...
Securing with HTTPS and Let's Encrypt
Why?This project wasn’t really necessary, but it feels right, and I support encrypting traffic in general. I want to show that support by practicing what I preach, so I decided that I should go for it and force all traff...
Thoughts on a Summer in the Bay
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my experience this summer at Pandora, and have been trying to write about it alongside my pondering, but have been coming up without words. Without a doubt, I had a great time an...
Senior Days Trivia Game Retrospective
BackgroundAt St. Olaf, the Student Government Association has a tradition of hosting Senior Days, a three day series of events for senior students after second semester final exams but before graduation exercises. The e...