I spun this out into a separate post because the previous post was already just too absurdly long. Anyway, I wanted to post copies of the three puzzles I worked the most on for Hunt, both to save them for posterity and to give readers some idea of what Mystery Hunt puzzles are like. The […]

Retrospectively, if any kid were going to grow up to be a coder, it probably should’ve been me. Genetically speaking, my dad had been working on computers since high school in the 1970s, semi-breaking into the school on the weekends to hack on the PLATO project and throw LAN parties with his fellow teenage geek […]

Last week at PyCon 2013, with the assistance of Asheesh Laroia and several other helpful TAs, I delivered an introductory Django tutorial wherein one builds a simple bookmarking application. Instead of the official Django tutorial, I used a different curriculum based on the tutorial I wrote for my IOLab students in fall 2011 (itself based […]

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been reading a startup essay series on the train to and from work. It’s Blake Masters’ notes from a startup class Peter Thiel taught at Stanford last year converted to essay form. It’s been interesting–not quite the mythmaking or buzzword dump that most talk about startups devolves into. It’s […]

“The storms come and go, the waves crash overhead, the big fish eat the little fish, and I keep on paddling.”— Varys, Game of Thrones In the TV show Game of Thrones, there is a character, Varys, who is the royal spymaster in Westeros. (There’s also a second person on the royal Small Council with […]

A few days ago, I found Rowan Manning’s joblint pack via Twitter. Joblint is a linter (code style guide implementation and bug finder) for job advertisements. It looks for keywords that indicate sexist, abusive, or bland content, unrealistic expectations, or outdated technology requirements and prints a report indicating possible problems with the ad. It has […]

There’s been some prominent blog posts recently questioning the usefulness of hackathon events. Some focus on the cultural issues associated with many hackathons–that by default they appeal to a very homogenous subset of tech workers (aka young white male coders who enjoy subsisting on beer and pizza). This can be mitigated by thoughtful event organizers–advertising […]

For my first software engineering job out of grad school, I was offered a salary of $80,000 a year. Said job was full-time, non-hourly, and located in San Francisco. I negotiated, because negotiation is Something You’re Supposed to Do, and got a bump up to $82K. Not bad, for 20 minutes of extremely uncomfortable phone […]

Three weeks ago, I went to a UC Berkeley career fair and dropped off a copy of my resume with a certain startup. I’d put a lot of effort into selling myself with this particular resume, and trying to stand out from the crowd (most of the attendees were undergraduate CS majors–most probably with better […]

Last weekend, I participated in Hack for Change, a 24-hour codeathon sponsored by Change.org and Code for America where developers and designers were challenged to create apps for the public good. As my first hackathon, it was a tremendous experience in a number of ways, and some really cool applications came out of the process. […]