Don't Cite Unsold eBay Listing Prices Journalists, I beg of you: please stop confusing unsold eBay listings for actual sales. I’m ticked off after seeing this Patch post about NYC MetroCards selling for $5,000 and this WSJ article about Trader Joe’s totes going for $50,000. Yes, someone listed these items for absurdly
Hacking Displate (For Fun!) During the pandemic my weird vice/obsession became Displates (metal wall art hung up by magnets): For me, part of the hobby was poking holes in their website. I’ve long stopped trying to give their devs heartburn, so I figured I’d document some of my hacking highlights. Limited
games Balatro’s Least Erratic Decks My most recent “just for fun” project was to find the least erratic of the Erratic decks in Balatro (a poker-ish roguelike deckbuilder game). Before each game, you pick a deck that has a special power. The Erratic deck completely randomizes the ranks/suits of the cards (such that you
remote Fix Your Microphone It’s likely that, at some point, you've had shitty audio during video meetings. Why? Because you don’t get immediate feedback for audio issues. With video, you can instantly see if your image is out of focus or if you’re not in the frame. You can’
When Your Source of Truth is Reality Let me tell you a story about why one should be cautious with databases that track the real world. I play trombone in a local community orchestra. For the past two years, I’ve been the board secretary; part of my duties is keeping a roster of who is in
code design Coding by Magic Most of my programming ventures begin with a single line of code I’m curious about. Who is calling the code, and how does this code fit into the larger jigsaw puzzle? As a result, “find usages”, “go to declaration”, and “go to implementations” are three of my most often
code design Programming Priorities Software development (or, you know, life in general) is all about juggling priorities. For this post, I’m thinking specifically about code design priorities. You only have a limited amount of time to implement a feature, so you have to pick and choose which aspects of it to spend time
politics Dan's Edina Sample Ballot Election (2024) As a summary, here's what I'm voting this year on my Edina, MN ballot (along with links to research on why I'm voting that way): * For all partisan races (president, senate, house/state reps) - the DFL candidate. * Statewide constitutional amendment - Yes. * County
politics Edina City Council (2024) Another post about local Edina politics, this time the city council race. There are three candidates for two open positions; you get to vote for two: * Ryan Daye * Carolyn Jackson (incumbent) * James Pierce (incumbent) Carolyn Jackson Let’s get the easy one out of the way first. Jackson has been
politics Edina Mayor Election (2024) Continuing blogging about Edina local politics… today’s race: mayor! There are two candidates for this race: * Ron Anderson * Jim Hovland (incumbent) Both candidates have tenures in Edina’s government - Anderson served on the Edina city council for one term (he lost his bid for reelection), whereas Hovland has
politics Hennepin County Commissioner, District 6 Election (2024) I’m gonna do some more write-ups on local (Edina) elections this year. (Those of you here for software development thoughts: I'll go back to that soon.) Today’s race: Hennepin county commissioner for district 6. There are two candidates for this race: * Heather Edelson (incumbent) * Marissa Simonetti
python My Evolving Approach to Learning Programming Languages I’ve recently started a new job that uses Python. The last time I professionally Python’d was 15 years ago, writing backends for mobile apps I worked on. At the time, I was still a novice developer, only a couple years out of college. While I’ve returned to
Software Development is Nonlinear System Let me tell you a story about when I cut months of work off of a project. Part of Rheaply’s offerings is an inventory management platform. A major problem customers run into is data entry - name & description is not enough, we need colors and manufacturers, dimensions and
javascript JavaScript Nulls and Programming Minutiae Socrates once said “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He was immediately sentenced to death afterwards. I, too, often find myself examining the minutiae of programming languages. Thankfully, I have not been put to death for it (yet). After spending more than a decade honing my Android development skills,
music Playing Trombone Champ... with a Trombone As a lover of both rhythm games and trombone, of course I got Trombone Champ. Naturally, I wondered: can I control it on an actual trombone?
games In Search of Exploration Games (This article is spoiler-free.) In the past few years, I’ve fallen in love with exploration in video games. This mechanic is key in games like Outer Wilds or Subnautica. You’re dropped into the middle of a world and are given free reign to go anywhere, discovering many surprises
android Sharing code between test modules In 2015, I wrote a post about sharing code between unit tests and instrumentation tests on Android. Iain Cunningham just pointed out that the method I outlined no longer works. That’s fine for me because I haven’t used that method in years! Nowadays I use modules, which provide
android Domain-Specific Models For a long time at Trello Android, we used the same class for parsing API calls (via Gson), making DB transactions (via OrmLite), and displaying data in the UI. Here’s a pseudo-code-y example of a board: @DatabaseTable(tableName = "boards") data class Board( @DatabaseField(columnName = “name”) @SerializedName("
talk Maintaining Software Correctness This article is a write-up of a talk I gave at MinneBar 2022. Instead of reading this, you could also watch the recording or view the slides. The title of this talk is "maintaining software correctness." But what exactly do I mean by “correctness”? Let me set the
annual review Year in Review (2021) I continue to do less and less each year due to the dual woes of raising a toddler and navigating a pandemic. I also took three months off work this summer and I didn't much feel like doing anything tech then! I suspect that 2022 won't
json How Trello Android converted from Gson to Moshi Trello Android recently converted from using Gson [https://github.com/google/gson] to Moshi [https://github.com/square/moshi] for handling JSON. It was a bit tricky so I wanted to document the process. (For context, Trello Android primarily parses JSON. We rarely serialize JSON, and thus most of the
My Programming Earworms There are tons of articles online that discuss the articles/talks/books that you must consume to become a true programmer [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman]. I dislike this framing; it’s gatekeeping, plus software development is such a varied discipline that one person’s essential reading
politics Edina School Board Election (2021) Here’s my thinking around this year’s Edina school board elections. The short version is that I’m voting for Erica Allenburg, Dan Arom, Michael Birdman, and Karen Gabler, but read on for more details. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Edina school board [https://www.edinaschools.org/Page/5225] is composed of
kotlin The dangers of JSON + default values The following code converts an object to JSON and then back again: val adapter = Moshi.Builder().build().adapter(Foo::class.java) val foo = Foo(bar = null) val json = adapter.toJson(foo) val foo2 = adapter.fromJson(json) check(foo == foo2) I think most of us would expect check() to pass, but
coroutines Do or do not; there is no tryEmit() In RxJava, PublishSubject [http://reactivex.io/RxJava/3.x/javadoc/io/reactivex/rxjava3/subjects/PublishSubject.html] (or PublishRelay [https://github.com/JakeWharton/RxRelay] if you’re a cool kid) is a gizmo for manually pumping data into streams like in this contrived example: private val socketSubject = PublishSubject.create<String&
