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I’m just back from reading Programmer Interrupted: The Real Cost of Interruption and Context Switching, an interesting short piece in which I learned about at least two new things. First, The Parable of the Two Watchmakers, introduced by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, describes the complex relationship between sub-systems and their larger wholes. In the context of the article, it helps explain, even for non-programmers, the cost of an interruption. It also hints at a possible mitigation technique:...

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Today I learned about psql-tips.org by Lætitia Avrot, an excellent repository of psql (the CLI tool, not the database itself) tips. I like how one randomized tip is playfully served on the home page while the complete list is always at hand.

In a C# library I’ve been working on, I wanted to use C# 9.0’s init keyword. Quoting the documentation: The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again. Consider the following class: public class Person { public string FirstName { get; init; } } You can initialize it like this:...

Today, my last self-assigned duty before the Christmas break was to migrate our in-house rate-limiting implementation (based on the AspNetCoreRateLimiting third-party package) to the new, shiny rate-limiting middleware introduced by ASP.NET Core 7. While the process was relatively straightforward, I stumbled upon a few quirks I want to annotate here. Our use case is simple. We use what the ASP.NET Core 7 documentation defines as a “fixed window limiter.” It uses a specified time window to limit requests....

I attended my first BJJ class a little more than a month ago. Going into it, I was hesitant. After many years doing what most people today call calisthenics, I wanted to try something new and challenging. But would it be appropriate for me to get into martial arts at the age of fifty-two? When I discovered that we have a branch of the renowned Roger Gracie Academy here in my hometown, I thought it was time to find out....

Oh, joy. After many years with an iPhone, today I learned how to stop spam calls with a single, not-really-super-secret move. Settings > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers That’s it. Unknown callers now go straight to my recent calls list for me to (eventually) review. Most importantly, the phone doesn’t ring. I initially had True Caller installed and enabled, which worked for a while. Spammers use throw-away numbers anyway, so it’s super-hard for tools like that to keep track....

I added a new tool to my amateurish DevOps toolbox. Developed in the open by Tom Williams, the Docker Event Monitor is a “tiny container that monitors the local Docker event system in real-time and sends notifications to various integrations for event types that match the configuration. For example, you can trigger an alert when a container is stopped, killed, runs out of memory or health status change.” At its core sits a simple python script that monitors the docker....

No matter how long I’ve possessed a Mac and how hard I try, there will always be a helpful keyboard shortcut hidden somewhere that I don’t know about. Today I learned about holding the Option key while clicking on the Copy command in Finder. It activates the super-useful (and super-secret) “copy as pathname” feature. I spotted this trick on Jamie Smith’s website, where other handy shortcuts (and the pretty gif above) reside....

When Giulia came home from school today, she was anxious to tell me what she learned about a Viking King and his legacy. She told me the story of King Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway from c. 958 to c. 986. Harald is mainly known for introducing Christianity to Denmark and consolidating his rule over most Jutland and Zealand. However, what sparked my interest is that Harald was nicknamed “Bluetooth”, and, in 1997, the Bluetooth wireless specification design was named after him....