I am spending much of my time these days in the world of machine learning and I'm finding that it is profoundly interesting. One of the most interesting aspects of machine learning, for me, is the black box nature of machine learning's output. What we typically get from a machine learning model what...

I have been mentoring a person new to Rails for the past several weeks and it is always instructive to see where someone new to the platform has issues. This blog post walks through the commands we used today and explains them. If you're an old hat at this, just move on but if you're starting out, I...

(Denver Skyline from a Remote Worker's Office; Photo Credit - Kim Corbett; Thank You) I have been, with one 9 month exception, a fully remote worker since 1999 and a manager of remote workers since 1996. Heading into 2020 that puts me at over 20 years of solid, day in and day out remote work so, I'l...

(Photo Credit - Lisa Meece; Thank You) Hi Bob, I strongly doubt you remember but I met you years ago as part of the Boston Blogging group that Dave Winer used to organize. About the same time I also met Dan Bricklin. I wanted to make a suggestion to you. I've been subscribed to you in my aggregator ...

As I write this it is 3:45 am and I am playing with Python. I have a small script that looks like this: import pandas as pd DATA_PATH = "data/" filename = "file.json" train_sample_size = 45000 dataset = pd.read_json(os.path.join(DATA_PATH, filename), lines=True) dataset_test = dataset.copy().sample(...

I'm in the process of working out security for a new side project (yes, yes, yes - I know; I have too many of these but they are such a good teaching tool for one's self) and I wanted to use pundit. Pundit, for those who haven't played with it, is a Ruby gem which makes authorization at the controll...

This is the first blog post in what I hope becomes a series that I'm calling "Startup Coach". I have a friend who wants their own business and I offered to write a blog post a week along the veins of how to do a startup. Each week I plan to take a single topic and discuss it . If you'd like to sugge...

I don't claim to be an expert when it comes to Python. At best I'm an apprentice striving to be a journey man. One of the interesting tools in the Python / Data Science ecosystem is the Jupyter Notebook which gives a cell based representation of code, visualizations, documentation and execution flow...

I had an abysmal day yesterday coding on my side project. Ok – coding on one of my side projects. I had one of those days where you try to do something simple and NOTHING, NOT ONE DAMN THING, WORKS. Note: Every software engineer knows this type of day. They aren't days that you talk about with anyon...

Taken November 20, 2019 which is significant only because that is my birthday I'm writing this blog post because my Facebook feed just flashed by at me "Today is Kevin Werbach's Birthday" and that made me remember. Kevin Werbach is a technology analyst and professor at the Wharton School and someone...

Updated: 5/5/2020 It is the second day of the New Year – welcome to 2020 – and I have still failed to launch my side project that I started midway through 2019. Sigh. I find myself fundamentally regretting this but, well, life: New Job Wife in Hospital Son and Schooling Issues Etc So my New Year's R...

It is interesting that my first post of 2020 is actually a CSS trick. That's quite an evolution in my web development practices from 2019. Here is a CSS addition that limits the max height of your trix editor window and makes it resizable: .trix-content { max-height: 800px !important; #set whatever ...

So I've been using JumpStart Pro to build a new side project and in a discussion with Chris Oliver, the creator of JumpStart Pro, I reported a bug which he said "Oh - you should update to the latest". He viewed the update process as something seamless and I, honestly, didn't get it. And, in research...

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/route-53 https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/route-53 okrsnow on  master [🏎💨] via ⬢ v12.8.1 via 💎 v2.6.5 on ☁️ us-west-2 took 5m33s ❯ heroku domains:add okrsnow.com Adding okrsnow.com to ⬢ okrsnow… done Configure your app's DNS provider to point to the DNS Ta...

11373* heroku domains:add okrsnow.com 11374* heroku domains:add www.okrsnow.com 11376* mate _posts/2019-12-29-heroku-and-route-53-using-amazon-for-domain-registration-with-heroku-for-hosting.md 11377* heroku logs 11378* heroku logs –tail 11379* heroku config:set RAILS_MASTER_KEY=123456789abcefg 1138...

Even though I'm a firm, firm believer in agile, I've recently been experimenting with a throwback to waterfall style development and it very quickly left me with a fully featured data structure of tables and relationships modeled as example data. What I did is very rapidly write a series of migratio...

Note: This blog post is for Max, my youngest son, so he can learn what I did to fix this problem. So my youngest son got a new Windows gaming PC for this Christmas from his Grandmother (thank you Nanny) and when he started it up, all he saw was this: The normal diagnostic steps of: Pull the graphics...

(Photo Credit - Lisa Meece; Thank You) Today is December 23rd and I am writing in the wee hours, that wonderfully still time when all is quiet in the world. Between the early hour and the time of year, I've found that this always makes me thoughtful. Many of the people I know and care for are terrib...

(Photo Credit - Lisa Meece; Thank You) During last week's offsite, my boss let us know that he wanted to go down the OKR rabbit hole in 2020. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a management philosophy promoted by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins who most famously got it internalized by Go...

I'm a new user to my Apple Pencil, the one with the magnet that charges on the top of the iPad. I mean I've had it since I got an iPad Pro but I dropped it in my laptop bag and, well, never even remembered it existed. A friend told me "Use Your iPad with the Apple Pencil and Google Jamboard and its ...

Like a lot of people in the Open Source world, I rarely know actual people in the Open Source world – but I do know github usernames. And one of those names that I truly respect is ankane. I've rarely found a bit of code he wrote that I don't like or use. And while I'm not a big open source creator,...

This one is a quick one. I have about 25,000 files in a directory that I need to grep across. I tried: grep '"class":0' *.json | more zsh: argument list too long: grep That's a problem because when the argument list is too long, nothing can happen. The solution here is a combination of find and xarg...

This isn't mine but it was forwarded to me via a group chat and, in it, I found a deep, profound and abiding truth: 1. For the first bug of Christmas, my manager said to me: See if they can do it again. 2. For the second bug of Christmas, my manager said to me: Ask them how they did it and See if th...

Last Update: 12/12/2019 I wrote this guide to different Ruby idioms and how to do them in Python. Organization is alphabetical. This will have to be a continually updated document as I keep finding holes in my Python knowledge and my prior practice of "Learn it / Blog it" simply doesn't put enough t...

My eldest son needs to lose abut 15 pounds before he leaves for boot camp in the Marines. So here is a week of Whole 30 Meals planned out for him. Here are more details on Whole 30 (scroll down about 1/2 way). Monday Breakfast: 3 Squishy Eggs, Black Coffee Lunch: Hard boiled eggs, nuts, fruit Dinner...

Perhaps I shouldn't have insomnia and then code into the wee hours because this is an exchange that I can see happening if only I could email Bootstrap in the style of Ann Landers … Dear Bootstrap, I was hoping that you could explain to me why my tables of data aren't full width. Here's an example w...

About two years ago, I lost 20 pounds. I compared experiences recently with a friend who had lost a bunch of weight and our experiences were so different that I thought I'd write them down. I'm also writing this down because my eldest son just enlisted in the Marines and he needs to drop weight befo...

Note: Code Cat watches disapprovingly as I work … The bulk of my career has been spent at the small scale of the startup universe – companies with 15 people or less; often a lot less; more than a few times, I've been the only engineer. I have done three stints with companies at or near the three fig...

This is another one of those "Tales from the Past" blog posts where something kicked off a memory. In this case, I was at a conference and talking with someone who was President of a startup and they weren't quite sure what to do. They had found themselves, at a very early stage, sidelined in their ...

This document is a "post mortem". I generally write these after any significant project I'm involved in ends. The idea is to capture the good (What Worked), the bad (What Didn't Work) and the next (Changes for Next Year). I am writing this as a public document on my personal blog so that it is acces...