Your employer should pay for the tools that you need to use to get your job done, right? Right?? Well, let me ask you a different question: A car should let you cross at the zebra-crossing, since pedestrians have the right of way in those situations in all cities, right? Yes. But, do you really want…

(Note to self: Need to write a bash script that looks at yaml date_published property of all posts, sorts chronologically, and outputs the titles. Will be useful for searching for posts.) One of the most amazing periods of my life is something unexpected. It was 2017 and I was learning to code for…

We’ve arrived in Düsseldorf! Some thoughts below. Big open concept kitchen space combined with the living room… amazing. I’m excited and a little overwhelmed by the sheer possibilities. Goal: cosy, very active, full emphasis on the word living. Haven’t met neighbours yet but eager to make a good…

We’re moving to Düsseldorf tomorrow. The state of our apartment in Berlin is such that there’s no mattress to even sleep on last night. Charlane contracted Covid and is sleeping on our kid’s playmat alone in our room. Me? I’m sleeping in our van in the parking lot. Reflecting on my hopes for…

This post is for anyone who is wondering what might be a good approach to writing tests during a software engineering live coding interview. Companies assess different things during the live coding stage of an interview process. Some will want you to have an efficient algorithm, others will want you…

Quicksort – stylised as a single word for some reason unknown to me – is a practical sorting algorithm that is often used in production code because it is very efficient for a sorting algorithm. To give you an idea of how complicated this is, I spent about 45 minutes reading the Quicksort chapter in…

(This is #8 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. It’s a poem.) Short time Short story But there lacks quality Long time History We made mere quantity Until our strokes are facile Our jerks shall prove us futile And beyond reach, Divinity

(This is #7 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) It’s 6 am and the alarm goes off. Not the riiiiiiing on the iPhone designed to yank you back from dreamland (what a terrible list of built-in alarm sounds), but the subtle sound of crickets getting gradually chirping louder. Chi chi chi… CHI CHI CHI CHI… I…

(This is #6 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) Is this fictional or autobiographical, you wonder? I ask in response: does it matter? I used to be able to think on my feet, which is to say, when I find myself in a situation where my mind is quietly posing a question, I would be able to quietly answer it…

(This is #5 of 30 raw essays in 30 days.) He had failed to play in the NFL, missing the qualifiers by one position. The muscles and smouldering hot looks would have helped his team rake in more money, probably, but they passed on him. Years passed and he had found a new thing to do. He’d raise his…

(This is #4 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic is my own. #3 was published on my newsletter as a paid subscriber only post and won’t be found on this site.) I would like myself to disappear and write about life in a way that is about the tiniest kernels of truth that exist in every moment of…

(This is #3 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic is my own.) This was published exclusively to paying subscribers of my Substack, which you can find here.

(This is #2 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic was submitted by D.) How do you feel about the intersection of parenthood and work?  Let’s start zoomed-out. Despite the differences in where and how we were raised, our lives from birth almost invariably go down the same path, perhaps with one or…

(This is #1 of 30 raw essays in 30 days. The topic was submitted by someone.) Why do some of us wonder if becoming a parent (newly minted or an old timer) is compatible with having a new job? Because it’s challenging! The main challenge is to juggle learning to be a parent of a new child (or being a…

This is one of those public service announcement posts that really needs to be searchable on the internet because bureaucracy is piece of work. This post is most likely relevant to you if: You are a foreigner based in Germany, you have applied for a residence permit for your child who was born in…

This is Part 1 of a two-, maybe three-, part series on how we almost decided not to have kids and become parents. We could explore the world, cultures, art, business, and so on—things we are happily doing in Berlin now. I imagine we could find enough ‘unknowns’ in this world to explore till we draw…

These days there is not a thing that I’m more grateful for than my wife. I have much to say about her, about how much she has influenced who I am today, which I fully expect to write about in this newsletter over time. In this post I want to examine something that I’ve been thinking about a lot…

Yep, I thought I was going to do something big with my life as Elon Musk has. It was when I believed that doing “something big” was the epitome of a meaningful life. The internet reproducing a meme that Elon Musk’s job is to be badass. (source: The Joe Rogan Experience podcast) Nowadays, having…

The older I’ve become, the more I’ve started to make decisions based on convenience. Based on a hunch and a recent experience, I think it may be time to reconsider that as my default approach. The other day, our 8 m/o daughter, Charlotte, found our poodle Brownie’s water bowl. She crawled with…

In my line of work (software engineering), one does not simply ignore the keyboard. It is, after all, the tool we interact with the most to get our job done. So I thought it was natural that shortly after I started my first job as a software engineer in 2016 I became acquainted with and found myself…