What can Camus teach us about facing the pandemic? — Note: No spoilers are below! Reposted this one from my journal-style Substack to Medium because I think it meets the quality bar. The Plague, set in the 1940s, is the (fictitious) story of the city of Oran during an outbreak of bubonic plague. The story is stitched together by a…

Including a step-by-step tutorial — Encryption is tricky, even when you’re using managed services, like AWS. In my last post, I went over what you need to know about IAM, the identity and access management service offered by AWS. In this post, I want to be a little more concrete, by covering a common scenario…

An overview of AWS identity and access management service — The first thing to both shock (and frustrate) many people moving into cloud-based environments is how complicated permissions can be. Typically, after years of becoming acclimated to being the God — sudo— of whatever code you have been writing prior, you are introduced to an environment where nearly everything is…

Leveraging computer science for answers to a classic philosophical question — “God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, Courage to change things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr Everyone at least acts as though they have the power to make their own decisions. Yet, when we reflect upon what we know about…

An opinionated guide to organizing your self-teaching process. — There’s a magic point in your journey to becoming a software developer where you get the feeling you could build just about anything given enough time and access to Google [1]. This is the point where code becomes a tool for self-expression; the point where you can build what you…

An overview of simple algorithms that generate complex, life-like results. — If you’re interested in the philosophical implications of cellular automata, check out my post here. Cellular Automata (CA) are simultaneously one of the simplest and most fascinating ideas I’ve ever encountered. In this post I’ll go over some famous CAs and their properties, focusing on the “elementary” cellular automata, and…

Recently Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist, has garnered a lot of criticism for a tweet he posted regarding the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. The most charitable interpretation of Tyson’s tweet is that he wants people to look past their instinctive reactions to the mass shootings…

Systematizing one of our most common forms of argument — I recently came across one of the best Twitter accounts I’ve ever seen. The account, @justsaysinmice, does one thing: Points out where journalist’s reports fail to mention a study has only been performed on mice. …