Blog
This blog updates whenever I feel I have something interesting to say.
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Playing Around With Bookmarklets
Years ago, I discovered a bookmarklet that allowed you to fill in a Jira ticket ID, and it would redirect you to that ticket in a separate tab. This was back at a previous job where Jira was used. In the meantime, I have worked at a few places where other tools were used. Now I’m back at a job where Jira is used so I dug it back up. I also started playing around with bookmarklets to make life easier in other ways.
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TIL (A Thing or Two) About Email Security and Authentication
The main TIL here is that Email is surprisingly easy to spoof. For example, you can use Emkei’s mailer to send emails as anyone to anyone. Using an online anonymous mailer like this is a good test of your email authentication and spam filter settings. The more surprising thing, to me at least, is that this is by design, kind of. Time to get into email standards!
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Regex in Java: Matching Line Breaks With a Dot
Last week I set out to write some unit-tests for a Java application. Because the assertions target variable fields in a JSON string, I decided to use regular expressions (regex) to match these fields. In doing this, I learned a few interesting things, which weren’t immediately obvious to me, about how regex are implemented in Java.
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2019 Review and 2020 Preview
Review and preview posts are becoming a yearly tradition on this blog, so here goes! This post is less detailed than my previous ones because looking back at them, they still felt too resolution-y for what I’m trying to achieve with yearly themes.
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Book Review: Permanent Record
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.
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Email Etiquette
This post is about email. I didn’t want to write about email, but it is happening anyway. Why? Because I want to be in control of the inputs into my life and email is one of the things that has continued to evade this control for a long time. Recently, I have made a few changes to the way I deal with email and I will continue experimenting as long as I feel out of control. This blog post is about those changes.
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Musings on the Erdős Number
I came across the Erdős number a long time ago and found it a fun and interesting concept. Just last week I saw someone writing about it on Twitter and I got curious about whether I have a finite Erdős number.
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Python's Import Intricacies
So far, most of my python projects have consisted of single files, only importing external packages. Now that I’m more focused on test-driven development and developing my skills in a more structured way, I find I’m splitting up my logic between multiple files. This requires relative imports within and between the packages and modules I write. Last week, I realised I didn’t know how to properly, Pythonically, import stuff from another file.
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The /now Page is Back
A few years ago, I had a /now page on this website, inspired by Derek Sivers and the movement that followed from him starting his /now page. I decided it could use a comeback. The /now page serves as a reminder to myself what I want to focus on, as well as a public declaration of my priorities.
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2018 Review and 2019 Preview
We’re little over one month into the year, and it’s time to bring this blog back to life. This year, one of my goals is to write more. Specifically, I aim to write approximately one blog post every month, for a total of twelve posts. Because of this goal and the fact that it has been a year since my previous post, I thought it fitting to start off with posting my review of 2018 and preview of 2019.
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2017 Review and 2018 Preview
I dubbed 2017 The Year of First Principles, meaning that I wanted to focus on first principles reasoning and use that to guide my decision-making processes. In short, first principles reasoning aims to reason based on the most fundamental truths and assumptions (possible), instead of reasoning based on layered assumptions or by analogy. This turned out to be a tough nut to crack because reasoning from first principles is much harder than reasoning by analogy. Another part of my plan for 2017 was to perform quarterly reviews, which I haven’t done consistently; the purpose of these reviews is to check whether I’m still on track with my goals and to make adjustments as needed. Despite these two points, I feel that I have made progress and created a solid basis in both areas to build on in coming years.
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Hello World!
For a while now I have been meaning to start a personal blog. Now, it is finally time to say
Keep reading...Hello World.