I used to read a lot. I saw it as a sort of educational salvation, a path to enlightenment or greatness. It was also very much an addiction, and probably the greatest distraction in my life. My journals have been absolutely littered with references of wanting to escape books. One time at church we went […]
Other People’s Problems
When I was younger, in my late teens and early 20s, it was popular to have passion for a cause, and one way to stand out from your peers was to latch onto one cause or another and really sink your teeth in. “Oh, I’m just SO passionate about [XYZ]!” I’ve probably been on different […]
Life Engineering
How you write a program can have a dramatic impact on its performance. I once wrote a query against geospatial data that took several hours to complete. After searching extensively online for ways to speed it up, I discovered an optimizer hint, one tiny piece of code, that effectively reduced the time to complete from […]
Striving
There’s a popular, but good cliche in the Christian missions community: God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called. It’s led me to question the striving in my own life, the trying so hard to establish an identity. I had a country I was planning to visit this summer, but it’s thoroughly locked down […]
Waiting to Give
For the past few years, I’ve had a strong desire to do prophetic giving. That probably sounds crazy to a lot of people, but it basically means praying to God for what to buy, then going out and praying to find the people who should receive those things. I feel like I’ve heard stories of […]
How to Win with Homeownership
It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of homeownership. I’ve detailed this before, and I’ll detail it again. But that doesn’t mean I believe homeownership, in itself, is wrong or bad. In fact, you could say my frustration is more with the blind importance, status, and reverence which American culture confers upon homeownership, […]
The Economics of Programming
It’s commonly known that if you want to be a software developer, you have to stay up to date with the latest technologies. What often isn’t explained is what this even means, since there are now a tremendous number of specializations within software development. It makes no sense to keep up with everything since 1) […]
Being Good Enough
In middle school, our band had a number of slackers, most of whom were in percussion. It was, after all, a time of trying subjects out and discovering strengths and weaknesses, and I think it was common for a lot of people to want to try their hands at drums and guitar. One particular percussionist […]
Mansions
Back in 8th and 9th grade, I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be an architect because I wanted to design and build houses. The irony! There had been some times as a kid when my parents were looking for another house, so our family would visit a few houses here and there […]
Passion! Success! Productivity!
Every now and then I come a cross some programmer’s personal blog in which they describe themselves with outrageous language. Without giving it away, I just came across one that says, under their little picture, “Passionate about Python and Javascript”. Bonus points if they throw in something about loving dogs, or cheesecake. JKLOLZ OMG! Passion! […]