⬆ Me

I write about software

"Just a guy, looking at a screen, helping software people do their thing."

Welcome, friend!

“Do you want a mess, or a masterpiece?", the master seamstress fondly reminded her young protégé…

A hopeful software craftsperson, I can imagine writing code so elegant that the source is featured in an NYC art gallery in the year 2442. But that’s just a fantasy, because here I am pushing my big grimy ball of software mud up the hill with everyone else, trapped and raging against the impossible triangle of quality, price, and speed.

But it’s not all stern foreheads and storm clouds — We’ve got fun code-wrangling blogs like tygertec to get us through the day. And coffee! We’ll always have coffee. And Paris. I’ve heard good things about Paris.

Featured Publications

From the mind of the Tyger

and the frozen sands
of the hourglass
snapshots of thought
from an instant of time
context fading
yet still…
it depends.

Sep 15, 2018 24 min read Pseudorandom

Stuff Nobody Tells You About Teaching Online

I won’t kid you; the road to course creation is riddled with potholes, roadblocks, and sketchy checkpoints. It was hard. But the solution to each obstacle taught me new skills and valuable life lessons. I think it’s time to document those lessons.

Aug 10, 2018 23 min read Pseudorandom

Run for better code

You’re a programmer, software craftsman, full-stack developer, software engineer. But regardless of the titles dangling from your Twitter bio, if you want to greatly improve the quality of your code and indeed the quality of your life, there’s one more title you should consider tacking on there: “Runner"…

Jan 21, 2017 5 min read Pseudorandom

How to find stuff in Git

When you first started with git, you quickly got up to speed with committing, pushing, pulling, merging, and the like. But then you noticed a gaping hole in your knowledge - how do you find stuff in Git? Can you revert to a version of a file as it stood three weeks ago, or find out when a bug was introduced? Who was the last person to edit this file?

They always tell you that the great thing about Git is that you [almost] never lose any history. So how do you access and utilize that history?