code and science (but mostly code)
Alabama just passed a forced labor law. According to this law, the state has the right to determine that one person is entitled to the labor of another: a pregnant woman MUST house and feed a fetus – without pay and against her will – under threat of state violence. If that's the case, how… Continue reading Alabama’s New Law is a Dangerous Overstep by Big Government
Originally, UITableViews were envisioned to hold homogenous data. Something like this: Every cell was the same type, just with different data backing it. And so the UITableView API was designed with that in mind. In your controller you'd register a cell type, and in the data source you'd set the data on that cell. Easy.… Continue reading More flexible UITableViews
A student recently asked me how to come up with ideas for new products... all the good ideas, it seemed to them, were already taken. I realized from talking to this student that a lot of people looking to be entrepreneurs think you have to come up with something new in order to be successful. But… Continue reading Don’t make something “new,” make something better
Those effin little lines are called 'separators' (you can adjust their insets over in the sidebar) and UITableViews add them whenever the list on the screen is too short to fill up all of it. It's annoying. The way you get rid of them is by adding an empty view as the footer of the… Continue reading UITableViews: removing those effin little lines
Every year, I do a retrospective in which I review the past year. Up until this year, I've kept those retrospectives private, for many reasons: I'm a fairly private person (though this year I've tried to change that a bit). I've been afraid I didn't measure up. I've been afraid that things I think might… Continue reading 2018 Retrospective
As someone who's worked from home for years, I've been asked about this a lot. How do I concentrate when I'm at home? How do I get things done? What keeps me from playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time all day? I think people ask me this because they think about how they behave at home… Continue reading Staying motivated while working from home
Ugh, Facebook, amiright? You've probably seen the news about how awful FB is about privacy, and how they've been sucking up all the info they can squeeze out of you and giving it to advertisers and other billion dollar companies. How can you mitigate this? You may be thinking it's too late, or that what… Continue reading Protecting yourself from Facebook
I hate waking up. A lot. Conversely, I love staying up late. This does not for a happy morning make. As I have struggled with this for most of my life, I thought I'd enumerate some of the coping mechanisms I've developed to deal with getting up in the morning. But first, a quick story… Continue reading Waking up when you’re NOT a morning person
And they called me personally to tell me they were doing so, the decision having been made by "high level Apple executives." The line repeated to me ad nauseum was that "the concept of the app might offend a large group of people.” The concept of the app is to amplify liberal perspectives on social… Continue reading AskNot rejected by Apple because it’s liberal
As a mobile app developer, I work with APIs a lot. The vast majority of them use JSON. Due to a refactor of the MBTA's API for the Boston T (and on past projects) I had the extreme misfortune to work under the JSON API format. The reason it's so awful for mobile devs is… Continue reading Why I hate “JSON API 1.0” – a Mobile Dev’s perspective
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