Not all background jobs have to be in the main crontab (the one you see at EDITOR=vi crontab -e ). That crontab was all I ever knew, so the revelation of the /etc/cron.d directory was helpful, to say the least. Some benefits include: Can separate different systems into different files (can’t…

It’s too long. I’ve played lots of board games, several longer than Monopoly, yet somehow Monopoly feels too long to me, too. …

…because we were disappointed. I don’t like Catan. The game is alright, but I don’t love playing it. But it’s my favorite board game. Not because of the mechanics, clever game design, community, or graphics. Because of when I played it. We used to have friends over to play Catan…

It doesn’t matter as much as you think. Engineers make their living when demand increases and supply needs to go up. We’re told stories when people built with and without scalability and how it made the difference between success and loss. We notice the times where popularity or disaster caused…

And why and when you shouldn’t — A few months back, I was reading about HTTP status codes — as one casually does — when I stumbled across 2 gems: Return code 418 is “I AM A TEAPOT”. It’s an April fools joke — well, as close to a joke as us nerds can muster. I’ll have…

…has a lot to do with treating spaghetti code — Our Secret Family Recipe Before making your sauce: Fill a pot with water. Add salt — we advise a lot. Add oil if you want; we don’t. Set the burner on low, or not at all, if you have the time. Add sweet spices, like basil or marjoram. Mix them into your water a…

How the framework fosters deception and undermines the basis of civilization — Angular Is Not All Awful I’ve worked with Angular professionally, some good and bad codebases. I have to say, most of Angular is fine. Many parts are actually pretty neat — I’m a fan of how much it uses reactive programming concepts, exposes web component support, and provides a nice dependency injection system. Some of…

You’d imagine free public datasets would be painless — This wasn’t painless. But now that I’ve figured it out, I want to save you Google-ers out there some time. What’s Google Colab? Colab is a way to run Python Jupyter Notebooks on the Cloud, for free. It’s provided by Google and integrates with Google Drive. Very clean way to handle “but it…

Deploying quantopian.com algorithms for live (or paper) trading with Docker — Before we talk code, we will clear up 2 misconceptions about stock investing, namely: stocks are a zero-sum lottery (investing is not, trading may be) investing can be a moral hazard (not acting may be worse) Then, we will discuss the technical side of stocks, particularly focused on Quantopian algorithms…