Book Review: A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore, as an author, has been someone I’ve heard about at a low level for a pretty long time, but who I’ve never read. I was familiar with Lamb, ...
Posts
2024
Book Review: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
This book has been on my to-read list for a while. I’ve been a pretty big fan of Charles Yu’s short stories for their orignal formats - “Fable” was told as a...
The Giving Tree really stresses me out
Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree has been around since 1964, and I’ve seen it in basically every library and classroom I’ve ever entered. Every parent I kn...
The Senior Engineer’s Guide: The Gilded Rose Code Kata
Introduction Code katas are a great way to brush up on some of the fundamentals of software engineering - the skills you’ll actually use on the job. I’m par...
New Project: I Ching - The Book of Change
Consult the I Ching! View the source on Github! I recently digitized the core text of the public domain Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching and...
Book Review: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City is the kind of book I think of when I think of short literary novels. It’s the kind of book I might expect from someo...
The Ultimate Writing Advice: Write like nobody’s watching
I’m convinced that this is the oldest story in the world: a writer has a great idea. They’re brimming with enthusiasm and pumped to get their ideas on paper....
A developer journal can help you get your next software engineering job
As an unemployed Senior Software Engineer who’s been on the job hunt for over 5 months as of this writing, I’ve had ample time to reflect on my tenure at my ...
Good readers make better writers - guidelines for critiquing work from your peers (and yourself!)
There’s nothing more nourishing to a writer’s growth than having a captive readership forced to offer feedback. But let’s face it: your mom is never going to...
AI and the writing process: Creative catalyst, and sympathy for NaNoWriMo
Machine-generated writing has been around for a while. I used to run different data sets from Project Gutenberg through a Markov chain script I had written a...
The worth of an MFA program is always going to be a mystery
Every now and then I see posts on Reddit asking about MFA programs: Is it worth pursuing? Even though I graduated from a reputable and expensive program, an...
How I met The Prime Minister of Dick and learned how to do my thing
If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mother, your Dad, your priest, to some guy on television, to any of the people t...
Writing as a parent, or how to be good at anything
If you want to be a writer, marry someone who thinks your being a writer is a good idea. And don’t have kids. Richard Ford
Software interviews are kind of messed up
This is a thing everyone in the software business knows and very few companies have fixed. Now that I’ve been on the job market for several months, I’ve had ...
Depression and bad friend advice in The Pout-Pout Fish
One of the perennial favorites with my kids over the course of their toddlerhoods has been The Pout-Pout Fish written by Deborah Diesen and illustrated by Da...
What does it mean to translate?
A couple years ago, when I most recently saw my wife’s uncle Richard, he’d asked me about my translation work. I translate mostly genre literature from the l...