May 30Oakland: Victims in WaitingI’ve had an awakening recently and finally found the words to describe it. They came to me unprompted while reading a neighbor’s reflections on their fears and if arming themselves would secure or endanger their loved ones and themself. Their ruminations come on the heels of a disturbing spike in…Oakland3 min readOakland3 min read
Nov 16, 2022Meta’s Employees and the Radio Technicians of the Rwandan GenocideOn April 6, 1994, Rwandan President and member of the Hutu tribe Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. There were no survivors. Following the assassination, the airwaves were filled with Hutu calling for the death of every Tutsi. For months one radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), was…Meta6 min readMeta6 min read
Mar 28, 2022An Exercise in Descriptive Writing: Kazakh FlagA fun little exercise to stretch your creative writing muscles, describe this flag in two sentences: Wikipedia: A gold sun with 32 rays above a soaring golden steppe eagle, both centered on a sky blue field. The hoist side displays a national ornamental pattern “koshkar-muiz”. Draft 1: A field of turquoise with a…Writing1 min readWriting1 min read
Mar 20, 2022Electron: Getting Custom Error Messages from IPC MainIn Electron if you want to communicate between the Node process running your app (main) and the Chromium process running your frontend JS (renderer) you will need to use IPC, Inter Process Communication. IPC is very useful for doing many things like making server calls and avoiding CORS and accessing…Electron5 min readElectron5 min read
Mar 19, 2022A Poem about LifeOnce I saw her frown, heard her cry Below the towering clouds plying by And after the storm, dancing she went along Beneath the blue skies singing her song For a friend who needed warmth on a cloudy day.Poetry1 min readPoetry1 min read
Oct 6, 2021Jest: How to Update Snapshot TestsSnapshot tests are a great way to test UI without manually checking every element is visible, styled, and in the right place. Each snapshot test has a snapshot, JSON, JS, or HTML file, that usually lives in this directory /__snapshots__. These snapshots serialize the UI at the time of your…JavaScript5 min readJavaScript5 min read
May 18, 2021PSQL: How to use HAVING to Query Aggregate Functions and GroupsLet's say we have two tables, users and accounts. A user can have many accounts. These accounts have a column that represents the amount of money in that account. How do you find all the users with no money in their accounts? …Psql3 min readPsql3 min read
Apr 27, 2021Jest: Clearing Module Mocks EffortlesslyI have a query module that is used throughout my app. Therefore, this module gets mocked often in my tests. To save time, I mocked it globally through a setup file that is loaded every time Jest runs. …JavaScript2 min readJavaScript2 min read
Apr 17, 2021Create a Copy Button with the JavaScript Clipboard APII love this new feature popping around the internet—no more clicking and dragging to copy content from the web. Click a button, the data is magically on your clipboard, and you can paste it to your heart’s content. Best of all, this feature is supported by most modern browsers. …JavaScript3 min readJavaScript3 min read
Feb 18, 2021Python: Why you can’t use Arrays in Query Strings with Requests and urllibAnd how to fix it — I’m calling an eBay endpoint that allows me to dictate which fields are returned by the endpoint by sending a parameter ouputSelector. This parameter takes a list of names and expects the parameter in the URL query string to look like this: ...&outputSelector(0)=SellerInfo&outputSelector(1)=StoreInfo... This the expected format for query strings…Python3 min readPython3 min read
