Honestly, I feel like I need to take some time and do this. Absolutely nothing will be gained, but it would be neat!

This is a cute video that came across my Twitter feed at a very appropriate time. I had just explained to someone that they cannot tell us “the customer isn’t very specific about what they’re sending us, so you need to fix it”, when discussing processing data through an API.

I explained that this isn’t really how things work – we can absolutely fix the data, but we need to know what we’re trying to fix, how we can infer the correct answer, etc. The example I used was “When you drove to work this morning, you didn’t think about all the things you did to get there, you just did them. We can’t do that, we must define every step along the way.” Fortunately he got it, and immediately started noodling through how to convert imprecise or missing data into something usable (working with a product manager).

Anyway, here’s the video – watch all the way to the end! https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1411772304531595264?s=10

Programming can be incredibly rewarding… and at the same time be it’s own special form of hell. Peter captures this pretty well!

http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

https://missymeyer.com/category/freebies

That’s it. That’s the post.

Matching brackets / braces / parens can be quite a PITA these days, especially in languages that breed them like it’s going out of style (Looking at you C#, Java and derivatives!).

This tool helps keep them straight inside VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CoenraadS.bracket-pair-colorizer-2

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/esheep-64bit/9mx2v0tqt6rm

I’m sure this won’t change anyone’s mind. If you already believe that Covid isn’t real, and that all the statistics are just made up, then even more facts won’t change your mind.

However, this is handy to have around: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306130

Just keeping this handy. I’m sure I’ll never need it, but if I do, it’s here.

https://www.protocol.com/parler-misinformation-macedonia

How much of the misinformation is out there just to stoke up rage and page views? Certainly some people believe and repeat things that are just strange (flat Earthers perhaps?), but to do it for cash is beyond callous.

Of course this has been happening with a couple of cable “news” networks, so I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.