With the wind and cold, a restlessness has come, and I find myself hoarding my last chocolate for the journey back across the mountains - forever getting-ready-for-life instead of living it each day.

This passage, from The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, reverberates within me.

I find myself writing not what …

A bias that I have come to notice in myself is the immediacy bias. This is bias towards reacting immediately to a stimulus, without consideration for the context or big picture.

A software example is the bug report. This may come in a raw form, like a new error in …

Hi, my name is Tristan and I am a stimulation addict. How did this come to happen?

I recently finished Faster by James Gleick. The narrative was fairly chaotic (hehe) and unfocused, but the truth is I failed to understand the lesson until it was made explicit: we've lost the …

It turns out that the django-model-changes library had been forked and modified some time ago by engineers at the company. Among the changes was removing the dynamic signal attachments from the ChangesMixin __init__ method:

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(ChangesMixin, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        self._states = []
        self._save_state(new_instance …

At work, we have a database export process that transfers data from our OLTP PostgreSQL database to our OLAP RedShift database. This export is exceedingly slow, causing headaches for the engineers, as deployments are typically delayed until the export finishes.

In diving into the export process, I discovered that one …