Originally posted on Substack.

Brief doc I’m sending to my friendos

For transparency, I’m going to recommend a paid window switcher I use for Mac OS X called Contexts. It’s saved me so much time and has made using my computer a breeze; so much so, that I’ve bound it to CMD+Tab. I’ll attempt to justify this in the doc.

The default window management paradigm in Mac OS X, for me, left much to be desired. I grew up using Windows, which has a pretty different pattern for how you Alt+Tab between windows.

Originally posted on Substack.

Try it out here if you like pressing buttons as much as I do! GitHub if you like reading code.

During the holidays, I wanted to get better at answering questions like “what is 7 half steps up from A?¹” I often found myself in the situation of having these problems as a lot of guitar chord sheets are written something like “A capo 7” which means you put the big barre thing on your guitar and play an A-shape chord. When using a capo, the actual underlying chord is ‘A + 7 half steps’. This means if you’re collaborating with another instrument or with someone not using a capo, you need to communicate the actual chord you’re playing. This requires some mental math, which I found slightly embarrassing as I didn’t always immediately know what chord I was playing.

Originally posted on Substack

edit: this blogpost was initially wrong when I published it. Thanks to some comments I got, I learned I didn’t fully understand TrueTime or Spanner — I’ve spent some time learning and understanding the core concept again, and have updated this artifact. This is an externalized resource for me that I hope can be helpful for others.

When I was reading the famous paper on Spanner, Google’s globally distributed linearizable database, I really struggled with the concept of TrueTime, which is a core component of why they were able to get their guarantees. After trying to wrap my head around it, I created the following artifact (IMO, TrueTime deserves a mini-ish paper or post on its own):

Originally posted on Medium.

they really do. I have most of them turned off on my phone.

first, idk who to blame about these, but there is this class of notifications that are like

“feeling hungry? order UberEats now!!”

someone gave someone this lever to pull to increase engagement. the first someone upsets me, and i sometimes think about the other someone and also get angry.

i turn all of these off, when I can actually turn them off. in the case where an app doesn’t let me disable them, I turn off all notifications for that app. they’ve lost my trust.

Originally posted on Medium.

I use git a ton in work and my personal life, and have come up with a couple of aliases that have made using it so much more pleasant and fast. First, I’ve renamed git to g. You have no idea how much typing that’s saved me (I also don’t know).

alias g="git"

Aliases#

git allows you to alias commands. In the spirit of renaming commands to one character, here are my favorite aliases:

Originally posted on Medium.

Why do we need AI to write blog posts? There’s been a trend of these AI tools to write things for you:

• https://www.notion.so/product/ai
• https://www.copy.ai/bloggers
• https://www.jasper.ai/examples/blog-posts

Imagine you have something to say to people. So you come up with some representation of that thing you want to say; maybe bullet points, maybe a rant, maybe even some markdown stuck in a GitHub repository. Why can’t you just publish that?

Originally posted on Medium.

Please. It’s an insult to my brain. Like, you put the button in one place, and then you’re like “nah, let’s move it somewhere else.” Here are some examples that have annoyed me the most lately:

Lyft Bike Scan Button#

This one sucks as I’m often opening the Lyft app just to ride bikes. So I immediately hit the bike button and I’m trying to hit the “Scan” button as quickly as possible. But no! Depending on how fast my internet is at the current moment, that banner will appear and push the Scan button up, which means I end up hitting the banner instead 😟; this is often a really frustrating start to my daily commute.

Originally posted on LinkedIn as a meme.

i’ve been thinking about the big rocks every day

for those who don’t know: https://lnkd.in/gZGfgBE9

just the other day, i was at whole foods. and i tried to fit the items into my cute tote bag haphazardly. they didn’t fit!!

but then, i put the straus whole fat milk first. and then the yogurt. and then i put the cheese, and the cute lil snax. i fit everything! the bag was kinda heavy though.

Originally posted on LinkedIn as a meme.

my friends are all attachment styles this and attachment styles that when it comes to dating. however, has anyone had the brilliant idea of applying attachment styles to working at a tech company? I didn’t think so! now you might be thinking, “hey Stephen isn’t this a bad idea?” and yes, it is. but just like we should all hope to be secure partners in our relationships, we should also possibly strive to be secure capitalistic partners at work.

Originally posted on the Plaid Engineering Blog while I was part of Plaid’s Developer Experience Team.

The developer experience team focuses on building tools and features that make it as easy as possible for developers to explore our APIs and integrate with Plaid. This year, our team adopted an OpenAPI schema (OAS) as a specification for our API. We launched this schema in beta earlier this year.

Our team is responsible for maintaining three sources of truth for our API that allow developers to build and test their integrations: