Items tagged "anecdote"
Code golfing interview questions
A very silly code golf solution I came up with that I’m still amused by ten years later
“KillsParentOnException” a lesson in API naming
An internal Meta decorator name which taught me something important about API naming
From opera to tech
Reflections on my journey from a classical music background to a career in big tech
Using Notion as my CMS with Next.js
Why I chose to use Notion as the backing CMS for the Notes portion of this site, and the technical details of how it’s implemented
The Winamp Skin Museum has a secret debug mode
Shhhh. Don't tell anyone, but the Winamp Skin Museum has a secret debug mode.
The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by an sqlite3 database
The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by an sqlite3 database containing 1.2gb of metadata about 86,000 Winamp skins and exposed as a public GraphQL endpoint
The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
How I indirectly helped remove stray characters from across the web
I wrote a simple lint rule which detected hundreds of user facing bugs at Meta and inspired my colleague to ship a similar validation to every major JS parser
“Alexa, add half & half”
The funniest Alexa interaction I’ve ever had
Elf Storage
Probably the funniest vandalism I’ve ever seen
Life, a fatal STD
A humorous quip by my high school sociology teacher
A Winamp Skin Detective Story
Tracking down the cause of some mysteriously corrupted Winamp skins
“Cool S” as a Unicode standard
There was once a proposal to codify the ”cool s” as a unicode character
An old engineer’s tale
My dad‘s reframing of a sexist idiom
My friends and I meet Thomas Hampson
My one interaction with the famous baritone Thomas Hampson
A verbose version of The Night Before Christmas
Sharing a humorous rewrite of a classic poem that would often get pulled out around Christmas time during my childhood
“Thank you for teaching me”
A charming moment of recognition when helping pick up litter with my daughter
Why there was never a Winamp 4
Did you ever wonder why they skipped straight from Winamp 3 to Winamp 5?
The Internet Archive is populated by hundreds of gnome-like effigies
The Internet Archive is wild. Eccentric, and all the better because of it
Laravel’s obsessive comment style
An insane detail that points to the obsessive approach Taylor Otwell took with Laravel
Falsehoods programmers believe about music genres
Did you know that the ID3 metadata tagging system hard coded the entire set of music genres? Some of the ones that got included are hilarious.