cowsay is a command line program written in Perl. The original version had a final release in 2016 (that’s the version of many installed cowsay programs) and there’s a number of forks of that release in Perl. There are also many many versions of cowsay in other programming languages, like the one I maintain written in R, unimaginatively called cowsay. I wrote about cowsay here back in 2014.

At work I’ve been using Quarto quite a bit for website and books for work projects.

I worked on a refactor of an R package at work the other day. Here’s some notes about that after doing the work. This IS NOT a best practices post - it’s just a collection of thoughts. For context, the package is an API client.

This blog is now using Hugo. Important - if you subscribe to the RSS for this blog you likely have to delete/remove the old one and add the new RSS link.

I wrote the other day about overcoming an issue with Shiny. Another issue I ran into concurrently was about file inputs. The issue was that file inputs (i.e., shiny::fileInput) was difficult to clear.

I’ve been working on an inherited Shiny app at work for the past few months. One of the many frustrating things about Shiny lately has been around buttons. Well, it wasn’t really about buttons, but that’s where it started. I noticed that a number of buttons - some having file inputs, some having text inputs - did not trigger every time, and I expected them to trigger every time no matter what.

I recently opened an issue in a repository for a package I’m working on to think about potential footguns and how to avoid them. That word “footguns” got me thinking;

My parents just found this email they had printed out from me from May 19, 2006, when I was 26. I chatted about some family stuff, then had this rambling string of weird thoughts below. I thought others might appreciate a good cringe - or cringy laugh - at my expense. It’s especially funny because I’m most def an atheist. I don’t know, those Tucson sunsets really are transformative.

notes to self for next job hunt (some of which may be generally useful): don’t apply to general tech companies anymore for many reasons. heard back from very very few but that may be b/c I don’t know many people at general tech companies never been able to get through interviews; they’re presumably looking for computer science grads (not me) most of their missions are probably not stuff I’d be happy about at the end of the day.

Soooo, my last job at Deck was amazing. I loved it. I was doing data engineer stuff there, mostly maintaining infrastructure for data pipelines. Everyone was great and the mission was amazing: helping Democrats win. Yet the company was shut down about a month ago, sending me on another job search, the 3rd since early/mid 2021.

I recently had a use case at work where I wanted to check that file paths given in a Python script actually existed. These paths were in various GitHub repositories, so all I had to do was pull out the paths and check if they exist on GitHub. There were a few catches though.