Hey, are you leaving Twitter? Are you worried that with 80% of the staff gone, it’s just a matter of time until there start being unreported breaches? (Heck, maybe there have already!) Want to ensure anyone breaking into your account doesn’t read your messages? Have a bulk-delete script, on the house! To use this, go to the messages page on a computer. Right click somewhere on the page, and choose “inspect” (Chrome) or “inspect element” (Firefox) to get the developer tools to come up.

This past Friday, I spoke at Code Beam America, and The Quaker World was published. I haven’t spoken at many conferences in the last decade. I did the Elixir Wizards one virtually last year, and this is the first time in person since 2011. It’s just a surprising coincidence that the book was published the same day. I wrote that chapter two years ago!

[updated 2023-01-28] I’ve studied a silly number of languages in my life, starting with Spanish from age 6 to 14. I returned to studying Spanish in 2017, when I was working with an Argentine client. We spoke primarily in English (I was far too rusty for the alternative), but I quickly became frustrated with not knowing how to speak in the past tense in Spanish. I hurriedly crammed “yo …é, tú …aste, él …ó” into my head and tried to keep up.

Like much of Pittsburgh, I am ethnically Rusyn. I was raised mostly Roman Catholic (because my dad is). At Easter, though, I always attended Holy Ghost Byzantine Catholic Church, where my mom’s family belongs. Byzantine Catholics have very different Easter traditions than many other Christians, but I didn’t notice until I experienced culture shock the time we took our basket to be blessed at the Roman Catholic parish where I grew up, and my basket was decidedly different from the others.

I recently completed a job hunt. I was a lot more intentional this time about having a list of questions to ask the companies I was interviewing with. I highly recommend Key Values for generating a list of questions to ask. They explain why they’re worded the way they are, too. I did ask one thing in a way they didn’t suggest, though. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a hot topic, and I know that asking specifically with those words is likely to get me a canned answer.

In general, I regard myself as pretty bad at algorithms. I’m comfortable enough doing the Elixir track on Exercism (that’s how I learned Elixir), and I’ve used HackerRank some, but the reason I used HackerRank was because TripleByte said algorithms were my weak point. (It said architecture was my strong suit, and I’m quite pleased with that, as I did put effort into improving on that front.) I really dislike white boarding in job interviews (both because of the nerves factor and because the problems are usually totally unrelated to the job) and so much prefer take-homes.