Matthew Martin

Software developer in Washington, DC (Herndon, VA specifically)

Doing #govtech python, dotnet, #aws, mostly Infrastructure as Code and cloud apps.

I tweet about software, programming, #python, dad jokes, DC, Fed government tech contracting

#fedi22 - index me!

Emoji Code:
🧘☸︎🌱🏃‍♂️👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
🗳️{🫏}
🏠{🇺🇸}
🗣️💬{🪆,🥖,💚,🇮🇸,🌮🌶️}
💻{🐍 #️⃣ <🌍/>}
📚{🚀 🛸 🪐 🌌 🌠 🌙 ☄️}

Public Key

npub1anj34n7xep997cj6w4d7mysld6kx48d2d7ggzuz8jqwmuq332ghs5tk3c3

NIP-05 Address

mistersql@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsweeg6elrvsjjlvfd82kldjg0katr2nk4xlyypwpreq8d7qgc4ytcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxjar5duh8qatzqyxhwumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmvyg2z5r

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

relay.ditto.pub

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1anj34n7xep997cj6w4d7mysld6kx48d2d7ggzuz8jqwmuq332ghs5tk3c3

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Last Notes

2026-10-16 02:38:16 UTC

If everyone on the fediverse was on single person esp32 instances...would it work. I guess the person-to-person email-like part might. Post and Account search would probably be completely broken.
Anyhow, an experiment we should do some day.

2026-09-07 19:57:46 UTC

Shy people's github repo:
IT_IS_OKAY_IF_YOU_DONT_WANT_TO_README_NO_ONE_DOES.md

2026-08-30 02:34:56 UTC

This...this is bonkers... run an entire fedi server on your phone, a relay server for when you're offline. It is like a client when it resumes (gets posts from relay), it is like a server while it is operating, I think. (handles server to server traffic on the phone?)
https://holos.social/how-it-works

2026-08-11 11:55:59 UTC

If we want to grow the mastodon user base, we need to pick a community to invite, create features for them and then invite those people.

2026-08-10 01:37:45 UTC

40% of my friends and followers are dormant accounts. As time goes on it is more and more important to have a feature to hide these accounts or otherwise take into account that they're not really here.

2026-08-01 16:33:04 UTC

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@nprofile…faww Moderation is trial by combat with all the users.

2026-07-25 19:17:06 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql In my speed read of Buzz... that sounds like an app (slack clone?) for an environment where you would want to know exactly who everyone is and not interact with just any relay. Also "identity" for an LLM agent is meaningless, each document is a different identity and the short document is Dr Jekyll and as it gets long it is Mr Hyde.

2026-07-25 17:32:45 UTC

Hmm, is nostr a viable network?
Good:
https://nostr.com is beautiful
good anonymous user features
Bad:
OMG, 10 seconds for 2 posts to show up on a profile page.
Is anyone home? network feed for last 2 hours looks the same

2026-07-24 12:41:23 UTC

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Bsky went from relatively unknown to a viable twitter replacement because new users were presented with starter packs. The 2-4 feeds on /explore are trash (entire fediverse feed), only useful on instances with a topic focus (instance feed), noisy & random & 50% fighting (everything trending).
Mastodon has collections now, but they're unfindable and not part of the new user experience yet, so things may improve soon.

2026-07-24 11:52:14 UTC

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Features for new users and anonymous users (ie users who won't create an account until they see how useful the app is) this line of thinking came from thinking about how to get my wife to look at mastodon and how bad the new user experience is.

2026-07-18 01:42:06 UTC

Taco Bell wasn't the cause, Taylor Farms was. Taco Bell was the only organization paying attention now that the CDC is gutted.
In Republican America
- Taco Bell == CDC
- Waffle House == FEMA

2026-07-07 13:26:34 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql Yeah, except it's real life- the major versions changes are treated as bad news, so 1.0.0 means no more improvements- we're going to live with the bugs now, 2.0.0 means things are going to be broken, until 2.0.15 etc. So better to increase minor and patch which mean "don't worry about it, it's going to be fine"
Real world numerology is reapplied astrology and is fixated on numbers-as-dates, so 9.11.2001 would be an unlucky version.

2026-07-07 12:14:23 UTC

TODO: A zero dependency #python app can be installed with
- git clone
- or download zip,
executed with python -m
But you can't search #pypi for these apps.

2026-07-07 11:35:00 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql Ha, it is going to be restricted to people who already have top secret poly clearance. They just want to shuffle the same small pool of people around.

2026-07-05 14:17:52 UTC

IDEA: superstitious versioning. No unlucky numbers, no 13.0.0 and no 6.6.6 and the like.

2026-06-13 15:28:50 UTC

IDEA: why stop at LLM hallucinating the names of packages. Let the bot generate the package that goes with that name. Put this behind a warehouse/pypi compatible interface.
`pip install logarithm-tools` <- this becomes specification, build and deployment command all in one.
(yeah, I already have this mostly implemented. I just need to get a static website version pushed to github pages)

2026-06-06 22:05:04 UTC

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@nprofile…j9f5 Conflicting transitive dependencies. .NET did this a little bit better with /bin and the GAC (centrally planned in advanced), python evolved competing solutions in a decentralized way over the decades, so even the location of the venv can be surprising. The venv situation used to be worse, pipenv, poetry, uv, etc make it better, but again, that's half a dozen ways to make ti better.

2026-06-06 00:36:04 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql This know-nothing populism is surprising.
Gov't owns a bit of Intel, why not expand the portfolio. Maybe they could buy electric plants in Tennessee

2026-06-06 00:15:29 UTC

To reach communism (the state owning the companies part), we had to wait for a government that didn't really understand the definition of the word or of words in general.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/trump-open-ai-altman-stake.html

2026-06-03 00:14:07 UTC

Google AI search is so that people will stop searching for boobs. Or Tiananmen Square.

2026-05-29 17:33:55 UTC

IDEA: Imaginary http codes
HTTP 999i: You f*king moron
HTTP 123i: You're not even connected to the internet
HTTP 987i: That's not a domain, this is a domain dumbass.com
HTTP 765i: Maybe computers aren't for you, go get pencil and paper

2026-05-25 14:38:33 UTC

If the NSA is somehow tracking VPN traffic, what do they get? Do they just get metadata about traffic from a VPN to a target server, i.e. they can see someone from Mulvad connected to trumpsux[.]com - won't they still need to see the contents of that request to do anything useful with it?
https://www.wired.com/story/using-a-vpn-may-subject-you-to-nsa-spying/

2026-05-24 13:49:10 UTC

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@nprofile…2hpy The relevant #COBOL candidate is in India or has moved to Florida or Arizona.
There is a gnucobol cics clone now, so in principal people could learn this for free.
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/860215700

2026-05-18 13:08:41 UTC

IDEA: ClaudeProject. It is a tool for CIOs to give Claude some direction on what the project is and the enterprise goals then Claude tells human programmers to go write the code.
ClaudeProject spawns subagents by posting job listing and hiring developers, testers who then create the application.
ClaudeProject does all the traditional activities, such as making the CIO feel good about themselves, making sure developers make ClaudeProject feels good about itself.
Come on people, create this.

2026-05-17 20:00:45 UTC

A tkinter UI for pip.
https://pypi.org/project/pip-ui-tkinter/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/591/674/942/730/510/original/35c7ad6f95a5123a.png

2026-05-12 12:01:08 UTC

IDEA: Unproductivity System. Use notebooks, lists, calendars, to reduce your productivity to a manageable level so you can get some recreation done.

2026-03-09 23:43:07 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql Hear of the slow food movement? That sounds like the slow code movement.

2026-03-09 23:13:58 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql SOLID COBOL. All code has only one reason to change, the boss said so.

2026-03-09 16:38:57 UTC

I'm officially an old developer! Someone ask me if I wanted to do an interview for a COBOL job. (I've only ever vibe coded COBOL, which is harder than it sounds because the COBOL you get back generally isn't executable with out futzing with it)
But no, I was not there when Grace Hopper was coding up the 1st. I wasn't alive in 1969.

2026-03-08 19:57:21 UTC

TODO: give SafariWriter a Atari BASIC macros. I got a BASIC interpreter that is 900 lines of python including white space, just need to change it to Atari flavor
Not sure how this going to work, in a language with no classes, no functions. Maybe every extension point is a new command.

2026-03-02 20:29:23 UTC

Has someone made a claude code or opencode or kilo code that is backed by mechanical turk so when the LLM service is down code generation can continue, albeit at a slower tokens per minute rate?

2026-03-02 03:44:11 UTC

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Citing my sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox

2026-03-02 01:19:47 UTC

Whales hardly get cancer at all. Kind of makes sense. If you have that many cells, if any of those cells is cancerous, then the whole whale dies, so the bigger the creature, the more important anti-cancer mechanisms are or you get to a size where immediate cancer becomes inevitable.
So turning people into building sized sauropods would cure cancer.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/156/940/948/800/906/original/8106053375daf59b.jpeg

2026-02-25 00:41:54 UTC

Good uses for 2, maybe 3, 3.5 hours of your time
Line go Up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

2026-02-21 23:58:57 UTC

goreleaser for when you need to rent some gore.

2026-02-20 16:30:38 UTC

Supreme Court vs Trump. Kind of a Godzilla/Mothra fight where you're hopping they both lose. (Godzilla wrecks downtown, who supports that)
We all will be about $6,000 wealthier/less poor over the next 3 years now.

2026-02-08 21:20:35 UTC

Faster than reading 3 million pages. The Administration is full of cartoon villains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-tapKoT1K0

2026-02-06 18:53:11 UTC

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought people might have a private language and private meanings for words. Later philosophers said, that's now how language works. But I've met people with private meanings for words. I think the motivation is to show rank. People in the chain of command can not bother to care about what words mean, it's up to the lesser to figure out what is being said. Words-have-no-meaning is both "don't care" and "contempt" at the same time.

2026-02-06 03:12:38 UTC

What are people replacing WaPo with? The Atlantic? The Guardian?

2026-02-01 14:29:20 UTC

I just got a nagging suspicion that AWS KMS is a fraud and provides no security above that provided by IAM permissioning.
Given society is decided have everyone commit fraud at all levels, why wouldn't all the cloud vendors do the same if they could?
(I am excluding the case where you keep all your keys on premise, which I assume no one does)

2026-01-31 14:51:31 UTC

Wow, the billionaires and people in the administration are a bunch of degenerates
https://youtu.be/rpdTnPWFjDo?t=283

2026-01-30 00:50:22 UTC

The physics community has been split into two. They were sent towards a wall with two slit-like narrow doors, didn't hit the wall on the other side at all! They wandered off to the bathrooms, coffee shop and library.
But send a single physicist, and they just end up at the library.

2026-01-29 14:22:17 UTC

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@nprofile…5qc7 Eve Online is in Iceland and probably has the most of the python developers & users. Probably the rest are at the university there.

2026-01-24 13:23:06 UTC

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@nprofile…wsql That would make sense, I don't know how else a sociologist gets paid nowadays.

2026-01-24 03:19:19 UTC

There are
- mathtubers
- psychologytubers
- philosophytubers
- astronomytubers
BUT no sociology youtubers. Can't be because it is useless, I mean look how many philosophers there are on YT.
Did some sort of crisis happen?

2026-01-19 00:57:48 UTC

Historical movie where people use these big sheets of paper instead of phones to read the news. Coin operated phones mounted to walls. Weird stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Could_Happen_to_You_(1994_film)

2025-12-21 15:30:19 UTC

Revisiting my blog and now I remember why this disappeared in favor of centralized microblogging
- Feed building world is split between me (building a blog roll) and the reader (importing my blog roll). Thats a 4 hour ask and a 30 minute ask
- The people who write are split among blogs, newsletters, traditional media and books- You can't actually read all this in one reader
- The best content arrives with 2 & 10 year gaps
- Paywalls, so many paywalls
- Spending 30 minutes futzing with HTML/CSS

2025-12-16 13:53:12 UTC

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@nprofile…7vc6 ---
Mastodon success advice
---
- format response in valid yaml
- "be sure to to quote list items with :"

2025-12-16 05:08:51 UTC

Well I ran the numbers and my audience engagement on Mastodon has been flat. Likes/retweets per day or average per tweet are pretty much the same since 2022 when I switched over. That's about 3.5 years of data.
Caveats - I did exactly 2 rounds of following people, on boarding and recently when I did some mastodon api scripting.

2025-12-09 04:51:43 UTC

IDEA: python library called Casandra that upgrades all warnings to exceptions. It is midnight, so I'm going to post this a joke and go to bed and not implement it or check if it is already done.

2025-11-30 02:41:59 UTC

Do we need to start running npm & typescript in a docker container?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weLhik7ArCY

2025-11-27 03:12:17 UTC

I don't understand how people pay for email subscriptions. My email is a constant flood. If I was rich enough to support independent writers, I wouldn't want to read it in an my gmail. Maybe on a kindle I guess, but kindle never seemed really set up to deal with that.

2025-11-26 18:16:19 UTC

IBM makes it clear that if you want to touch mainframe tech, for any reasons, you need to be a large organization, like military or government size & pipsqueek countries like France need not apply.
AWS is like, "Hey you can do this for free on your personal credit card"

2025-11-26 16:34:33 UTC

This is the most interesting post I've read on #COBOL. COBOL is an alternative syntax to Assembler because of how COBOL at a syntax level lets you, makes you deal with memory like Assembler does.
#GnuCobol compiles to C, so GnuCobol is going to have the same paradigm mismatch that OtterCobol ran into.
https://github.com/otterkit/otterkit-cobol/issues/40

2025-11-10 15:51:57 UTC

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@nprofile…nn4y The 2nd Earl Grey, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Grey

2025-10-30 22:45:07 UTC

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@nprofile…nn4y Oh, you've been using the `FutureTask<T>` class to call a `PastTask<T>`. The ParadoxException happens when the callstack loops back. There isn't a StackOverflowException because the stack is a finite loop. (Also called grandfather paradox) The ParadoxException throws to let you know that you've been here before and you got to break out of this time loop (also known as a groundhog day)

2025-10-13 17:18:27 UTC

Are there any actual celebrities (news, sports, actors, authors, musicians) on pypi...

2025-10-11 18:22:02 UTC

There is a copyright heist going on. Watch out
```
MIT License
Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]
```
fullname is coming for all your code.

2025-10-02 17:59:42 UTC

YAML is the *worst* language for writing YAML. There are so many good programing languages that can emit YAML. I mean, 0's and 1's are a good deskilled DSL, you don't even need to count to 2, but no one writes 0's and 1's anymore. Why are we writing YAML?!

2025-05-24 23:13:33 UTC

Who ordered this much coffee
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/565/341/576/272/167/original/591cc03281e17335.jpg

2025-05-23 22:40:13 UTC

The 3 kinds of queues are:
- FIFO
- LIFO
- FAFO

2025-05-12 22:25:08 UTC

It has come to my attention that vibe coding means non-developers asking the bot to code until the code works, not a developer asking a bot to code and then editing it until it works. Now I got a lexical gap for LLM-assisted coding again.

2025-03-09 13:39:50 UTC

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@nprofile…qfh3 So, a traffic jam?

2025-02-06 21:29:46 UTC

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@nprofile…h9tf Patreon and a YouTube channel so people feel like they got a relationship with the creator

2024-12-28 03:21:54 UTC

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@nprofile…tmrr Wow, this is huge. As a code racoon that has spent time digging through US Federal Agencies' public Github code & innersource code while doing contracting work, this has a lot of promise, like the shared web design but not possibly for everything
e.g. https://designsystem.digital.gov/

2024-12-27 22:18:39 UTC

#atuin wrapped
My commands were mostly `just`, `make` and `cd` and `poetry` - and they failed 1/2 of the time.
I should branch out I guess.

2024-12-27 21:36:26 UTC

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@nprofile…4h6v If you need to stop and google it, you're doing it wrong

2024-12-27 16:44:35 UTC

Find out how many of your AWS identifiers and stuff leaked
(if an ARN isn't publically accessible, should I care?)
https://awseye.com/

2024-12-27 14:42:14 UTC

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@nprofile…y6pm just the easy stuff, like adding `command || true` to the terminal command so the window doesn't close on crash (or a process exit command somewhere)

2024-12-27 14:36:56 UTC

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@nprofile…plty You can get your **2014 **calendar out and re-use it.

2024-12-26 14:50:40 UTC

Family separation policies resume. Many children are still orphaned from the first time this policy was tried.
https://wapo.st/3VTkEol

2024-12-26 00:11:41 UTC

Minecraft Server in #cobol
https://github.com/meyfa/CobolCraft
Surprisingly readable and stays in COBOL most of the time, not too much resorting to C.
#gnucobol
I think it deserves more stars.

2024-12-25 15:41:40 UTC

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- Influencers: This does seem to work, but the main job is creating content and growing your fanbase. The side project 3/4 of the time is selling more content, 1/4 the time an app that is nothing special but can sell because you have an audience, thing Sabine Hossenfelder's quiz app. Downside: you can't become famous quick, nor on purpose.

2024-12-25 15:39:35 UTC

I just reviewed my side projects for money making potential and it is so grim.
- Developer tools: worthless
- Enterprise tools: Worth a lot, no way to monetize without enterprise sales staff, minimal scope is huge
- Consumer apps: Hard to find anything that hasn't already been done, willingness to pay is low so you need so many customers.
- Cyber begging: Works for large cultural phenomena with corporate backers, think PyPA. Not so much for individuals

2024-12-25 13:01:04 UTC

Coding Kata: You are Ebenezer Scrooge the morning of what could be Christmas. It is too cold to open the window to shout at passer-bys. Write a python script to get the date, check the obituaries for Tiny Tim and use stripe to transfer a proper salary to your office staff.

2024-12-25 03:20:14 UTC

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What is cool about this is that you can run many compiled programming languages as a script using this shebang:
`///usr/bin/true; exec cobc -xj -fmfcomment "$0" "$@"`
- The target language has to tolerate comments starting with # or /
- The "script" has to be single file
Works for golang, I haven't tried it for rust.
For gnucobol for it to work, you have to also set a bunch of environment variables because that is how gnucobol rollls.

2024-12-25 03:13:51 UTC

testing
https://carbon.now.sh/CslPglWEUtKBv7faQMjd

2024-12-23 22:56:59 UTC

Recruiter: "Quick we need a Junior developer from 2010 who spent 2005-2010 getting experience with .NET. We'd like to pay them 2010 salary, not adjusted for inflation"
Me: "That young, optimistic, uncynical man, he just isn't here anymore. You are 15 years too late. All that is left is this guy who knows .NET but has a 2025 mortgage. And python! Let me convert it all to Django-Postgres on AWS for you."

2024-12-22 19:35:24 UTC

The emperor god king habit is habit tracking.

2024-12-22 15:22:08 UTC

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These tools exist for the same reason low-code programming languages like UIPath exist... your department needs a bug fix or feature in an app, but the team ignores you, has a delivery time horizon of years, the team was all fired 10 years ago. And all you need is a bulk export or some fix that is possible if only you could script the app, even if only via the GUI.

2024-12-22 15:20:10 UTC

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Workflow products are for solving large **bureaucracy** problems. It is a **social** problem. You have 3 huge apps and you need code to call all three of them in a long running script/application. None of the teams want to help you with this feature, maybe none of these 3 teams can call each other directly. So you hack together a visual code "script" that glues together these three *teams*

2024-12-22 15:18:06 UTC

I'm thinking about AWS Step Functions. (Also so many similar workflow things, like .NET 3.5 Workflows). They store state in what in python would be a pickle. They seem to be for programs that take months to run. But why not be stateless and store the workflow steps in a regular database?
Epiphany....

2024-12-21 22:56:39 UTC

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@nprofile…0xfz 1 order of pizza
- no crust
- no sauce
- no cheese
- pineapple left
- pineapple right

2024-12-21 21:04:46 UTC

Is your python code full of `):` ?
Go search for it and add the annotation for the return type.

2024-12-21 18:38:01 UTC

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@nprofile…waj5 Use gofundme. I got no advice on how to run a successful gofundme campaign.

2024-12-21 18:35:58 UTC

The future of computing is counting my fingers, which can bend into many good or even super positions. When the technology improves enough, I will be able to crack all codes, simulate atomic bombs, all in seconds. Right now, it would take quadrillions of years. But as soon as I can fix error correction, speed, a lack of applications other than typing on a keyboard, the random wiggling of my fingers will revolutionize computing.

2024-12-20 23:21:59 UTC

End that shutdown playlist and time to play the work as usual playlist.

2024-12-20 20:23:35 UTC

You got 7 matchsticks arranged to make an 8. Make one move to get a null reference.
(set them on fire! It is a matchstick, why do these problems with matchsticks if you don't set them on fire?)

2024-12-20 19:50:28 UTC

I got an Orcid. Unemployed arm chair philosopher. Not yet published in a Peer Reviewed Journal, but I got peer reviewed Pull Requests.
https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0893-7539

2024-12-20 15:24:02 UTC

Hire me or fire me with a single click directly on my resume!
https://matthewdeanmartin.github.io/resume/browser/

2024-12-20 13:02:53 UTC

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And my LinkedIn page
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdeanmartin/

2024-12-20 13:02:08 UTC

I'm on the job market again, anyone need an Python/AWS developer for an IC or Tech Lead role?
- For remote, my jurisdiction is Virginia, USA
- In person in Norther VA, DC
Resumes, portfolio, contact info here:
https://github.com/matthewdeanmartin
#fedijob #fedijobs #hiring #hiringnow #jobsearch #hireme #fedihire #fedihired #getfedihired #layoff #lookingforwork #opentowork
#forhire #techjobs #techishiring

2024-12-19 02:42:19 UTC

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I'd add to this list some more high cost big guns for squashing/preventing bugs
- typeguard (I got frustrated and stop using this)
- hypothesis (This is hit or miss if it adds value)
- mutatest/mutmut (I haven't used these)
- 100% coverage
- pyta (pre/post condition checking)
- mypy for None safety (not sure this is achievable like in other languages with null safety)

2024-12-19 02:34:32 UTC

Railroad programming with `returns`.
I think this makes sense for that chunk of code in your app that is
- super complicated
- flaky
- lots of code paths
- and has to work or the whole app & project fails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkxf583t4Vc&ab_channel=ArjanCodes

2024-12-17 00:22:25 UTC

People, you're killing me
```python
class FatalConversationError(Exception):
```

2024-12-16 20:20:33 UTC

TODO: Write MATTLAB, which just sends me emails with your math problems and I reply that I don't know, it's over my head.

2024-12-16 20:19:36 UTC

Why don't people who like minimalist code editors use here strings in the terminal? Too high level? Maybe a byte stream editor. Too high level? Toggle switches? Go used toggle switches, show us how macho you are.

2024-12-16 01:58:10 UTC

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@nprofile…cygt Yes. Traditional cooking styles in many places have similar characteristics without being tied to a confusing recommendation. (American 2020 Italian food, full of veal, cheese and so on? How they ate in Crete in 1880? The Mediterranean diet's research was based on the later.)
Naming is hard. DASH diet has 0 mindshare, probably because of the name.

2024-12-16 01:51:44 UTC

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@nprofile…hv9z Yes. The transitive dependency problem happens in all ecosystems. Conda attempts to deal with this by giving people a great big collection of packages that should work together (in their case, because they all depend on the same version of numpy and the like).
It used to be worse before lock files & nice tools to show the dependency graph.

2024-12-16 01:48:09 UTC

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@nprofile…sdcu He can sneak in to leave the merch, he can sneak in to get the cash to pay for it.