my brain space.

I’ve spent 7 years working in large tech companies, and I can expect every now and again I’ll need to do some menial work that can take hours or even days. Sometimes by myself, and other times as a group with other engineers. This can be clicking through too many UIs, running through a list of commands and wait times, or going through a spreadsheet of 1000+ rows and typing “good” or “bad” for each row. ...

New Ideas, New Projects. I come up with ideas all the time, anywhere and everywhere. I’ve always wanted to make things. An idea gets stuck in my head. I spend time thinking about how I could make it work, I lay it out at a high level, and decide to dive in. It’s exciting to start something and throw a bunch of time into it. However, I find that over time the excitement wanes, at least relative to the next new fun idea that’s stuck in my head. Rinse and repeat. ...

I joined the chess craze during the pandemic. (Feel free to reach out for a game on lichess: @CasualHippo) Starting with the phenomenal Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, I dove into chess YouTube. It’s hard not to be full of admiration when watching masters demonstrate their prowess during simul matches or blindfolded demonstrations. Particularly being able to hold the state of the board in their mind during a blindfolded game… That was a skill I wanted to be able to learn. ...

When prepping for the job search, you often encounter heuristics mentioned on Blind for interview success. “Be able to solve a LeetCode medium within 15 minutes”, etc. I wanted a good tool to be able to measure where I was, in addition to what my progression looked like. This chrome extension adds a natural looking timer to the leetcode interface, tracks your valid & invalid submissions, and generates some statistics around the data. All data is stored completely locally, and the extension allows for data import & export. ...