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Caffeinspiration

alexanderell.is

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Software / engineering practiceGeneral

’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
72 from 6 Aug 2017 to 16 Nov 2025
Posting
now and then (3 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://alexanderell.is/index.xml

2025 5

  1. Timeline and Early Days
  2. On having heart surgery at 32
  3. Cathy: my dear, helpful catheter
  4. How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look?
  5. Visualizing my strengths and areas for growth with RPG radar charts

2024 1

  1. Harry Chapin and RATM: the problem with bleeding interests

2023 5

  1. All of the writing I did in a week as a software engineer
  2. Brute-forcing the NYT Digits game
  3. The dog hair and the computer mouse
  4. Things that are hard to measure, things that are easy to measure
  5. In the desert, no service, and your partner's late to the rendezvous. What now?

2022 36

  1. Practice being a beginner
  2. Learning by working on problems just outside of your reach
  3. iPhones and action discoverability, or "How the hell was I supposed to know that?"
  4. The hobby buyer's fallacy: "I'd really pursue my hobby if I just bought X"
  5. Stubbornness and programming
  6. Writing a toy WebSocket server from scratch
  7. What happens if you point two CNAMEs at each other? Not much, really
  8. Sharpening the axe for programming
  9. Funny artifacts in a 3D house scan
  10. My false start when learning to program
  11. Work context, home context
  12. How to break the Envoy CI at head
  13. Long running pull requests
  14. How far behind a plane is its noise?
  15. I only care about the helpful notifications, not the promotional ones
  16. Playing with a 3D representation of RGB color space
  17. Wikipedia Over WhatsApp
  18. A basic ear training note matching game
  19. "I don't know the numbers": a math puzzle
  20. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable
  21. Opinionated variable names
  22. What is a minute, really?
  23. The tech interview prep industry
  24. Keeping a debugging lab notebook
  25. Detecting pitch with the Web Audio API and autocorrelation
  26. I prefer my biographies in chronological order, thank you very much
  27. My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll
  28. I miss easily seeing how my coworkers use tools
  29. Morse Codle
  30. Writing Morse code games in JavaScript using the Web Audio API
  31. Little games to play with Morse Code in your browser
  32. Writing a toy traceroute from scratch
  33. (1) New Message: How websites catch your attention with JavaScript
  34. How do you visualize code?
  35. A Children's Book Story About Distributed Systems
  36. Completing a Part-Time Master's in Computer Science While Working

2021 3

  1. The Strange Path of Accepting How Your Brain Works
  2. Writing an RPC From Scratch
  3. You're Reading This in the Future

2020 5

  1. Checking if the Pi is done
  2. Building a Raspberry Pi Cluster for Building Toy Distributed Systems
  3. Debugging a launch-blocking issue
  4. Code Review and Criticism
  5. Don't touch my clipboard

2019 4

  1. Harnessing the Power of Shower Thoughts
  2. Dark pattern for autoplaying videos: clickjacking pause
  3. Clickbait Snail Mail
  4. MapReduce in Simple Language

2018 10

  1. Good Design: Double Sided Park Signs
  2. Why does a spray bottle work?
  3. Letting the User Guide You: Analyzing Store Design
  4. Building a Simple Cache Server in Python
  5. Investigating JavaScript's RegExp Lookbehind
  6. JavaScript: Writing your own Array.reduce
  7. typeof null: investigating a classic JavaScript bug
  8. Investigating JavaScript Casting Behavior
  9. Investigating a Bug in Moment.js
  10. Connecting Arduino with a Node Server

2017 3

  1. MBTA Bus Mirrors
  2. Temperature Sensing with Arduino
  3. Noticing UI: Shazam's loading screen